Gaston Glock arrived in Luxenberg in July 1999 for an urgent talk with the shell company artist Charles eart eward picked up Glock personally at the airport before proceeding to their meeting he suggested that Glock take a look at the new sports car that he had just acquired it was parked in a garage when they got to the garage eward guided
Glock down to the third Underground Level where they found themselves alone eward pointed out the sports car and Glock approached on foot to take a closer look suddenly a tall man stepped out of the Shadows lunging at GLOCK GLOCK raised his arms defensively and the attacker swung a large Rubber malet and struck Glock on the top and the side
of the head rather than intervene to help Glock eward turned and ran I'm a coward he would explain later Glock meanwhile was fighting for his life the gun maker who usually carried a pistol lacked one on this day with no other option Glock fought with his hands he swung his large fists into the attacker's eye eyes and mouths though he was 70 years old Glock put up a stout
defense he drew blood and knocked out several of his attacker teeth despite the hammer blows to his head he gained the advantage when the police arrived they found a bizarre scene the bloodied attacker lay collapsed on top of Glock with his arms outstretched like Jesus Glock was pinned to the ground but not mortally wounded his attacker was
unconscious Glock had suffered several Hammer blows to the head and lost a liter of blood at the hospital though he was strikingly composed before doctors finished patching him up he summoned his personal Bankers those two Bankers held $70 million of his cash in accounts to which eward had access within 3 hours of the attack Glock had moved 40 million to a
secret Swiss account ewart was busy too he blocked the other 30 million from being transferred eward glock's supposed Financial advice had been stealing from him that was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today which is Glock the rise of America's gun and is written by Paul Barrett I was not expecting to do
this book this week this book wasn't even on my radar until like a week or two ago I saw somebody uh speaking about reading the book online and what they said made me interested in ordering the book and he says uh what struck me is how his inexperience was a great Advantage he didn't assume anything about how to design a handgun because he
never designed one before consequently he of course designed the best one ever he didn't know what was out of bounds and so the idea of not knowing what's out of bounds not knowing what you don't know it sounds like to a normal person like a liability but in as we've seen many of these the books that you and I go over together uh for entrepreneurs
especially going attacking an industry they never worked in before it winds up becoming an advantage and that'll make a lot more sense as we go through the book so that intro occurs about 15 years after Glock invents and starts selling his handgun this story is wild cuz not only does he have people stealing from him his financial adviser actually hired
the guy to kill Glock but what's crazy is over the course of the story Glock has so many of his top lieutenants and top Executives steal from him which I'll get to in a bit I want to start at the beginning because it doesn't make any sense this guy was 50 years old he was managing a car radiator Factory outside of Vienna he had a small manufacturing
business on the side he had never made a gun I don't even think he owned a gun and yet within a decade he goes from zero to billionaire so let's jump to that right now after 30 years of manufacturing Glock had yielded a respectable social station and a comfortable life still he dreamed big he was the son of an Austrian railroad
worker he was managing a car radiator Factory outside of van and he operated a side business with his wife using a secondhand metal press they produced a modest volume of brass fittings for doors and windows he also made a bunch of sh curtain rods over time the side business slowly expands and this is one of the most important um ideas in the
book and that is to always do the best with the job in front of you because you can never predict what future opportunity that unlocks he gets really good at manufacturing things with polymer and plastic one of those things he actually is going to make for the Austria's Ministry of Defense he starts making knives for the ministry of
defense that is how he learns about the opportunity to make handguns so it says the garage metal shop expanded over time to make steel blaz which so impressed Austria's Ministry of defense that Glock obtained a contract to supply field knives and bayonets to the Austrian Army and this is where he's going to find the opportunity watch watch how fast he
moves once he realizes there's a huge opportunity here one day in 1980 he overheard a hallway conversation between two Colonels that jolted his imagination the Army needed a new pistol to replace the Antiquated ones from World War II Glock interrupted the conversation and asked if it was possible if his company could bid on the pistol contract he's
asking to bid on a pistol contract he's never made a pistol designing Firearms was something far beyond his experience he asked the colonels to describe the Army's requirements for a new handgun and I just love his mindset here he's like well this shouldn't be too difficult to make cuz he just describes it to him the handgun was simply another
acutran that attached to a soldier's belt similar to a knife that he already produced as Gaston Glock himself put in an interview that I knew nothing was my advantage that I knew nothing was my advantage he gets to start with a blank sheet of paper all of his competitors have decades in some kind in some cases centuries of builtup procedures and
