Forrest Mars

“So once he takes control, he comes to Chicago, he immediately rips out all the office walls in the building, open floor plan for everybody. He demolishes the executive dining room. He sells the company art collection and the company helicopter, and he hands ev…”

“The fact that this happened in 1935 completely blew my mind, because I knew that Mars was in the pet food business, much like Nestle Purina is in the pet food business. I thought this was like a recent diversification hedge, but here it is effectively at the f…”

“Supposedly, Forest had, and Mars has, or at least used to have, a specific target of 18% return on total assets for every division and every factory, which means essentially that every investment needs to pay for itself in less than five years.”

“He takes actually two things with him that his dad sort of gives him as he's heading out the door. One, 50,000 dollars, and two, the foreign rights to the Milky Way recipe.”

“Before Forrest leaves Europe, he had spied a new, to him at least, type of chocolate candy that had become popular with soldiers in the Spanish Civil War called Draguet.”

“You can hire lawyers. You can hire accountants. You can hire advertising men or financial types. But if you want to get rich, you got to know how to make a product. And you aren't going to hire anybody to make a product for you to make you rich. They'll only m…”

“Like I said, at this point, Forrest's empire is doing, call it, 200 million-ish of revenue annually around the world, and Chicago Mars had about fifty million of revenue, so Forrest is, call it, four times the size of Chicago Mars.”

“Any employee in the factory could stop the line for any reason at any time. If there's anything that's out of place, anything that could impact quality, you know, anything is dirty, anything is not perfect, every single worker in the entire facility can stop t…”