#394 An Orphan Who Built An Empire: Leonardo Del Vecchio and The Founding of Luxottica

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/fd4cd30060915ca5

It's amazing to me how across the last three episodes you had world class founders, founders that build the leading companies in their industries.
And they all share the same obsession, and that is investing heavily
in technology. It didn't matter if they were making eyeglasses.
Like Del Vecchio or tires or some of the best chocolate in the world. They all had the same obsession that founders like Andrew Carnegie had.
That John D. Rockefeller had as well.
If you read Andrew Carnegie's autobiography, you'll see one of the main ideas in that book.
is invest in technology.
Because the savings compound.
It gives you an advantage over your slower moving competitors and can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
Leonardo Del Vecchio builds the most dominant business in his industry by far, one that is still thriving today.
And in his biography it says
His profits must first be reinvested in the heart of his own company.
In research and development, in automation and technology, never skimp when it comes to spending.
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It has always been like this.
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Leonardo Dovecchio is the patron.
legend and haunting spirit of the global eyewear business.
He is its citizen Cain and its captain Ahab.
His father died before he was born, his mother was poor.
And he was raised in an orphanage.
He went to work as a metal engraver.
At the age of fourteen.
At twenty five, Delvecchio opened a workshop in a tiny village in the Dolomite Mountains.
That was giving away free land to companies that were willing to move there.
Del Vecchio built a factory to make parts for eyeglasses.
He had a young family.
He built a house.
Next door to the factory, so he could start his day at three A. M.
Over the next half century.
Del Vecchio grew his company, Luxotica.
Into the world's greatest maker of glasses.
In an industry.
That was traditionally fragmented and small scale.
The totality of Del Vecchio's ambition

by surprise. This will remind you of another great
European founder.
Bernard.
Oh no. There's a lot of things that that Telbeck is gonna do throughout his career, which I'll talk about later.
There are very or no like
He sought to control every element of
Of the business.
From the metal alloys of the hinges.
To the stores where Iwear is sold.
In a series of audacious takeovers.
Del Vecchio acquired brands such as Rayband and Oakley and Pursew.
And sign contract with fashion houses such as Armani.
Ralph Lauren and Chanel.
He built factories in China.
Acquired vision insurers in the US.
And retail chains on four continents.
Del Vecchio was Italy's highest individual taxpayer and the country's second richest man.
A few years ago.
People thought his career had run its course.
But at the age of eighty one.
Del Vecchio announced the greatest deal of his life.
In which he also secured
The final missing part of his frames.
The lenses.
When Lexotica agreed to merge
With Eselor.
Del vecchio is referred to as simply
El Presidente.
In the optical world, conversations turn to the personal charisma and menace.
O Delvecchio.
He's the godfather, said Dean Butler, who founded Lenscrafters in nineteen eighty three. Del Vecchio bought lenscrafters in nineteen ninety five. The story there is crazy.
And again, very Bernard or No like, I'll get to that in a little bit.
The Godfather is the guy.
He runs it.
He runs this industry.
Del Vecchio built the empire of Lexotica on two ideas.
The first was to do everything itself.
After the company's initial progression from parts to complete frames in the early nineteen seventies,
It set out step by step.
To control the entire процес.
Of making and selling glasses.
From acquiring the raw materials to selling its own products in its own stores.
No one had done this before Del Vecchio. There is a simplicity to him.

It is a very simple equation.
I make the best stuff.
Why doesn't everybody buy it?
For the first twenty five years.
Laksonica stayed on the wholesale side of the industry.
Behind the curtain, as it was called.
Selling its glasses to opticians to the public.
In the nineteen nineties, however.
Del Vecchio decided he wanted a retail network too.
First, he got Luxotica listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
An almost unheard of move.
for a mid sized Italian business.
A move a lot of experts said was impossible.
Luxotica later estimated that that listing
was worth about a hundred million in free advertising in the United States.
And it laid the groundwork for Del Vecchio's hostile takeover of USU.
A conglomerate that owned
Lens crafters.
The country's largest optical chain.
On paper the deal seem outlandish.
USU was five times larger than Lexotica.
And its board did not want to sell.
Having its own shops would also put Lixotica in direct competition with the thousands of optometrists it had been supplying for decades.
A colleague of De Vecchio described the deal this way.
You have to not only be courageous
But a bit
Crazy.
Lixotica completed the hostile takeover of USU for$1.4 billion. Once the deal was done,
Del Vecchio promptly broke up USU.
Until all that was left
Were the landcrafter stores which he wanted in the first place.
Which he then proceeded to fill with Lexotica frames.
That is exactly the formula they have used ever since, said Jeff Cole, the former chief executive officer of Cole National Corporation, an even larger optical retailer.
That sold to Luxotica in two thousand four.
When they buy a company
They spend a little time figuring it out.
And then kick out all the other suppliers.
This formula means that when you and I walk into a lenscrafters or a sunglass hut or a David Cluelow or an octopus Carroll, which has nine hundred and fifty branches in Brazil.
or a Zulang glasses in Shanghai, or a Ming Long store in Hong Kong, around eighty percent of the frames on display.
Will be made by Lixotica.
Having its own designers.
Engineers, factories, supply depots, and retail outlets, and contracts with a hundred thousand opticians around the world.
means it can also bring products to market faster.
And in greater quantities than any of its rivals.
It also keeps a larger proportion of

As a result.
In their factory I saw robots pinning together a pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers and basket after basket of metal frames

to coat and color them.
Glasses may appear to be relatively simple objects.
But they involve between a hundred and eighty and two hundred and thirty manufacturing stages to produce.
With its own designers, lasers, and massive machines, Luxotica can take a pencil sketch to global production in about three weeks.
Lixotica has around twenty seven thousand models in production at any one time.
Its plants turn out four hundred thousand pairs frames per day.
No other company comes close.
Del Vecchio's second great insight is the one that changed the nature of the optical business forever.
And that was to combine it with the fashion industry.
In nineteen eighty eight, he signed a licensing deal with Giorgio Omani.
The deal transformed the glasses industry.
After the Armani deal, consumers that wanted fancy glasses could buy Prada.
Gucci and Chanel.
And they were willing to pay for it.
Armani himself.
negotiated a seat on the board of Luxotica and a five percent stake in the business.
This started the transformation of glasses from a medical device.
to a means of self expression.
Like clothes.
Or sneakers, or as you and I talked about a few weeks ago with the Jimmy Ivean episode, are headphones like beats by Dre.
Lixotica bought Ray Ban in nineteen ninety nine.
At the time the label was washed up.
You could buy a pair of aviators at a gas station for nineteen dollars.
They were selling wayfarers at Walmart.
Del vecchio paid six hundred and forty five million for Rayban.
Wait till I tell you the story later, too.
Ray Ban is now the most valuable optical brand in the world and it generates more than two billion a year in sales.
For Luxotica.
Over the next year and a half, Luxotica withdrew Ray Ban from thirteen thousand outlets.
hike their prices and radically improve the quality.
Increasing the lay of lacquer on a pair of wayfarers from two to

