Bob Taylor
Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Taylor Guitars. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorother
Bob Taylor is the co-founder, senior advisor, and co-chairman of Taylor Guitars. He is a master luthier who pioneered modern acoustic guitar design and manufacturing techniques.
1shows
1appearances
17statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Bob Taylor said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Taylor: Excessive manual crafting time does not make better acoustic guitars
“That's when I figured out not to make love to every guitar that I'm building. I'm production-minded. I like to get it done, and come out with a good guitar, you know, at the end, and the amount of time that you stroke it isn't the key factor there.”
Taylor: Company canceled $50M in orders to avoid post-COVID retail glut
“Kurt and his sales team got on the phone and spent four months canceling from our end, fifty million dollars worth of orders, knowing that those aren't real orders.”
Taylor: Switching to single-piece flow assembly saved Taylor Guitars' cash flow
“They move down the line and we've run our company that way. That's how I learned about working capital. That's how I learned about just in time. That's how I learned about, you know, cashflow. So that made all the difference for us. It was a huge, huge thing.”
Taylor: Severe market downturns shrink large competitors down to startup scale
“Part of our success is that that bad market brought competitors down to our size. For a period of time, and we're ready to go when they were ready to go when the market turned around.”
Taylor: Manufacturing founders often sell at 45 employees due to management fatigue
“Somewhere back then, I read that when you have maybe a founder-run company where you're making something, most companies get sold at around 45 or 50 employees. That's when the owner is starting to feel like they're just babysitting all day long.”
Taylor: Bob Taylor gifted Taylor Swift her iconic koi fish acoustic guitar
“Well, what happened is we started a we started a series called the Gallery Series, and the first guitar I made, I named it Living Jewels, and I had koi fish swimming around it, and we had this relationship with Taylor, and her birthday is just before Christmas…”
Taylor: Over 90% of Taylor Guitars' sales come through wholesale retailers
“When we say the majority, we're not saying 51%, we're saying 90%.”
Taylor: Evening toolmaking shifts prevented manufacturing from repeating daily friction
“I really, literally would work two days a day. The first day was guitar making, and then the second day, the evening shift, was making some kind of tool So that the next time I did that job, it was a little bit easier.”
Taylor: Taylor Guitars initially sold entry-level guitars to a distributor for $150
“At one point, we had to come out with a less expensive guitar for them, and we were selling a guitar to them for a 150 dollars, is what, how much money we would get”
Taylor: Taylor Guitars machines its components but assembles every instrument by hand
“We still have way more people working by hand than we have machines. It's not an automated factory. And if anybody here has ever gone through a car factory, The first step, they're gonna be stamping car parts, and there's not even a person in there. It's all r…”
Taylor: Securing artist adoption requires backstage networking at major award shows
“Getting our guitars into the hands of artists takes going to those shows. You need to be backstage during, you know, the MTV video awards or the Grammys or those types of things. You have to develop relationships.”
Taylor: Taylor Swift hosted a 200-person private concert at Taylor Guitars' factory
“She ran a contest in the United States and picked, it was a radio contest, and two Winners from every state won, and they all got to bring a guest, and she paid for their air flights and their hotels to come out and get a 200 person private concert from her at…”
Taylor: Taylor Guitars currently produces over 700 guitars per day
“We make 700 and something guitars every day.”
Taylor: Founders must purposefully transition company ownership before they die
“And I always, one of my sayings is invest in the inevitable. And one thing that's inevitable is I'm going to die. Yep. That's inevitable. And so I'm going to sell this company, my shares of it by accident when I die or on purpose before that. ... And so knowin…”
Bob Taylor: Small-scale US guitar manufacturing was virtually nonexistent in 1973
“There were actually very few people that were making guitars on a small scale. Now, if you went to Spain, there's a guitar maker on every single corner, 100,000 of them. But in the U.S., it wasn't a thing.”
Taylor: Taylor Guitars took eight years to reach $130,000 in annual revenue
“Eight years into it, we were doing about a hundred and 2020, 130,000 dollars worth of business, so if you back up, to put context, we had started by ourselves, we did two years with Rothschild, we quit doing business with them, so we were on our own by the tim…”
The other half of the tape: Bob Taylor's own voice is left out of every number here. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Bob Taylor, by other people (5)
Listug: Founders valued Taylor Guitars at $100,000 to buy out third partner
“We'd value the business at 100,000 dollars, and Steve owned it, 30%, so we each borrowed 15,000 dollars.”
Listug: Taylor Guitars doubled its revenue in first year following partner buyout
“So we went into debt again, but we're excited, and then that first year, the business doubled.”
Taylor Guitars co-founders pooled $10,000 to acquire their original guitar shop
“So we actually put together 10,000 dollars all together between the other partner, Bob, and myself, and we bought it, and the rest of the money was our working capital.”
Listug: Bob Taylor and Kurt Listug work for free post-ESOP transition
“We're both on the board. We're co-chairs of the board. And I work every day. I still come in all the time. Yeah, we work for free.”
Listug: Rebranded from Westland Music because Bob Taylor was the main talent
“Then a few years into it, when we realized our future was really an In making and selling guitars, and Bob was really the talent, then we, you know, we decided to call the guitars Taylor Guitars, and we added a little Taylor underneath the neck on the little l…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Bob's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & Co-Chairman, Taylor Guitars | 1 | 17 | 100% 2/2 | full record on How I Built This → |