INC.: Wait a minute. Did I hear you suggest that your goal is not to make money?
HENDRICKS: Making money is the result of good business; it's not the goal. If you make it the goal, you get into trouble. I think the biggest mistake people can make is to go into business to make money.
INC.: Isn't that a little ironic? After all, you devote a lot of time and energy to teaching people how to make money.
HENDRICKS: Knowing how to make money is not the same thing as being motivated by it. I personally believe wealth is a cancer. I don't like most wealthy people. I never associate with them. I want to associate with real, honest-to-goodness thinking, working people in the trenches.
INC.: OK, but why exactly did you go into business, if it wasn't to make money?
HENDRICKS: I went into business purely for the fun of doing it and getting other people involved in doing it. . . . This is ABC I'm talking about. I didn't have much fun when I was in the roofing business.
INC.: What was the difference?
HENDRICKS: Back then I was out there to get more money. If that meant cheating a little bit, I didn't feel there was anything wrong. But my employees saw what I was doing. They figured, if the boss did it, it was all right for them to cheat a little, too. Instead of putting four nails in a shingle, they might put in three. I was actually destroying their character, although I didn't really understand that at the time. Eventually, I just got sick of what I was doing, so I phased the business down.
INC.: I don't understand. Was your roofing company a failure?
HENDRICKS: No, no. We were one of the largest roofing contractors in the country -- International Roofing Co. I started it when I was 19 years old. By the time I was 26, we were doing $45 million a year. We did a lot of the K marts in the Midwest. We did Arby's, McDonald's. We did military bases all over the United States. I had 500 employees. I made a lot of money, all right, but it wore me out.
INC.: So the business was incredibly successful.
HENDRICKS: Yes, but there was no physical way a person could keep doing what I was doing. I'd have 20 jobs going at the same time and only four or five superintendents I could rely on. They were my friends, and I didn't grow anybody else. If one of them wasn't overseeing a job, I had to be there myself. So I was traveling all the time. I just got sick of it. I couldn't take it anymore. But the experience was very, very important to me, because it laid the groundwork for my whole philosophy about managing people.
INC.: It sounds as though it taught you how not to manage people.
HENDRICKS: That's exactly right. The problem was, I didn't include them, not even the people I brought in as managers. They were the employees, I was the boss, and my attitude was, Do the hell as I say. But there was no organization, no support, and they didn't know what I wanted. So they kept failing, and then they'd blame me. What I learned is, you can't give people a reason to blame anybody else for their failure. You have to have everything in place for them. It's a responsibility you take on when you hire people. You have to provide an environment you feel good about, where they can come to work and it's a challenge, not a job. But I couldn't see that at the time because I was in it for the money, right? I wanted to hire employees for the least amount I could and then get the most out of them I could. So it was a chess game between them and me.
INC.: Was that because of you or because of the business you were in?
HENDRICKS: It was because I didn't understand people. I didn't understand their wants. You've got to serve the wants of your people. Forget about your own wants. Once you solve their problems, yours is taken care of.
INC.: So your management philosophy came from doing all the wrong things in your roofing company. What about this obsession with waste?
HENDRICKS: That really goes back to my father, who was a roofer and then some. Talk about bringing out the value of things. He could fix anything that had to do with real estate. He could put up a wall, pour a floor, do the plumbing and the electrical, whatever. You send Joe Hendricks out to build a house -- it might take somebody else three months. My dad would do it in 30 days. All by himself. People would say, "How did you get those trusses up there?" Who knows? He did it. He had a system. And I respected that so much because the other guys were just wasting time.
Of course, he never got credit for it, because roofers get a bad rap. That wore way down deep in my gut. People would say, "Oh, you're Joe Hendricks's kid. He's a roofer." You could tell what they were thinking. My dad made more money than any of them. He just didn't belong to their damn country club. He didn't play golf. He carried a lunch pail, and he went to work at 5:30 in the morning and came home at 6:00 at night, and he worked every Saturday. Yet they talked about him as if he were a bum. So that built my character way down inside. It's a big reason why I feel the way I do about my customers.
But my dad did have one fault. He was one of those guys who thought no one could ever do anything as well as he could. So his business never grew. He had two or three employees, but he could never keep them because he wouldn't give them their space. He ended up having to do it all himself, which was a waste. There was just so much more he could have done if he could have taught other people to use his skills.
That's sort of what I'm doing here. The skill my dad had was that h