When speaking to one of De Veke's long time
Associates, I asked him, how did a man
Who started with a small factory in a remote village come to rule the global Iwear industry.
His response
Appetite comes with eating. This is very fascinating because Napoleon said the exact same thing. He said appetite comes with eating.
The more I conquered, the more I wanted to conquer.
Larry Ellison said something very similar similar. He said, I'm addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win.
So then this profile goes into the biggest deal of DeVecchio's life. How did two companies, one in frames and one in lenses, come to dominate glasses?
This part is wild because you have to think about this is the the company that DeVecchio gets control of.
It is also wild to consider that the biggest deal of his life comes sixty years into his career.
So in nineteen seventy two, Essel and Seylor
Two French optical companies merged and began to sell aggressively into the US market.
SLR specialized in plastic lenses, which were replacing glass.
And it also invented the world's first progressive lens.
The company set out to make sure its products were sold in every optometrist in the world.
Lenses are the pixie dust.
of the optical business.
Barely anyone knows what they are made of or how they are constructed.
For the last half century.
Persuading opticians to
To prescribe Esslor has been painstaking face to face.
Work.
The profit margins within the optical business are closely guarded secret.
While opticians might sell frames for two or three times their wholesale price.
It is the lenses where they make the most money.
Charging markups of seven hundred or eight hundred percent.

The largest margins of all
Or on complex progressive lenses.
and a protective coating. So think about like scratch resistance for your lenses, right? Those features
Cost Esslore.
A few cents to make.
An optician sell them.
Between twenty five and fifty dollars a pop.
That is absolutely nuts. A feature that costs you a few cents to make.
the end consumer pays twenty five to fifty dollars a pop. The company supplies between three hundred thousand and four hundred thousand stores around the world.
Three or four times as many as Luxotica.
If Luxotica has spent the last quarter of a century buying up the most conspicuous elements of the optical business, the frames, the brands, the stores.
Then Essel has busied itself
With the invisible parts acquiring lens manufacturers.
Instrument makers, prescription labs, and the science of sight itself. What does that mean?
The company holds more than eight thousand patents.
SLR buys up Belgian optical laboratories, Chinese resin manufacturers, and Israeli instrument makers within the industry.
Eselor is regarded
As an unstoppable enveloping tide.
The first rumors of these two companies joining forces began more than a decade ago. There were considerable obstacles.
The first was cultural.
Silver might be huge, but it is retained
The feel of a traditional French industrial enterprise.
Fifty five percent of its employees are shareholders of the company.
Lixotica, on the other hand, function like a monarchy with none of the management structures of most multi billion dollar companies.
The corporate governance and headquarters of Laxotica were mister Del Vecchio's dining room table.
That was said by one of Del Vecchio's managers of one of his US businesses and he continues the story.
Since in the early two thousands, we fly to Italy.
go to his house and show him our annual plan. And he would say, Go do that.
It's funny. Let me pause here,'cause when I read this section it reminded me of something I read in one of Jeff Bezos'
uh buyer fees in the early days of Amazon.
This guy named Wright was building out the early fulfillment warehouse centers for Amazon.
And he goes and shows Bezos his plans. I think it was like a three h it was gonna cost like three hundred and fifty million dollars.
to build a new warehouse and everything else. And so he's showing the plans to Bezos.
And Bezos goes, This is beautiful.
And then right ass Bezos.
Who do I need to show the plans to and what kind of a return on investment would I have to demonstrate?
And basos replies, don't worry about that, just get it built.
And then Wright says, Don't I have to get the approval to do this?
And basically says you just did.
So back to this, the companies also saw themselves differently, too.
Eselor has a moral purpose. With Lixotica, it's all about domination.
That line is gonna give you an insight into Dovecchio's personality as we go through this.
The most infamous Lexotica deals carried an edge of brutality.
In two thousand one, the company clashed with Oakley.
The world's hottest maker of sunglasses at the time.
Lixotica had just bought Sunglass Hut.
Which sold a third of all US sunglasses, and Del Vecchio demanded
That all of its suppliers drop their prices.
Oakley refused.
In the summer of two thousand one, the company's founder, Jim Gennard, flew to Milan to meet Del Vecchio and strike a deal.
Gennard had found an Oakley out of the back of his car in nineteen seventy five.
At the end of their conversation.
He said he hoped the two men
Would one day be France.
Del Vecchio replied.
We will never be friends.
A few months later, De Vecchio swung into action. Sunglass Hut stopped selling Oakley's.
Sunglass Hut accounted for a quarter of Oakley's business and its share price fell by thirty seven percent.
Then Lexotica began to produce ray bands with bright blue and green lenses that were eerily similar to the
to Oakley's colored shades.
Oakley sued.
The case was settled out of court.
And Laksa bought Oakley for two point one billion dollars.
By that time.
Del Vecchio appeared ready to retire.
In the summer of two thousand four, as he approached his seventieth birthday.
Lixotica's founder handed over day to day control.
of the company to Andrea Guerrera.
A young chief executive.
Guerrera did not want to merge with Essel.
Del Vecchio forced Gerr out and came back to work. He was seventy nine years old.
It became clear.
That Dovecchio was worried about what would happen to Luksotica after he dies.
Lak Sonica is his most precious child.
His most precious child.

Six children from four marriages to three women.
He remarried his second wife. I'll tell you about that later. It's a wild story.
DeVecco came to believe that folding Luxotica into Esslore was the best way for his work to endure.
SLR controls almost half of the world's prescription lens business and has acquired more than two hundred and fifty other companies.
In the past.
Twitter.
Between them.
Esselore and Luxotica play a central.
Intimate role.
In the lives
of a remarkable number of people around one point four billion people
Use their product.
In many conversations, people describe the arrival of Essel or Luxotica as both extraordinary and somehow inevitable at the same time.
That struck me.
As the kind of contradiction you come across
More often in a person.
Than in a business.
And it's true.
Because Esslor Loxotica
the business of vision itself.
Is