processes and the way they do things so let's skip ahead and go into his initial research process because I think there's a lot of good ideas in here for you and I uh Glock didn't own any guns after the conversation at the defense Ministry in early 1980 he bought a Beretta a Sig and a modern version of the German P38 pistol he began disassembling the guns
putting them back together and noted the contrasting methods used to make them I started intensive studies in such a manner that I visited the Austrian patent offices for weeks examining generations of handgun Innovation so what's he doing there he's doing exactly what you and I are doing he understood that learning from history is a form of
Leverage listen to what he just said I started intensive studies in such a manner that I visited the Austrian patent office for weeks examining generations of handgun Innovation what took people generations to learn because he's going back and doing all this reading he learns in a few weeks I bought and tested all modern pistols
available at the time and I tried to involve into conversation the best experts I knew so he contacts a bunch of experts in the firearm industry he invites them he has a meeting with them there's two guys two main guys here and I just want to go over this really quick uh he invited several firearm Specialists to join him among those who
attended were this Colonel uh a champ who was a champion shoot shooter who also oversaw weapons procurement for the Austrian Army that becomes extremely important he also invited an author of technical books such as silencers for hand firearms and then he just asked them flat out gentlemen what do you want to see in a pistol of the future and the
Beautiful Thing is his initial customer is going to give them the outline of exactly what he needs remember he's going to have to bid against it's not like they're just going to give him the contract all right he's got to bid against other gun manufacturers so it says they desired a high capacity pistol that held more than eight rounds it
should weigh no more than 28 ooun it should have a light trigger pull for fast accurate firing and it should be streamlined and easy to holster crucially the gun should have no more than 40 Parts this is so important one of my favorite ideas about this entire book is the way this guy designs his company and I'm going to repeat a lot of
the things that he does he designed a product and a company based on limiting the amount of moving Parts this is going to be very reminiscent of like the early days of uh Henry when Henry Ford was building his car of herb Keller of Southwest Airlines The Limited moving Parts the simple product the simple business processes they all created
allowed them the stack advantages at one after another wait till you see the profit margins that this guy this is incredible all right let me I'm getting ahead of myself so it says the colonel also told Glock that the pistol should be able to withstand extended contact with snow ice and mud it should fire 10 it should be able to fire 10,000 rounds
with no more than one failure per thousand the ideal pistol should have a long service life of 40,000 rounds this professional research that Glock is engaged in is so important and he knew he knew it was important then at the evening's end Glock had his guest sign and date one of the sheets of paper that memorialized their thoughts he
treated the occasion as if it would be remembered by history another main theme that appears over and over again in the book you don't need much to start out he began working on a prototype he tested crude early versions in a basement firing range that he built specially for this purpose he shot alone using this is hilarious he shot alone using only his
left hand if the gun blew up on him he would still have his good right hand this guy moves fast too more professional research Glock attended Police Academy classes and took private shooting lessons remember he didn't own a gun he knew nothing about it my intention was to learn as much as possible as fast as possible this
process lasted one year he filed for an Austrian patent on April 30th 1981 it was his 17th invention so he called the gun he called his gun the Glock 17 so from zero to patent that's one year then from finally actually submitting the actual Prototype 2 which is going to be his first customer that's another year so two years in total after another year
of testing and Improvement Glock four samples of the pistol to the Austrian Army I worked for two years day and night to bring the sample to the Army on time move fast and then as we'll see a few times today Glock has a lot in common with James Dyson difference for the sake of it and retention of total control to this day the Glock family
owns the company Glock is obsessed with control just like d James Dyson was if you don't know what I'm talking about uh listen to episode 300 uh that's the third or fourth time I read Dyson's autobiography two overarching concepts would set the Glock 7 apart remember he's bidding against other existing pistol manufacturers okay first it was to be made largely out of light
resilient injection molded plastic and second it was designed without a pre-existing Factory I need to go ahead a few pages before I come back to this because this comes up over and over again it's black plastic and metal construction set it apart from everything else on the market suggesting modernism and efficiency difference for
the sake of it so something that James Dyson talked about that benefited that his product his first vacuum cleaner benefited in the early days they gave him an edge over all of his competitors is it looked different you would go into a store you'd see seven eight vacuum cleaners all look the same then you get to the end you're like what the hell is
this thing it immediately snaps the consumer it's like oh I need to pay attention this is different he also has a great line James Dyson has a great line on the value that that a strangel looking product will actually get you more media attention he says it is one of the virtues of having such a strange looking product that journalists are
