Book Review—From Lucky to Smart: Leadership Lesson’s from QuikTrip

Author: Chester Cadieux
Reviewer: David L. Perkins, Jr.

The University of Oklahoma marching band—which officially refers to itself as The Pride of Oklahoma—has been entertaining crowds since 1904. QuikTrip Corporation, the Tulsa-based company founded 53 years later, is rapidly becoming the unofficial “Pride of Oklahoma.” Indeed, we should consider replacing our sleepy state welcome centers with QuikTrip stores. “QT” is Oklahoma born and bred, serves all comers well, and makes a consistently positive impression.

QT is privately held, and financial data are not publicly released, but annual revenue is known to be around $7 billion. QT employs around 11,000; has been growing rapidly since inception; and now operates close to 600 stores. Forbes ranks QT the 37th-largest private company in the United States. Fortune lists it as one of the top 100 places to work in America.

Chester Cadieux was an original investor and the original manager. He opened the first store in 1957— a few years after he graduated from the University of Oklahoma— and has led the firm ever since. Unequivocally, QT is the house that Chester built. It’s quite a success story, and Cadieux has done a great service by writing it down, in his words, and sharing it with us. From Lucky to Smart is a book every Oklahoman, business manager and aspiring entrepreneur should take time to read.

QT actually started in the mind of Burt Holmes, a boyhood acquaintance of Cadieux. Holmes had traveled to Texas and visited a 7-Eleven. He returned with a plan to start his own “c-store” concept. Holmes secured $5K in seed money from his father and another $4K from two others. He needed a little capital, and someone to run the store. He found both in Cadieux, who secured $5K from his father.

After reading Lucky to Smart, I considered the things Cadieux said and shared: the stories he told, the lessons he learned, his philosophies. Here are a few themes and selected quotations from the book that convey each.

QT wasn’t an instant success, by any stretch of the imagination:

• If the city hadn’t closed the road eight days after we opened (our first store), the location of QuikTrip #1 would have been pretty good.
• Since we were true entrepreneurs, we opened a second store, which was even worse than the first. In spite of slightly better interior design, the location— a critical factor we had yet to grasp— doomed it from the start.
• The first two winters were long, tough and grim. We were losing money, coming up short in inventory and having personnel problems.
• We were trying to make the best decisions we could, but in retrospect we always did everything wrong the first time.
• Sometimes, all we can do is learn from the crashes.

Employees make the business “go”:

• There are … those people who make life easier and those who seem to be near the center of every controversy. The trick is getting the right ones on your team and keeping them there.
• We can train competence. We can’t train commitment.
• Inspect what you expect and pay for performance— it’s actually quite straightforward.
• Only when our employees’ standards are as high or higher than mine are we really running our stores the way they should be run.

Learn from your peers:

• Even though we were barely keeping our heads above water, attending the annual (industry) conventions became a priority. The cost was high, but the payoff was far greater.
• The industry conventions made me realize I wasn’t alone and I’d return from each with a handful of improvements. Implementing them kept bringing QuikTrip closer and closer to where we wanted— and really needed— to be.
• Attending early (industry) conventions gave me what I truly needed most of the time: ideas and self-confidence.

Courage, character and commitment needed to be a manager:

• It’s easy to get stagnant, to stay within the time-tested, familiar limits of your expertise. It’s easy to keep long-serving, faithful employees on the payroll even though they’re no longer carrying their share of the work. And it’s easy to accept deals that generate profit in less than honest ways. Yet leading is about taking chances, making tough decision and doing what’s right for the organization without jeopardizing anyone’s integrity or professional morals.

Great businesses are one of a kind, and they wow you. Think Apple. Rolex. Wal-Mart. QT is earning the right to be mentioned among these.

Twenty and 30 years ago we were all amazed at the QT “product.” And while we were all amazed at what QT was, and had become, Cadieux was humbly and diligently working on what the future could be. Today, not one of those “perfect” stores exists today— each long ago was deemed “insufficient” by QT management and leveled to make way for newer and better incarnations.

One of my favorite quotations is one I heard from Chester Cadieux some years ago. He was addressing complaints about their decision to close one of their stores. He said, “We must be committed to the future, not the past.”

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Written by David L. Perkins, Jr., Managing Director of Tulsa-based Acquisition Advisors and Managing Editor of The Business Owner Journal.

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