Brad Jacobs

“I've started five companies from scratch, seven if you include two spinoffs, and turned them all into billion dollar or multi-billion dollar enterprises.”

“I usually spend about half an hour a day meditating. Much of this time is spent in thought experiments. This produces a profound sense of calmness and is when many of my best decisions materialize.”

“I learned to turn my internal chatter to my advantage by reframing negative thoughts as useful data rather than objective reality.”

“Within 13 months, we had built the largest equipment rental company in the world.”

“A couple of years later, those two billion dollars of shares we brought back, we bought back, ended up being worth six billion dollars, giving them a profit on that one transaction of four billion dollars.”

“It makes no financial sense to skimp on salary incentives to save a 100,000 dollars a year when hiring a second best candidate may cost you millions of dollars in lost profit.”

“We ended up selling those road rental companies at about a half a billion dollar loss because it was the best way forward under those circumstances.”

“The deals I've avoided have contributed more to my success than the deals I've done.”

“Radical acceptance quiets the noise created by yesterday's decisions and today's wishful thinking.”

“Hertz did this. And they built up a national equipment rental chain to about a billion dollars of annual revenue over the course of 37 years. United Rentals did that in 13 months.”

“Make your hiring choices as perfect as they can be because there are few mistakes costlier than hiring the wrong person. This is so good way to remember this. An empty seat Is less damaging than a poor fit.”

“My teams and I have completed approximately 500 acquisitions. In total, these ventures have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and raised about thirty billion dollars in outside capital.”

“The CEO trait most closely correlated with organizational success is a high IQ.”

“Your executives, the team you have around you, like they, over time, they start to like filter information too much and they can give you like an overly rosy or like false, like positive view of what's actually happening in your company.”

“He says an empty seat. Is less damaging than a poor fit.”

“He says it makes no financial sense to skimp on salary and incentives to save a 100,000 dollars a year. When hiring a second best candidate may cost you millions of dollars in lost profit.”

“Hertz did this, and they built up a national equipment rental chain to about a billion dollars of annual revenue over the course of 37 years. United Rentals did that in 13 months.”

“A couple of years later, those two billion dollars of shares we brought back, we bought back, ended up being worth six Billion dollars, giving them a profit on that one transaction of four billion dollars.”

“He has started eight different billion dollar or multi-billion dollar businesses. He's done over 500 acquisitions. He's raised over thirty billion dollars.”

“Instead of sending 50 trucks out over five days to pick up X tons of waste. 20 trucks, so more, less than half, could now perform the same service in three days.”

“The great majority of the tens of billions of dollars of value that my teams and I have created Have flowed outside of my companies.”

“He's been meditating, I think, for over 50 years, and as he says right here in the book, he feels it's been a huge benefit to his career, because that's where he feels many of his best decisions actually materialize.”

“He says, I find that slightly understaffed teams are more focused and spend less time doing redundant busy work.”

“You can mess up a lot of things in business and still do well as long as you get the big trend right.”

“My friend, Jared Kushner just invested in Brad's latest company and joined his board.”

“Owning win accomplished two things. One, we had an industry-best platform that we can continue to develop internally for our own use, and the acquisition gave us access to aggregated, anonymized data on macro trends across, across the industry.”

“The deals I've avoided have contributed more to my success than the deals I've done.”

“Radical acceptance quiets the noise created by yesterday's decisions and today's wishful thinking.”

“United Rental Stock is a hundred bagger. The share price at inception was three dollars and 50 cents, and it now trades at more than a hundred times that price.”

“We ended up selling those road rental companies at about a half a billion dollar loss because it was the best way forward under those circumstances.”

“You really should overpay for top talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for top talent.”

“Brad wrote, I find that slightly understaffed teams are more focused and spend less time doing redundant busy work.”

“There's two people in the audience that didn't know who Brad was when I covered his book the first time, heard the episode, decided to look into this Brad Jacobs character, and have since invested seven hundred and fifty million dollars into Brad's company.”

“I negotiate explicitly for unrestricted access to the company from the moment we sign an agreement. Immediate access to employees is an essential condition for us. This is not commonplace in M&A.”

“When QXO closed on the Beacon Buildings products deal, we sent out a Zoom town hall invite to everyone with a Beacon email address within minutes of the press release going live. I was happy that 3600 people, the overwhelming majority of those invited, showed …”

“I began transcendental meditation TM when I was 16 years old. I started practicing meditation twice a day. I've been doing that for decades without missing a single day.”

“Typically, when we acquire a business, most of the people we exit do not come from the front lines. They're in the mid to upper echelons of the legacy operation. That is where we usually find most of the bloat.”

“That's Brad Jacobs. He started eight separate billion dollar companies, and he has some of the most positive, maybe the most positive infectious energy of any human I've ever been around”

“A single integration can have thousands of specific line items. Each one is assigned a single throat to choke an owner who is personally accountable for the outcome on a firm completion date.”

“A great org chart should fit on a single page, a clean geometric structure with minimal dotted lines and no asterisks.”