more likely to take an interest in it that's something that he learned when he designed a a wheelbarrow with instead of a wheel had a ball and he got so much more attention than other people trying to build wheel bears that all look the same that he applied that idea about 10 or 15 years later when he was designing the vacuum cleaner we see that same
exact idea benefiting Glock right here and so not only did glock's gun look different but it also had a huge benefit remember has to survive in rain snow and mud this was initially designed for the mil so the he's using industrial plastic which they said is often called polymer was actually remarkably strong and resistant to corrosion a major problem
with traditional steel guns and then because he started from a blank page he's like well I don't have to just manufacture guns in a factory that's been manufacturing guns for 50 years what would a factory look like if I designed it now from scratch this also gives him this also makes him uh produce uh his gun a lot uh a lot more
efficiently and cheaply and that increases his margins uh the the important thing that gave him the his big price Advantage was that he designed the pistol for complete production on computer controlled tools and I probably have 75 highlights in this book but really this is a summary of why like studying the way he he's very flawed
person as we'll get to later on but his approach to companyb building and creating a new product is very fascinating to me as says uh this is just a note I'm writing to myself the book is all Simplicity focus and differentiation that is the best way to get my attention Simplicity turns me on I love it I am drawn to it clock produced the simplest handgun with only
34 components again Simplicity lets you stack advantages one on top of another I also wrote down uh one of Steve Jobs favorite quotes one of my favorite quotes this was plased all over Apple in the early days Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication that of course is Leonardo Da Vinci because of the unfussy way the simple way Gaston Glock
fabricated his slide his pistol required fewer steps to manufacturer saves money and there were fewer opportunities for error adds durability the Glock 17 was put through a PR preliminary firing run of 10,000 rounds the Glock malfunctioned just once and then again the benefit of starting from a blank sheet of paper and a brand new company none of his
competitors could say the same he got it right because he hadn't done it before one of the largest problems in getting a new design accepted by an established manufacturer is not just the quote unquote not invented here syndrome but also the we don't have that tooling syndrome why would we invent something new when you can simply modify what we
already have Glock started with a blank sheet of paper Pap as a result he came up with something original and he was at the right place at the right time the book starts out with this this crazy shootout that's happening in Miami in the 1980s between the FBI police officers and I guess these drug dealers or bank robbers a lot of these cops and
FBI agents get killed they're all at that time they're like running around with like these Smith and Weston revolvers that hold like six shots and if anybody's seen the documentary that's on Netflix called Cocaine Cowboys the flood of drug violence in Miami in the 80s and the all over the country actually these guys have Uzi they have high powerered rifles and so you have
military and law enforcement officials all over the country and all over the world trying to get better guns that could hold more rounds and were more reliable and so even though he starts out in Austria he's going to wind up dominating the most valuable market for his product in the world it's also interesting because I think I'm pretty
sure he's he's pretty he's he's very anti-American he does not like Americans he says they're stupid but that's where I think almost all of his wealth came from uh with in just a few years another Market far larger and richer than the Austrian defense sector would be Keen for a pistol of the future American police officials wanted a new handgun
and Glock was there to offer a powerful alternative to the revolver and then the author talks about the Dynamics of this Market the fact that the American civilian gun buying population tends to gravitate towards what the professionals carry and as a result for Glock this will trans this translated into a Bonanza and then finally one more thing
from this section before I move on something we see over and over again first they ignore you then they laugh at you you and then they copy you Smith and Wesson who who dominated the American law enforcement Market before Glock created something uh new and better Smith and Wesson ignored Glock at first then they scoffed at him and eventually
be they began imitating him he actually sued them later on and wins like a a patent infringement case against them okay so in addition to Simplicity differentiation and uh retention of total control the other main theme of the book that stuck out to me that I've been thinking about a lot like how can I use this in my own business is he's got
all these very unique and unusual forms of distribution and So my answer to this question how did a pistol produced by an obscure engineer in Vienna a man who barely spoke English and had no familiarity with America become in the space of a few years an American icon the answer to that question is distribution and a lot of this is going
to be media driven and media begets more media so first of all there's people in America that are really they are gun salesmen they understand the industry they see this headline and they're like wait a minute what's going on so this guy named Carl Walter is going to play a very important role in the first few years of GLOCK GLOCK I don't think