The legacy
Of a single
Man.
Okay, so that was a profile written almost a decade ago about this legendary merger between and Esslor.
And I wanted to start there because I think it's gonna give you a great overview of the person I wanna talk to you about today, which is obviously Leonardo.
Uh Del Vecchio.
This is another book.
So the book that I read for this is another book that was translated for me by my friend Cameron Priest.
The last few episodes.
We've translated books from French.
And Italian.
And so I spent a week reading the book and I spent the last three days rewriting
All of my notes and highlights.
And what I wanna do is tell this remarkable life story. I I I couldn't have said it better, which is like
Well, you're describing this
You know, the the dominated
uh the eyeglass and eyewear industry.
In hindsight, it looks completely predictable.
It's extraordinary and inevitable at the same time.
And what you'll come to learn now is that is the exact description of the orphan.
That builds this empire and the legacy of a single man. And this business continues to thrive.
De Vecchio passed a few years ago, but the business that he built that he gave his life to continues to thrive. As a matter of fact
The founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, just spent
three and a half billion dollars buying a three percent state
in Esslor Lixotica.
And before he died, Del Vecchio did the deal with Mark Zuckerberg.
To produce
The glasses that Meta's making.
So I wanna start with De Vecchio's childhood. Once you understand his childhood.
This will without a doubt be one of the most remarkable founder stories you'll ever hear. So this is a is at at its core. This is a story of a poor orphan.
who will come to dominate an industry and build a thirty billion dollar fortune.
is an Orphan Who Built an Empire. That might have to be the episode tit title, An Orphan Who Built an Empire.
So DeVecchio's dad was a fruit peddler.
Who died from pneumonia.
When
Del Vecchio was in his mother's womb. His dad is only forty nine years old when he dies.
Del Vecchio is the youngest of four kids, so now his mom has to go work in a factory to support her other kids.
She has to walk forty minutes each way to her job every day.
She had nobody to take care of.
Young Leonardo, young DeVecchio.
So he essentially spends his days
On the street.
After several years his mom realizes is not sustainable. She's terrified of what's going to happen him.
To him.
If he stays on the street all day.
So she goes to an orphanage.
And begs them.
To take in and care for her son. He is seven years old when this happens.
Can you imagine thinking that your mother abandoned you when you were seven?
This is how Del Vecchio describes his childhood.
We were a poor family.
My mother was a widow. I grew up without a father and in an institution.
Growing up without a family is something you can't explain unless you've lived it.
It marks you.
He lives in the orphanage for seven years.
The orphanage has very strict and precise rules.
And you'll see that he actually adopts these rules in the way he runs his life and runs his business.
So you a at the time you sleep in a dorm, there's ten other beds in each room.
You wake up at six AM no matter what.
You line up shirtless even in January when it's freezing.
You eat breakfast at seven.
You go to school until it's night.
You are taught to work tirelessly.
You were told to fight against your inherent laziness.
You were told perseverance makes the difference and that talent isn't enough.
And what's interesting about this, and there's several stories in the book, but there's several Italian entrepreneurs of the twentieth century that were at the same orphanage.
They follow remarkably consistent and similar paths. They all start of uh out as great great craftsmen first.
Than industrialist.
And they said they were united by maniacal attention to the quality of their product and never satisfied with what they achieved. And keep in mind.
This is Leonardo in glasses.
Guy goes on to build a l one of the largest publishing uh houses in Europe.
Another one is the best manufacturer of bicycles.
Later in life, one of these entrepreneurs that were raised in the same orphanage that go on to build a fantastic career as well, talks about this. He says, I'm a lucky man.
I was born poor, and this gave me a certain understanding of the facts of life.
All of their stories are united by the same thread.
They know the harshness of poverty, the pangs of hunger. They become skilled craftsmen.
Thanks to a trade learned at the orphanage.
They seek independent from a young age, are not satisfied with their first success, and continue to grow their businesses.
into becoming leaders in their respective fields.
Young Leonardo De Vecchio is orderly and precise. He says at this time, I liked to study.
And the trade that he learns in the orphanage is engraving.
which he doesn't know it at this time is going to lead to his career in glasses.
So he finds a master.
Ready to take him in as as an apprentice.
at a metal factory.
He is four when he leaves the orphanage and starts working.
full time and really more than what full time.
And from this point for the rest of his li year for the rest of his life
He has a singular obsession.
To be the best.
The way he thinks about it is if he is the best at what he does, he will never again be forced to suffer the hardships of his childhood.
He will never have to be
Poor again.
He will never be forced to rely on anyone other than himself.
So the company he works at, he works there during the day and then the company sends him to school at night. So he's taking drawing and engraving classes at night.
Learning to draw is essential to be a great engraver.
And this is important because it's engraving that first puts him in contact with eyeglass frames. He's handed a pair
of aluminum eye glass frames and he's asked to engrave decorations on the temples.
This is the very first time that a young Leonardo DeVecchio will handle the object that will change his life.
He quickly understands that he's good, he's very precise, he's meticulous.
And he's restless.
Almost immediately he wants to start his own business as soon as he can because he does not like
having to rely on other people. He refuses. And there's a line in the book later on says Del Vecchio cannot be controlled.
He do he refuses to let other people have command over him.
I think Del Vecchio is a great example.
of the wisdom that Charlie Munger had when Charlie Munger said, Hey, it really helps don't read business books, read the biographies.
'Cause it helps to tie the ideas to the personality that developed them.
If you grew up
Like Dovecchio.
If you experience what he experienced, of course.
Like if you look at his entire sixty year career is just him gaining more and more and more control over what he's doing.
This relentless
methodical march for deeper and deeper vertical integration.
And you see it when he's fourteen. He's also wicked smart. He understands two important things about himself from an early age. One
Doing one's job well.
Whatever it may be.
Being the best at it is non negotiable for him.
And the second thing he realizes is that he's got a lot more drive and passion than other people around him. He said
I've always thought of myself as privileged.
For the passion I had inside.
And for my enormous desire to do.
So by the time he's eighteen years old, he's promoted to run the factory. He is now the head of the factory.
For a few years
He keeps this position and so he he winds up getting married and having kids early on.
And so he's making enough money, right? He's running the factory. He's in his late teens, early twenties.
And he could have just stayed in that position, he would have never been poor.
But there was no way.
that he was ever gonna stay working for anyone else. So this is when he starts
his first company. He decides to open his first workshop.
In a tiny spot that he calls the hole.
By day he's still working his day job at the factory and at night he works for himself.
And so Dovecchio begins to produce molds for various industries.
He starts out as a subcontractor.
It is a strictly family run business.
It's Del Vecchio, his wife and his brother are helping him out as well.
And he doesn't quit his job right away because he needs a fixed salary as a guarantee for the loans required to start the business. This is how he's gonna transition from how he buys his uh his first machines.
And he starts to transition from artisan to industrialist. He's very much a craftsman at this point.
And one thing I love about reading all these biographies is there's always these examples and anybody that creates something great.
And the way I think about this is like how bad do you actually want it?
Like how bad do you actually want this to happen?
He's working twenty hours a day.
And one of the things that helps push him.
And to work way harder than anybody else.
He know he never he says he there's a line in the book where he says he he never stops because he knows he is good.
He understands the key to success is in his pocket. This is what he said.
I realized I was good.
Because when I delivered my finished work, I immediately got new orders and never had to make changes. Even though I was young, I realized that I had something more than my competitors. That is one of the most important lines in the book, if you think about where he's at in his life.
In fact, it reminded me of one of my favorite stories from Larry Bird.
Uh the basketball player.
You know, Larry went to Larry Bird went to a tiny college. He went to a small school
And people didn't think that he could make it in the NBA and then they told him
that you're not gonna be able to make it in the MBA.
And so Larry's talking about this later in his career after he's won, you know, multiple championships.
And it had a Hall of Fame career.
And he said
Oh, they won't that I won't be able to get my jump shot off.
That I'm not quick enough.
that it won't be able to rebound.
And so after he was drafted in the NBA before the first season starts, he goes and plays in w with all the rookies.
And Larry says this, it took me three days of rookie camp.
And I found out, hey, this league is nothing. I can play in this league and I will dominate in this league.
The reason I bring that up is because you're gonna see Del Vecchio throughout his entire career, he cannot understand.
Why his competitors
Don't have the ambition
That he has.
Are satisfied with the small stakes, I'll repeat this over and over again.
don't work as hard as he does and are incapable of making the quality the the same quality of product that he is.
And so as soon as he can, it's just a year that he's doing both jobs.
After year he resigns from his day job and devotes himself full time to
to building his business. He is twenty three years old.
And from this point at twenty three until he dies. I think he dies at eighty seven years old.
He follows one.
Only one categorical
Imperative.
Excellence. He says if you want to stay in the market.
You must always seek perfection.
And it's not perfection as a disease, not as an abstract ideal to refer to, but perfection as a fact.
He has several great and important ideas. Набор вона реализи
There is less competit competition in the eyeglass sector.
And so he's gonna focus on that industry completely.
He starts out as a subcontractor. This is what his first business is.
Producing molds and small metal parts for eyeglasses. Two he also realizes
That this sector is the most profitable.
He says among the small metal parts that he was making.
The parts for glasses gave me the most profit.
Three.
He realizes to his customers
Quality is more important than price.
You need to remember this idea. He's going to use this idea so many times over the next sixty years.
When my clients were ordering new molds for I glass temples, they were not so much interested in the product's price as in the quality.
And in the fact that the molds were made to perfection.
And this is how the book describes this turning point in his life.
Leonardo understands that he can expand into an industry
That promises high profit margins to those who are able to produce.
high level products. Remember, his obsession with quality
Is important.
And it's also even more important because he decided decides to to direct that his obsession with quality.
to an industry that will pay for it.
And again he repeats.
That he sensed
That he had something extra
compared to his competitors.
His guiding strategy is very simple. I want to be the best at everything I do. That is all.
This is very important because the application of that idea leads directly to the beginning of Lexotica. The way he founds Lexotica.
Is that one of his best customers. Remember, he's a subcontractor at this time.
He's gonna start at the very bottom of the industry and then just cum Sherman march to the sea and absolutely dominate it over the next you know, fifty years.
So

