Brad Jacobs has started eight companies from scratch and led each to become a multibillion-dollar business. Today, he is the Chairman and CEO of QXO, Inc., and he’s doing it all over again.
We discuss how to read anyone during an interview through intentional questions, the exciting role of AI and technology in the future of business, and where money-making ideas can be found within companies.
Jacobs also shares how his training in math and music made him a better business operator, the one thing he focuses on to grow his businesses, how to spot big trends before everyone else, and the only thing a company should focus on for success.
Listen now: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Lessons from Brad Jacobs:
- If you get the major trend right, you can make mistakes and still succeed.
- If you want extraordinary results, you can’t think like everyone else.
- Complexity hides opportunity.
- Focus on return on capital and return on time.
- Your job is to multiply shareholder wealth.
- Problems are assets, not liabilities.
- Anyone can buy a company; integration creates (or destroys) value.
- Companies don’t go bankrupt from bad ideas. They go bankrupt from too much debt.
- Speed without quality is reckless. Quality without speed is irrelevant.
- Rigid plans miss opportunities; improvisation captures them.
- Being liked and being contrarian aren’t opposites; you need both.
- So much of business success comes from keeping your head in a good place.
- Look for people motivated by money. This is capitalism, not a charity. (Must have integrity.)
- The most powerful thing in any relationship is giving someone 100% of your attention.
- Standardization enables scale.
- Ask the top employees what they’d change; they know reality.
- Survey employees constantly. They know where the opportunities hide.
- Reward people for helping others win, not just for winning alone.
- People need to feel understood before they’ll accept change.
- You can’t fake appreciation. Rearrange your brain to see the real good in people.
- Ask what shouldn’t change. The good stuff tells you as much as the problems.
- How you end a meeting matters more than how you start it.
- Feelings count in business. You want the love vibe, not the hate vibe.
- Musicians make better CEOs than MBAs because they know how to improvise.
- Technology is an accelerant, not a strategy.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:13 – The future of AI
03:50 – How to think rationally
05:17 – The major trend
07:26 – The research process
09:58 – On asking better questions
16:04 – On rearranging your brain
18:52 – On music, math, simplicity, and business
28:55 – Leverage, debt, and optionality
31:40 – What it takes to take contrarian bets
37:14 – Confidence and parents
46:50 – Why negative-only feedback is detrimental for employees
52:43 – Money lessons
54:42 – A deep dive on M&A (Jacobs’ secret sauce to growing his companies)
01:04:20 – Questions to immediately get to know anyone
01:07:43 – On boards and board meetings
01:13:26 – On decision-making
01:20:06 – The role of capital markets
01:22:10 – The type of person you don’t want to hire
01:27:45 – The best capital allocators
01:30:22 – Biggest lesson Jacobs learned from the past year
01:33:49 – On success
Book
Brad wrote an incredible book, appropriately called How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. Members of our learning community can access all of my highlights from the book in the repository.