really maintains very many Professional Resources uh relationships for a very long time this guy like builds up his entire American distribution Salesforce and he winds up firing him later on but Carl is just this gun salesman and then he sees a headline he's like an unknown gun manufacturer won a large contract to supply pistols to the Austrian defense
Ministry of Defense he was intrigued so let's go back to this very important theme that we see over over and over again do the absolute best job on the opportunity that's right in front of you cuz you have no idea what opportunity that will unlock in the future Glock starts making knives for the Austrian government he's reliable does the best
job possible so then they allow him to bid on the pistol contract he does an incredible job there that headline then gets the attention of this guy who's going to build out his entire American distribution in Salesforce and so Carl is sitting in America reading a German's weapon magazine and that's where he hears about the Glock 17 and so he says
I was extremely curious why the Austrian army bought it so he goes and meets Glock and there's two things that are happening here one he's like well here's this Gap in this extremely valuable Market how many guns does the American police and military buy and so he's like well there's actually some really there's a lot of money to be made if we
could convert US police departments from revolvers to pistols and there's all these news stories about the cop in in in the 1980s being outgunned by other people not you know having six shots their their guns jamming all this other stuff and so it's like okay well why would you carry a Smith and Weston revolver that carries six shots and can
jam why don't you carry this weird looking pistol that's made mostly of plastic by this Austrian engineer that carries 17 and so it goes back to the Dyson thing about having the benefit of having just a strange looking product assuming that the product is good obviously we we we're operating on the assumption that the product you're
making is world class or really great and he's like wow that's really ugly but that initial reaction by Carl is like oh that's really ugly but yeah at least you have his attention and then this is another example of glock's like fetish for Simplicity working in his Advantage because Carl at the time when he's going to meet uh Glock he actually works he's
a he works for this company I don't know how to pronounce this maker it says uh he represented steer s t yr but steer made really complicated pistols so it says this is what Carl said the handgun that they made was far more complicated and it was a pain and the ass to service so Carl goes and meets Glock he says Hey listen I represent this handgun
manufacturer United States perhaps I could do the same for you I could represent Glock in the United States this is the crazy part the the the biggest sales opportunity of glock's entire career was somebody else's idea and so Carl also had contacts in the the American Gun media industry this is again this is this cannot be overlooked
it was extremely important so he's having this conversation with Glock he says listen the pistol will sell but must be sold he meant that he could explain to the American law enforcement Market why a gun that looked so strange deserved a chance and so he brings with him this guy that runs this magazine this really influential magazine at the
time called Soldier of Fortune and so he says listen this is my suggestion you should give the the scoop on publicizing the Glock 17 United States word of mouth will then spread in gun Circles by the time that you have expanded your manufacturing capacity America would be hungry for your new pistol so what Carl understood is that media begets more
media and this is going to supercharge glock's distribution and so this article is going to come out the guy writing the article says uh he argued that the glock's design set it apart from everything else on the market back to the importance of differentiation now the one with the one exception Glock studied and copied the greates remember he was going back and reading
generations of patent filings in a few weeks and so if this is from the article the only uh conventional thing uh about the Glock was the method of operation he adopted for his handgun Glock borrowed his basic mechanics from John Moses Browning the greatest gun designer of the late 19th century okay so let's go back into more unusual distribution this
is fascinating so the Secretary of State 1985 the US Secretary of State goes and meets the foreign minister of Vienna and so the US Secret Service agents and their vien Vienna uh counterparts actually start talking and the Austrian counterparts give the US Secret Service a gift they give them a bunch of Glocks the US Secret Service uh agents returned
with on usual gifts from their Austrian counterparts three high-capacity black polymer pistols it was glock's first official foray Westward so that's the first way the pistols get from Austria to America once they're there the Secret Service then passes some of the pistols along to the US Department of Defense those two organizations are both going
to be future customers of Glock so then what happens next American defense procurement officials invite Glock to compete in trials in 1984 to select a new sidearm for us soldiers now I mentioned earlier that this guy's obsessed with control you see this example he he objected to the Pentagon so he's going to compete and then win at this he objected to the
pentagon's insistence that the rights to manufacture the winning gun design would be open to competitive bidding Glock intended to collect all profit from the production of his gun himself it's really smart again goes back to the advice from James Dyson retention of total control and so then this goes back to how if you go back in in glock's life