Wants to become his partner. So
There are two
Wildly successful entrepreneurs. They own a company called Metal Flex.
They have more demand than they can fill and they want to start a new factory. So they propose partnering with Del Vecchio.
To run that new factory.
He will be a minority shareholder. They want him to run it.
He was worried about being a minority shareholder there. He said this would castrate his ambitions. Remember, this is a man obsessed with control.
Maintaining control was important to him and he would never
Ever compromise that.
And even though he's very young at this point in the story, he had very clear ideas about his future.
So he forms a limited partnership and he's the general partner so he can maintain control of the factory.
He insisted on operational control despite not owning the majority of the company.
So he sets up the factory in this town of Orgordo.
because the mayor is giving away free land for companies that will come create jobs. It used to be a mining town. Once the mine closed down, the population was dwindling and so the mayor actually did something smart. It's like hey you know, you can have the land just come here
build factories, build businesses, and hire the people that are living in the town.
Now the degree to which Dovecchia will thoroughly dominate this village and really anybody anybody in his life and i this entire industry.
He th he's gonna turn this village that was depopulating into a Luxotica town.
At one point there's like four thousand residents of the village.
And there's forty five hundred people working at this factory.
And so he is twenty six years old. And again, the book makes this point several times, I think is important to point out.
This is the start of his empire, but he didn't know it at the time.
He never did.
He just sees an opportunity for growth and he pursues it.
His entire career
Is one step at a time.
With a clear and simple idea.
To be the best.
And if you want to be the best at what you do, then growth is necessary.
Now, Del Vecchio's relationships with his partners is gonna remind you a lot of Rockefeller. So the Metal Flex owners.
What they thought is like, Oh, we found a way to expand our business, but what they didn't see
Із кріт афрет.
So before setting up the factory
They say come work at the Metal Flex headquarters you can actually learn how to build these businesses.
So they had him do everything from delivering parcels to customer to customers at the post office.
To receiving sales and purchasing documents.
Months and months of apprenticeship that allowed him to understand the industry from inside one of the leading factories. And this guy, he doesn't miss the opportunity.
To learn from the best.
And he also takes note of everything.
Names, addresses, people. He studied every detail.
of the industrial activity, understood who the most promising customers were, which products were the most popular.
information that would prove useful a few years later.
to compete directly with his former partners.
This is another great example of the maximum that you and I see over and over again in these books. If you know your business from A to Z, there's not a problem you can't solve.
He's gonna run through these dudes like a hot knife through butter.
This is an example of his early employees describing him, but also another example of how bad do you actually want it.
I would wake up and it was still dark.
I would open the shutters and check the factory on the other side of the river.
I would always find the light on.
Before dawn.
I would tell my brother who also works in the factory, Wake up.
The boss is already there.
In nineteen sixty one.
Del Vecchio invest five hundred thousand lira.
for thirty three percent of the company.
So that's about six thousand Euros today.
So he puts in six
Thousand Euros.
For thirty three percent of this company.
Sixty years later.
His shares will be worth twenty five billion.
UROS from six thousand euros.
to twenty five billion.
in sixty years. My friend Moses Kagan had this great tweet.
And something me and him bond over.
is this obsession of not interrupting the compounding.
Of finding what you're meant to do and do it forever.
And he was looking at resumes, if I remember correctly, and it's just like, you know, people just jumping around every year, two years, three years, whatever the case is. And this is what he said. By jumping around like this,
You're giving up the benefits of long term compounding.
And long term compounding.
is one of the most powerful forces in business and light.
From six thousand euros to twenty five billion in sixty years.
And all of this happened in a remote location.
The town that he sets up his first factory in.
Doesn't even have a single paved road.
And I actually think there's a benefit that people overlook here.
He benefits from being in such a remote location. The early employees
Had no other options.
They gave everything to the company because it was their only opportunity to provide for their families.
Some of the early employees stayed for fifty years.
Their sons and daughters worked in their factory. Their grandsons and granddaughters worked in the factory.
And they're willing to follow Dovecchio because he leads from the front. This is what he says. I used to come to the factory.
At five or six in the morning, really, whenever I woke up, and I would stay until midnight. The company is my life.
So this is when he starts to take control of Lexotic and he has to break up with his partners.
What they didn't understand, they never treated him as a real partner. This is a guy that that's the best in the world at what he does. He has pride.
He has drive.
He's doing all the work.
And he realizes
Oh, you're not I'm not a partner to you. I'm just like a supplier to be squeezed.
So they try to push'em on price.
The drop in on the factory without telling him.
And Del Vecchio realizes oh that this is not a long term solution.
And I'm at risk right now because I have way too much revenue concentration with Metal Flex.
And so he does something really smart before he breaks up with his partners, he starts looking for other customers.
And he also realizes even though he's younger and has way less money than his partners, he's like, Wait a minute
I have a form of leverage here because no literally nobody else
can match the quality of my product.
Think about it as quality is his survival strategy.
And he would tell his employees, he's like, Listen, we're going up against these giants and there's
Not just the Italian companies, the German companies, the Austrian companies.
And he's and it says an obsession with perfection.
And he was convinced of the fact that the only way to grow in a world of giants is to offer the best products.
And so there's all this fighting going on between him and his partners.
And then they realize uh oh.
We created a competitor.
So we need to destroy this guy and the way we're gonna destroy him
Is they were the ones that were
Guaranteeing the company's
credit. You need a credit line from a bank.
for the factories to survive. So they're okay.
We're gonna pull the credit.
And this is where I mean there's like this Rockefeller esque
situation going on here.
They're convinced.
We're gonna pull this credit, we're gonna s we're gonna strangle this guy. This guy can't get far without us.
And the reason I compare it to Rockefeller is because
They didn't know who they were dealing with.
So they pull their credit, Leonard calls all of his employees together.
And he has like tears in his eyes. He's like, I'm afraid I can't pay the salaries this month.
He's crying.
But he's also refusing to give up. He said, We will move forward on our own.
If you don't feel secure, you can leave.
They all stay.
He doesn't lose a single employee.
And so he has two ideas.
He goes to his second largest customer, right?'Cause he just lost his first customer and they pulled the credit.
And so this guy named Boris Killot.
Was making a ton of money importing Italian Iwear into the United States.
He owed the factory thirty five million lira.
And so the Vecchio goes to him, explains what's going on. He's like, I will die if I need this money now.
If you don't pay me, I can't pay my employees and then therefore you don't have the product that you're making a ton of money.
importing into the United States.
So Boris gives him the money.
And then since the bank
pulled his credit line.
In true Rockefeller fashion.
What does he do? He goes bank to bank to bank.
Until he finds another bank willing to extend him credit.
This is a line from Rockefeller's autobiography.
What if the'cause people don't understand.
I I I guess you do because you've probably heard the podcast and you and you've uh
hopefully read a bunch of biographies on Rockefeller, but one of his advantages is that he always went into battle
Rockefeller.
Better capitalized.
than his competitors.
And most of that was debt from banks.
So this is Rockefeller in his autobiography talking about this. He goes, What if the president of a bank refused to make me a loan?
That was nothing.
That made no difference to me.
It simply meant
Then I must look elsewhere until I got what I wanted.
So then with the bank credit, which his partners didn't think he could ever get
Leonardo says, Hey, I'm gonna buy you out. I wanna buy you out of our partnership.
He offers them forty five million lire each.
For a stake that less than ten years earlier.
Was worth five hundred tausen.
So you all put in five hundred thousand each.
Less than ten years later, I want that stake. I'll give you forty five million lira for that.
And it's amazing how dismissive of him his partners still were. They didn't believe he actually had the money.
So when they set the date for closing.
They don't even bother to show up because they don't think it's real.
Eventually he buys them out and he says it was one of the greatest days of his life. He now answers to no one else.
The book says he was literally bursting with joy.
having achieved a goal that was fundamental to him.
And Del Vecchio tells a friend at the time
He's amazed.
That they agreed just when the factory, after years of shared sacrifices, could start to bear fruit.
He said it's a little like David who kills Goliath, a paradox where those who did not have money buy
While those who were well off financially decided
to sell.
And then what happens next?
He takes
most of their customers. He is a true
Predator.
This is something that'll reoccur throughout his entire career. Those who compete against him.
They call him a true predator.
And they call him a hawk.
'Cause they said he would circle
Wait and then strike.
And so what just occurred in Leonardo Becchio's life reminds me of this story about a young John D. Rockefeller. This is from this book called Conspiracy, which was was which was written by Ryan Holliday.
And I want to read this excerpt to you.
Rockefeller found himself stuck with bullying corrupt business partners. He wants to break with them, but he can't.
Because they control the votes.
They're squeezing his business to death.
They abuse him, talk about forcing him out.
What is he to do?
Quietly.
Rockefeller lines up financing from another oil man and waits.
There's a confrontation.
One of them tries to threaten him.
You really want to break this up?
Yes.
He calls their bluff.
They go along knowing that the firm's assets will have to go to auction.
They're sure they'll win. Rockefeller doesn't have that money.
He bids.
They bid
He bids.
They bid.
Rockefeller wins the auction.
A few weeks later.
The newspapers announce his new partnership.
Revealing who had backed his bid.
And the news that Rockefeller
At age twenty five.
is an owner of one of the largest refineries in the world.
This is what Rockefeller said. On that day his partners woke up and saw for the first time
That my mind had not been idle.
While they were talking so big and loud.
They were shocked.
They'd seen their empire dismantled and taken from them.
By the young man they had dismissed.
Rockefeller.
had wanted it more.
You could take out the name Rockefeller and put in Del Vecchio, and that story is almost exact the same.
Sixty years later.
Del Vecchio's business is thriving so much that Mark Zuckerberg pay pays three and a half billion dollars for three percent of it.
And Metal Flex doesn't exist.
And from here on in, the rest of his career, it's the step

