Rose Blumkin, business legend
David Shapiro has written a fascinating and inspirational piece in The Times on Mrs Rose Blumkin, business legend and founder of Warren Buffet’s Nebraska Furniture Mart. For anyone who needs a bit of inspiration to overcome the odds, this is it.
Shapiro traces the story of an illiterate Russian girl who managed to find a job and a husband (who fled Russia before the outbreak of the Revolution). She somehow managed to follow him to the US where they settled in Nebraska. She built her basement used-furniture store into a multi-million dollar business, by superb mechandising and sheer hard work:
She and her son, Louis, who helped run the furniture mart,
worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week. She was once quoted as saying
that she came home only to eat and sleep and that she couldn’t wait for
daylight so that she could get back to business.
Wait. Inspirational she may be, but 12 hours a day, seven days a week! I certainly wouldn’t be able, nor even remotely willing to work those sort of hours. Certainly not for year after year. Well I guess Warren won’t come knocking any time soon.
I like Buffet’s warning of what happened to Mrs B to managers considering retiring: “She retired at 103 and died a year later.”
Read the article – it’s a gem.
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