even before he had a lot of financial success he was obsessed with quality in fact there's a great line that comes somewhere later in the book where it says quality will always bring you more money Glock demanded high quality H the motto of the company is perfection Glock Perfection to this day it's like all on the walls and everything but this was
very interesting it this is this three star general in the Austrian Army and he's describing Glock at the early days of building his company so Glock is still alive today he's like 93 I think he's like 52 where we are in the book he says there's this interesting guy he never in his life designed a field knife and he delivered the best quality
samples among all the in Industry participating and all those guys have been in the knife industry for hundreds of years then this interesting guy came back and sold a newly designed handgun to the ministry of Defense quality will always bring you more money now what happens if you're able to make high quality in the simplest way you have a
company that's going to essentially he just created a money printing machine and and this paragraph is really the benefit of a product with fewer moving parts and a company with fewer moving Parts uh they settled on a commercial wholesale price of $360 and a recommended retail price of $560 these levels undercut comparable
American and European Brands yet they generated generous profits glock's gross margins exceeded 65% by comparison Smith and Wesson and Beretta ranged 5 to 20% of profit the glock's simpler design and the computerized manufacturing methods allowed for larger profits another benefit of a low cost structure Glock said in their first year if they they
could break even all they had to do was sell 8,500 guns for the year right so they have a very low cross structure we sell 8,500 guns will'll at least survive they unveil the Glock at a trade show in America they sell 20,000 units on the first day a and then you go into why so many people want to buy it one it looks weird it's getting covered in the media
as a result of the fact that it looks weird but then both professional and recreational gun owners want something that's simple less things can break in a life and death situation this is winds up being huge Advantage for Glock again make a product in a business with few moving Parts the pistol's design and its relatively few components was the most
important thing because of these components less Parts can break and therefore the weapon will last longer let's go back to re curring theme in the book the fact that he's getting a ton of free media attention because his product looks so differently somebody writes they're mistaken they thought they somebody wrote an article I think it was
like the Washington Post or something like oh my God this this gun is all plastic like you can sneak it through it's like they call it like the hijacker special or something like that there's there's metal in it you can't sneak it through but the result was a huge surge in demand for this pistol the intense public attention devoted to the Glock
did have an impact on the gun and its manufacturer questions about the pistol's unusual design and materials became a major selling point civilian orders continued to pour in as thousands of gun buyers decided to see what was what all the commotion was about I'm going to pause right here uh when I did the the book on Robert Caro it's episode
305 I don't know if I mentioned this in uh in the actual podcast but there was something fascinating where one of the very first what we I guess would call lobbyists today is this guy named Tommy the cork Tommy the cork was really close to like FDR and Lyndon Johnson and he winds up Surviving and living longer than both lb J and FTR and he agrees to
be interviewed by Caro and Robert Carol at the time is a very young man Tommy the Cork's older Robert is in Washington DC you know he's spending few days with Tommy the cork interviewing him wakes up reads like the front page of the Washington whatever times or whatever it's like oh my god Tommy theork has been caught in like this huge Scandal
essentially like bribing politicians and so Robert goes to meet him and thinking oh my God Tommy's going to be distraught maybe he won't meet with me goes to Tommy the Cork's office and the guy's like smil violing he's like gassed up completely energetic and Robert's like what's going on like didn't you see the newspaper he's like yeah that's why I'm
happy he goes uh it's just free advertising kid and so this idea it's just free advertising kid I think is a main theme in this book there's a lot of uh attention and controversy surrounding glock's product and in every case even his his attackers just make his company stronger like we're seeing here uh so it says civilian orders orders continue to
pour in thousands of gun buyers decided to see what all the commotion was about more than 1,000 requests for free samples from law enforce enforcement agencies poured in in 1986 alone so you're not selling one or two uh guns right this is another part of um his distribution strategy is you could sell to Consumers but they might buy one or
two or whatever the case is these agencies are going to buy a thousand at a time some of the contracts in this book like 150 million a year to this Army uh you know 75 million to this other division in the US government or all these other governments and a lot of them found out because all the controversy in the media more than 1,000 requests for free samples of law
enforcement agencies in 1986 alone Glock would send the guns for free said hey if you want to keep them just send us a check and the check the price would be heavily discounted because Glock knew that the US uh gun buying population is just going to copy what the law enforcement in the Army has nine out of 10 of the recipients eventually sent a