Vertical integration.
He's obsessed with controlling everything. He is not satisfied with a slice of the market.
He wants everything.
And he has a bunch of very simple ideas that he builds his career on. The way I think about what's happening in his life, he's like, number one, I'm better than anyone else.
I know my product is better.
Two, I want control.
I want to eliminate intermediaries everywhere I find them.
And this takes decades and decades, this is something that happens overnight.
Three. So uh the the
Logical
Next step is three, I should build my own glasses.
And this is what he says, I produce the semi finished goods necessary to make the glasses. Why give this advantage to the final assembler?
I can do everything in house.
Why should I allow others to benefit from my expertise?
The answer is self evident.
We must manufacture.
A finished product.
And he just has this great mindset early. He sees where he's vulnerable.
And he's like, Well, if I just analyze my company honestly, right, I see my vulnerability and if I was on the outside, this is what I would do.
And so it says for him, company growth is a natural consequence of the choices of creative destruction.
Companies are obligated to continuously develop.
Whoever stops is lost.
They risk being crushed by the competition.
And overtaken by more dynamic entrepreneurs.
I think it's been obvious up until this point, but this guy is extreme. He says
It is forbidden to get distracted.
To rest on one's laurels, to be complacent.
To enjoy
Суснол ачивне.
So think about what he just said. It's forbidden to enjoy success.
And personal achievement.
This is something that's gonna reappear over and over again.
His work is by far.
The number one priority in his entire life.
For Del Vecchio, Laksata comes before everything else.
He always puts the company before everything else, even his own family.
He gets married and has six children.
He divorces his second wife.
after just three years, gets married again, has more kids, divorces her two, then remarries his second wife again.
Ten years after they get divorced.
There is a forty seven year age gap between his oldest child.
And he's youngest.
And later.
When he's in his eighties,'cause he's uh I think eighty five when the the book is written.
When he's in his eighties he says he only has one regret.
And that is not spend more time with his kids when they're young.
And I don't believe him.
And the reason I say that is definitely driven because he wants to be the best in the world. He wants he wants what what he wants to do.
But he's also driven by fear that I don't think ever ends.
A fear that somebody else is gonna come along, somebody better.
and take what he gave his life for.
So let's go back to the story where you're just like, Okay, I'm gonna eliminate intermediaries anywhere I find them.
I think I can build my own glasses.
Everybody tells them you can't build your own glasses, you should just stay a subcontractor.
So he develops some prototypes for his own glasses.
He travels from the little town.
Back to Milan. Milan is having this huge fair.
And he's like, This is where the the this this exhibition, this is where I'm gonna sell my own glasses, attempt to sell my own glasses.
For the first time.
And something he doesn't know, but he's doing this at the perfect time.
There is this is there's a wave starting that he's going to surf
For decades. There is an Iwear boom.
Glasses and sunglasses.
are changing from a medical device
And they're turning into a fashion accessory and a cult object.
And he's gonna benefit from not only more people buying them
But the fat margins that come along with this.
So to evacue himself.
He travels, he's selling this, he brings some of his employees.
But he's so desperate for orders.
He doesn't know what to charge, so he sets the price really, really low.
So you said okay, you can buy and again there this is a fair, so you have wholesalers coming to buy product.
And so he's like okay, th we're gonna sell our frames for six hundred lira each.
Very first day.
They get swamped. Their booth is in swamped immediately.
Every day of the fair there's so much demand.
That Lexotica increases the price every day. Within three days.
Their prices triple.
And again, it goes back to the excellence of the product. This guy is working twenty hours a day. He's obsessed with being the best at what he wants to do.
And the wholesalers see this immediately. There's a great line about this. When he left for the Milan Fair
He was still full of doubts and fears.
When he comes back, he's full of orders.
By the time the fair is over.
They have gathered orders.
for two years of production and they have no idea how they're gonna keep up with all these requests.
But he is certain of one thing that he was right, that Luksotica was ready to sell their own
Glasses.
Under their own brand.
And he does another thing smart. This is in this is in the seventies, early seventies when this is happening.
He continues to spend to grow. So most of the profits are reinvested into research and development and new machinery.
This guy's obsessed with watching his costs. He keeps this like coin on his desk that says every euro
Saves another year on profit.
And what Del Vecchio has in common with most of his U screen entrepreneurs that you and I talk about?
They they manage their costs down to the penny.
But they invest.
Heavily.
They empty the clip when it comes to investing in technology.
So it says most of the profits are invested in research development and new machinery.
The nineteen seventies started a virtuous cycle.
New orders determined the need to increase production, which in turn led to the need to expand apartments and invest in new machines.
For which it is mandatory to obtain new orders and increase market share.
Increasing volumes lead to a reduction in unit production costs.
Which allow for a more competitive pricing without compromising
Profit margins.
And so it continues, more control.
More vertical integration. Now he's like, Okay, I'm making my own glasses. I wanna own my own distribution.
He would sell to distributors.
who we then sell to opticians and the end user, which is the the retail stores.
And so his first step is I only want to work at the best.
So
Now that I'm making my own glasses, I needed a sign with the literally the best distributor.
And then once he does that, he's like, I need to own them.
So it says he only wants to work with the best. This applies to partners outside the company as well.
He finds the person he thinks is the best distributor. This is this guy named Mr. White, who's one of the largest distributors in America.
At first, Mr. White says no.
Leonardo doesn't flinch, he comes back a year later as a bigger company with better products.
They finally sign a partnership.
Then you already know where this is going. You know where this is going.
He goes
Actually working with distributors is too risky.
Laksonica is at the mercy of other people's choices.
This is a situation I cannot live with.
So he starts another phase. He goes, I want to grow my company by acquisition.
How am I gonna grow my company by acquisition? Well, I need to raise more money. So he raises more money by selling stock in his company.
He also gets more banks to loan him more money.
He uses that money
To keep pressing his advantage, to keep controlling more and more parts of his business. The more he vertically integrates,
The higher his profit margin becomes.
Which allows him to keep controlling more parts of his business.
So he buys
his largest American distributor, so Mr. White.
Right, and his partner. This is so funny, the guy
You know, few years ago.
Said I I'm not gonna sign a deal with you.
not realizing that, you know, a few years uh a few years in advance.
De Vecchi's gonna own your whole company, man.
So he buys his largest American distributor, Mr White and his partner are fighting.
This gives
Dilvet you the opportunity to buy out Mr. White's partner.
So he buys fifty percent of this company for eleven million dollars.
This is wild. This is how
This guy's just risk on, okay?
He buys fifty percent of his largest American distributor for eleven million dollars at a time when his entire company's just doing fourteen million in revenue.
And Del Veccu describes this when he's an older man. He says this was a decisive turning point because now
I am one of the largest distributors in the world. Four years later.
He buys the other fifty percent.
And again, he just said it's forbidden to rest on your laurels. So what does he do? Buying distributors is not enough. He wants to own the retail stores.
That the distributors sell to.
Distributors sell to opticians who sell glasses to the end consumer. He is missing the relationship with the end customer.
Which he says is quo indispensable.
to understanding how taste and trends
Change.
