The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Jacobs: A Manager Only Manages Return on Capital and Return on Time
“There's only two things a manager manages, return on capital and return on time.”
Jacobs requires his companies to perform budgeting every single day
“We don't do budgeting
Once in a while.
We do budgeting every day.
Every single day where we've got our numbers, that our plan is our plan, and where are we tracking versus the plan?”
Brad Jacobs did three hours of weekly therapy to improve business decisions
“I did a couple years of therapy for three hours a week for a couple years, so I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I think, what my automatic thoughts are, what my biases are, what my cognitive distortions are, and I'm aware of those. And I apply vario…”
Jacobs has completed approximately 500 acquisitions with his teams
“My teams that I've led have done about 500 acquisitions. I've been involved in those acquisitions.”
Brad Jacobs self-identifies as a musician rather than a businessperson
“I define myself, I self-identify as a musician, more than a business person, which you might find odd, because I've spent a lot of time building big businesses and running large enterprises, but When I think about myself as a music, musician who happens to be …”
Jacobs's companies generated 32x and 150x returns for shareholders
“So, in my companies, we've been fortunate that we've been able to give back 32 times their money in one, and another company is over a 150 times.”
Jacobs tripled post-2015 acquisition profits through integration without raising equity
“Sometimes we've done some acquisitions, like in 2015, we did two big acquisitions and then we digested them. And we integrated and optimized and doubled and tripled the profit without doing any acquisitions. During that period of time, we didn't need to raise …”
Multiple Jacobs executives made tens of millions, and one made over $100M
“I've had people on the senior level make, many, many people make, become millionaires, multi-millionaires. I've had people become tens of millionaires. I had one person who made over a hundred million dollars.”
Jacobs underwent three hours of weekly therapy to improve business decision-making
“I did a couple years of therapy for three hours a week for a couple years, so I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I think, what my automatic thoughts are, what my biases are, what my cognitive distortions are, and I'm aware of those, and I apply vario…”
Brad Jacobs has led teams through roughly 500 acquisitions
“My teams that I've led have done about 500 acquisitions. I've been involved in those acquisitions. So I get into the details of what are we buying? And to buy those 500 companies, we looked at thousands and thousands of other companies that we didn't buy”
Jacobs: Stepping down from United Rentals caused sole depressive episode
“The only time in my life that I've been depressed, but I was really depressed, was in the mid-two thousands, when I had stepped down from being CEO of this big company, United Rentals, and now I didn't have anything to do.”
Jacobs: Leaders must validate and join before disputing someone's thinking
“Joining, then leading. Validating, then disputing. So even when they are changing the way you're thinking, say, gee, is there a better way to look at that? Is there another way we can look at that and be more constructive? Before doing that, before that disput…”
Jacobs: XPO levered past 4x for Conway before $550M asset sale
“When I bought Conway, we levered up to about four times, a little more than four times, but we very quickly sold off, I mentioned that truckload division, for five hundred fifty million dollars, boom, we paid down a whole bunch of debt right from that.”