On which lines to focus on.
And where higher margins can be extracted.
And so we're gonna get into how he breaks into retail, but there's another thing that reappears throughout his entire career.
He wants high barriers to entry. He does not want competition.
So he winds up remember that company that
Uh he was uh he he was first in a grave rap.
The one that sent him to school at night?
Twive years later, he buys that company.
So he buys the company that he first worked at.
As an engraver twenty five years earlier.
Why?
'Cause that company owns a valuable patent.
They own the patent on the elastic hinge on the temples of eyeglasses.
Again, think about this idea of fear.
How can I stop anyone from taking what I have?
From me.
One way to do that is to increase the barriers to compete with me.
Then what does he do? He moves into fashion.
And he ex drastically explained. This is this gonna blow your mind.
He drastically expands not only his revenue.
But his profit margins at the same time. So
question he's having is like okay
How do you transform a commodity product into a customized one?
If he can move into the higher end fashion market.
He could greatly increase his profit margins.
So this part was surprising to me'cause I've never I don't think I've ever bought
I have a like pair of ray bands, but I've never bought like luxury grass glasses.
It said in uh the book that the sale prices for some of these luxury brand glasses that are made by like the high end fashion houses.
they could be ten to twenty to thirty times the cost of production. So they give an example of
They're manufacturing some of these glasses.
Some of these companies are manufacturing these glasses that cost of thirty dollars.
And then turning around selling them to the end consumer for nine hundred.
So the first person he works with is Giorgio Armani.
And again, Armani wanted to work with the best, and he believed that the best was Del Vecchio.
So this is where he signs that agreement.
And he insists to get five percent of the company.
The Vecchio wisely gives him five percent of the company.
Why is that important? Because Armani's another turning point for Del Vecchio. Armani glasses alone.
This is a single brand. They signed a bunch of them.
Our money glass alone will account for ten percent.
of the overall revenue of Luxotica.
That is nuts. But also not only the ten percent of revenue.
But it opens the door. So then he uh it starts signing up with another Who makes our money's classes?
So he starts signing agreements with other fashion houses like Valentino, Chanel, East Saint Laurent.
Ralph Lauren, Delicious goes on and on and on.
And so the DeVecchio's like, hey, I need a bigger stage. I still need more resources because I need to get to that end user.
So he says, It's time to go public.
And it was like okay, you're like a medium sized Italian business.
You're obviously gonna list on the Milan Stock Exchange. She goes, No, I'm not and this is what he said about that.
If you have to sail, it's better to choose the big sea rather than the small one. He lists
On the New York Stock Exchange.
The company.
It's thirty years old, and Del Vecchio is now a multi billionaire.
I mentioned this earlier, but he estimated that going public gave the company a hundred million dollars in free advertising.
He is now one of the wealthiest people in the world.
And he's asked the secret to his success.
This is what he says.
There is no secret, it's decades of hard work.
Then he's asked a follow up question.
Why are you still working?
He replies.
Because I enjoy it.
And so now he has more resources, he has more currency.
And this is where he launches his hostile takeover of lenscrafters.
He launches a surprise hostile t offer.
To buy the US Shoe Corporation.
Which owns lenscrafters.
Which is the largest optical store chain in the world.
US shoe. This is the nutty part.
Was a conglomerate.
That had a stock market value five times higher.
Their market cap was five times higher than Lixotica.
And its board of directors.
Did not want to sell.
So this is a debt heavy deal. Dave is gonna use leverage financing.
He raises money through bank loans, bond insurance.
uh bridge financing from major European uh and American financial institutions.
And his plan is immediately when he grabs
uh when he takes control of this asset.
He just s literally sells off every single thing. He doesn't care about anything else but lenscrafters.
That winds up helping he does this for one point four billion.
And I think he recruits around five hundred million from selling off the other pieces.
And it was helpful for him to get financing for this because he's like, Listen, if you just take lens crafters
If
You ignore everything else to shoe cor and and US shoe corporation. Lenscrafter is actually highly profitable.
They're throwing off a ton of cash flow. We're just gonna take that cash flow to service the acquisition debt.
And so it was at this point in the book, you know,'cause he makes the point over and over again, and he just felt like
He was competing against very weak competition.
They uh he'll talk about this later. It's like you know
If they could get
Enough to have a house by the sea.
They didn't want to work anymore. He's like, I don't give a shit about having a house by the sea, even though he has a house and a helicopter and all kinds of crazy stuff.
And there's something that Warren Buffett said.
That I think was simple and profound if you think about it for a while.
There's a beautiful genius to what Buffett said. He says
The important thing is to keep playing.
And to play against weak opponents.
And to play for big stakes.
I think Del Vecchio is an ex example of exactly that.
Repeatedly for decades.
Ten.
What did he do? He kept playing.
He played against weak opponents and he play for big
Steaks.
At every turn, Del Vecchi was surprised how slow his competition in.
And how limited.
Their ambitions were.
He had no ceiling to his ambition.
he'd still be working in the business. He d he was working in the business, I think he dies in eighty seven.
He died from a uh I think pneumonia.
The only way to get this guy to stop was to kill him.
And one of the things I loved about him is he trusted his own judgment. He didn't care
The perfect illustration of this
Is when he buys Ray Ban.
There are other bidders for rebound. Look at what he does here.
So Bosch and Loam are the ones that own Ray Ban at this time.
They need to get rid of it.
You know, Ray Ban had was like hugely popular in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
You know, by the nineties it's like a failing brand but
uh brand. They're still doing five hundred million a year in revenue, but they're losing fifty million a a year.
So
They're like just please take this. I get this fifty million dollar hole away from us.
Now
Why would Leonardo want a failing brand with decreasing quality and a cheap price point? Remember, when he buys Ray Bam, you can literally buy them at gas stations. They're selling in them at Walmarts.
The price point is less than twenty dollars and somehow
Del Vecchio transforms it into a luxury brand with fat margins.
So what is going on? What does Del Vecchio see that other people don't see?
says Luxotica was still too focused on prescription glasses.
Contrary to the trend in the sector.
Where sunglasses represented over sixty percent of the market.
Moving towards sunglasses follows the same logic that Leonardo had adopted a decade earlier.
When he ventured with Armani into the world of designer glasses.
to target segments where competition is not on price.
But on product and service.
Sunglasses have a much higher fashion content.
Than prescription glasses.
They are a product where brand and fashion are decisive.
And above all
They have a
Higher turnover.
People buy sunglasses to renew their look much more frequently.
Then they switch to a new
Prescription.
Frame.
Now there are other bidders for Rayban at the time.
They are all the other bidders are offering between three hundred and four hundred million.
But they also move slow and overcomplic the process. Del Vecchio grabs a sheet of paper and a pen.
And he asked the question.
How many pieces does Rayband produce each year?
Next question.
How much will it cost us to produce a single piece?
Next question.
How much can we sell the glasses for?
Having obtained the answers, he does a simple multiplication and arrives at his final price.
Six hundred and forty miljon dollars
At the time everyone else tells him he is overpaying. He doesn't give a fuck.
What other people think.
He says
But I knew the glasses sector well and what Rayband could give me. It would open the doors
of any optician in the world.
They mean the other bidders could not understand that.
And he was right, they're screaming, you're overpaying you're so stupid. He now sells more than ten times

The company.
Now what was one of the most surprising things about reading this story is he makes the same exact mistake that Sam Walton did.
They're the same person in the sense that they're they're gonna they're gonna dominate their industry. They're completely obsessed. They think about it all the time.
So he steps just what just just same thing with Sam Walter did he step down, let somebody else be CEO.
And then is just unbelievably unsatisfied. One
Wants to do the work themselves anyways.
And
too unsatisfied with you know the what other just w they're gonna want to this is their baby. This is their life. They wanna run it. You should never step down. It's it's fascinating that you know two brilliant people can make the same exact mistake.
So he says, you know, he they tried to transform himself. They used to call him the craftsman president.
'Cause you know he he was in the factories, he was doing the work, like

I'll tell tell about this in a little bit. There's only one office that's empty in the Del fact and in the all uh in the factory and it's
Debacios.

He was on the factory floor, he's in the stores.
So he tries to transform he fails at doing this, transform himself from craftsman president to shareholder president.
But the problem is he's struggling in a role that's very different from the one he had built up over the previous fifty years.
And then he also doesn't like how much attention
That the new CEO, you know, DeVecchio's very, very quiet. So he doesn't like the fact that he sees his CEO, the one he hired.
on the front pages of the newspapers in Italy for reasons that have nothing to do with selling glasses.
And he can't understand why this guy doesn't understand that you have to dedicate all your time to the factory.
And what DeVecchio would say is factory above all.
There is so much to do that a CO should have little space to focus on other things.
The sh CEO should fuse with the factory.
Live there full time. That is what he's saying.
So he went up firing him and comes back to run the company. He wants Esslor.
Remember that the CO that was running before did not want Esslor.
He needs to become a leader. This is what Dobec believes. He needs to become a leader in the corrective lens segment as well.
Where he finds high margins, which you and I have talked about over and over again today.
But also
Significant.
Barriers to entry.
Patents, exclusivity, exclusivity.
Still didn't say that right.
Advanced machinery and lots of specific technology.
Now what was fascinating is when this deal comes together, it's announced. Luxotica and Esselor have reached a fifty billion euro merger agreement.
the world's largest lens manufacturer is tying the knot with its absolute leader in frames and eyewear sales. That makes sense, right?

Del Vecchio was selling out.
So it says the structure
hides a substantial truth it will be Del Vecchio who has control.
At first glance it seems that he was the one who was selling.
For the first three years the management will be perfectly equal between the French and the Italians. Just wait.
Three years in, Del Vecchio will be able to assert the weight of his controlling stake.
as stipulated in the agreements that they both signed.
It is the majority shareholder of the Italian company.
Who becomes the majority shareholder of the group after the merger, in other words.
Del Vecchio wins again.
And so remember, his greatest deal came sixty years into his career. He's in his eighties, so at the time
Young people are asking him.
How did you manage to accomplish all that you did? This is his answer.
I've always tried to improve.
Every time I achieve something
I started thinking about how to make the next step. I see this over and over again. The way I summarized this.
There's no rear view mirror.
No resting on laurels.
No sleeping on winds.
Make something great and then do it again.
And then the book ends perfectly.
In the end.
His strategy has always been only one.
I want to be the best at everything I do.
That
Is all.
Okay, so now you know what I think are the most important parts in the story of the life and career of Leonardo Beckett. What I did is
I told you I had twenty nine pages.

For all the reading I did about him.
I then condense those twenty nine pages into a list of about fifty short
Sentences.
That I think will give you a sense of the man and how
He ran his life and his business. So I just want to run through them.
He followed a few simple but essential rules.
Those who have competed against him call him a true predator.
Rivals called him a hawk.
He would circle, wait.
And strike.

The world belonged to those bold enough to take it.
Those who owe their well being to him revere him like a deity.
He devoted his entire life to mad and desperate work.
At the expense of children and marriages.
With the ambition to be the best.
Always.
He had a will of iron and a fierce stubbornness to follow his own intuitions.
He was always looking ahead.
He was never satisfied.
At eighty seven he had no intention of letting go.
He knows no boundaries.
Every strategy of his starts with the product.
His choices always head in one direction.
Excellent.
He would insist on seeing and improving every new design every week.
He had a fear that never left him.
That someone better might come along and take everything away from him.
He said what you don't take for yourself others will take from you.
You mustn't nurture potential competitors.
If you get distracted or rest on your laurels.
As I've seen several entrepreneurs who started with me do.
Someone comes along
To snatch your market away from you.
The difference between me and many entrepreneurs who started with me.
They felt they had made it when they could afford the apartment by the sea.
I never got tired of moving forward.
He had a passion for order.
Cleanliness and control.
He'd show up at factories running a finger across machineries.
To check for dust.
He uses simple words that get straight to the point.
He has a great talent for simplifying the most complex situations, just like he did when he bought Ray Ban.
He said I follow every model we sell in every country.
On every line.
He has no desire to talk about the past. He's in his eighties when he said that.
He never feels at ease.
His moves are all born from the need to protect his business.
His employees and his brand.
A longtime associate of his was asked how did a young orphan
From the outskirts of Milan.
managed to dominate a global industry.
His answer when describing Dovecchio.
So much passion.
On his desk is a plaque with the phrase engraved
Simplicity.
Transparency.
Clarity.
Humility.
Also on his desk is another plaque with the words
Every euro saved.
is an extra euro in profit.
He said here we produce we don't talk.
Our story is told through the excellence of our products.
The processes required to make them.
And the cleanliness of our financial statements.
His passion does not lie in the office.
His fixation always remained with what happens in the factory.
I like to see the new models born.
Study the designs, the making of the prototype all the way through to the complete collection.
He has never changed his mind.
His profits must first be reinvested in the heart of his own company.
in research and development, in automation and technology. Never skim.
When it comes to spending to be at the cutting edge.
It has always been like this.
If there is a new machine to buy, he wants it immediately.
Here's a great description of Del Vecchio's career, a man who was trained in the field.
Who bet on a few simple and powerful ideas.
On the quality of his products.
On his spirit of conquest.
And on a hunger that no achievement has managed to satisfy.
It all starts with the product.
This I just want to be the best at what I do is such a powerful idea.
Ask yourself, am I the best at what I do?
If not, how can I be?
Del Vecchio started out by making a mold that turned out to be the best product on the market.
And everything developed from there.
It happened naturally.
Step by step, almost without realizing it.
He said.
Some have a passion for the mountains.
Some have a passion for cycling.
My passion has always been the factory.
He understood decades ahead of his competitors that the winner
would be the one who places the customer
at the center and manages to retain him.
He's described as having the same charisma as Steve Jobs and having a reality distortion field effect on those around him.
He shaped reality to his liking.
His requests were very clear. His employees would describe him as easy to understand.
He watches every penny, doesn't tolerate waste, and invests heavily in technology. He said, I have great respect for money.
I have always invested my money in the company to keep it competitive.
He says I have a respect for money and the effort required to make it.
He maintained a great perspective.
Some would say, You're working so hard, how difficult your life would be. He would say
To remain alive is a privilege, as is being fortunate enough to get up in the morning and make frames all day.
Feeding dozens of families.
He lived by a simple but powerful principle.
One's own work must be done to the best of one's ability.
There is only one office that is always empty. His he is never at his desk. The office is not for him. He is a trench man.
A factory man.
He said, I'm always around the factory. I talk directly with everyone explaining why and how we do things this way. What is he saying?
He's using the word explaining. He's really what he's saying, he's saying he's teaching.
This is what Jim Sinegal, the founder of Costco, said. If you're not spending ninety percent of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. That is a direct quote from Jim Sinegal.
I'm always around the factory. I talk directly with everyone explaining why and how we do things this way.
He explains his very simple strategy for the factory.
You have to do things well.
Then better and then always better.
Innovation has to be continuous.
He had so many ideas that he had to keep a tape recorder next to his bed.
He would wake up in the middle of the night with a solution to a problem or an idea to expand his business.
He would record the idea and then he'd go back to sleep.
He was driven for decades.
By a deep need to be autonomous. He does not want to depend on other people.
He believed that complacency kills others took vacations at the sea.
I kept moving forward.
He experienced a lot of change in his lifetime. His first son, Claudio, is forty seven years older than his younger Clemente.
Claudio grew up in a small attic room overlooking the factory.
Clemente grew up the son of a billionaire.
He says I follow the performance of our fifteen hundred reps every day.
He's in his mid eighties. It's the weekend and he's obsessively checking
Every single individual store sales data on his iPhone.
He says, I have never been satisfied.
He was described as simply a man who sees far.
Much farther than others.
Del vecchio could never be controlled.
He has taken over the world of frames by destroying the competition, humiliating his Italian rivals, buying out the Americans, annihilating the French and Germans.
And finally, Del Vecchio found his reason for being
in his work.
And that is where I'll leave it. I would say for the full story, read the book, but the book's not even available in English, unfortunately.
I will leave as many of my notes as possible.
in the show notes so you can see it on your podcast player.
And make sure on my personal email list. I email the top ten highlights from every single book and episode that I make. I'll leave that link down below. You can sign up for free.
And it's also available at David Center dot com.
That is three hundred and ninety four books down, one thousand ago. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.