check saying that they would like to keep the guns and so from just this one article alone this is the what they said internally at Glock you just got $5 million worth of advertising for free Okay so let's stay focus on more of their ideas for distribution they actually I mean I guess this is kind of a a this kind of a a version of
influencer marketing combined with an idea that David olvy learned so David olvy before he started his advertising agency he was actually one of his jobs he had multiple jobs one of his jobs was selling stoves door too and so something that he learned was if you go up to knock on the door and somebody anwers like hey you want to buy my stove talk
about it that would have one conversion rate and then if you say hey if uh here's a stove this is all it does but by the way if you buy you get six free cooking lessons with purchase he said the word free is magical just that extra sentence or that extra offer wind up dramatically increasing the percentage of customers who actually purchased and
so we see Glock having this like combination of influencer marketing plus free teaching and free lessons which becomes very powerful uh distribution component for them in mid 1986 Carl Walter began putting some of the country's most admired shooting instructors on contract that's the influencer marking part part of it to
spread the word about the Austrian pistol this melding of training and marketing became a Glock Hallmark if a department would buy some Glocks this is what they do they would then dispatch another trainer as part of the procurement deal a freebie for the new customer that is the combination of the olave V selling stove and giving away
lessons idea and then this was also differentiated against their competitors because their trainers would come to you the other existing gun manufacturers would make you come to them they took the training program on the road you had to go to Smith and Weston Academy in Massachusetts if you were going to use this if you were going to use the Smith
and Wesson if your agency was going to adopt the Glock we would send training your way again this goes back to this more unusual forms of distribution why many times instructors from neighboring agencies attended these sessions out of curiosity Glock would then sponsor an openhouse seminar for all federal state and Municipal trainers in a given region
this was just a brilliant way to sell this gun and then what happens next could have been predicted by Andrew Carnegie when he says cut the prices scoop the market watch the cost and the profits will take care of themselves the deals worked financially because of the company's startingly low manufacturing costs which Glock was able to push down
even further to less than $100 a unit as its production volume GR targeting the lucrative professional law enforcement Market was a great idea but it was not a new idea all the way back on episode 147 you and I have seen this idea before Glock is literally running Sam Colt's exact Playbook he was just doing it 100 years earlier Glock was not
the first firearm designer to promote a handgun to the Americans in uniform as a means of developing a lucrative Market the first was Sam Colt the strategy that the Glock team pursued 140 years later later resembled that of Sam Colt what allowed Sam Colt to get his business off the ground was the fact that he was winning endorsements from prominent
lawmen and Military Officers of his day this is more on what Colt and Glock had in common Colt relentlessly pursued public contracts this is exactly what I've been describing to you so far in the book regardless of the profit margin government patronage Sam Colt once said is an advertisement if nothing else Gaston Glock became the Sam CT of the 20th century
back to more unusual distribution they get the gun in the hands of prop makers for movies so they they give uh pistols to the propman and then they also give them huge discounts and they would let them cut the line in front of other customers Glock it's one of the most valuable product placements ever in uh this movie called Die Hard 2 with Bruce
Willis and this is what Bruce Willis's character said in the movie that punk pulled a Glock 7 on me you know what that is it's a porcelain gun made in Germany it doesn't show up in airport X-ray machines and it costs more than you make in a month and the crazy thing is all of that was made up and it did not matter it didn't matter that every
single trait that Bruce Willis said uh rattled off on the pistol was incorrect there was never a model called the Glock 7 the gun was made in Austria not in Germany it did show up on airport X-ray machines and the Glock did not cost more than what a police captain made in a month despite all of the errors as a result of that line in Die Hard 2 the
Glock became an instant favorite of American gun enthusiast another advantage that Glock had over their competitors was the fact that they were able to focus they put all their effort and resources behind a single product American handgun makers offered many diverse models in the fashion of the Detroit car companies Glock saw that
as competing with himself and resisted the Temptation so this is what I mentioned earlier how he goes essentially from zero to a billion uh within 10 years uh here's some sales numbers 10 years in the company sells more than 20,000 guns a month at an average cost of $600 a piece pie they've sold over 500,000 Glocks in North America alone four out
of five Glocks produced in 1995 were purchased by civilians who paid much higher prices than police departments and this is the crazy part is that demand is far outstripping supply of the Glock Factory at this point in time he had taken a Hiatus from buying advertising the factory in Austria could not make pistols fast enough to meet the
demand and this is more about Glock the man and then how he ran the company a lot of weird stuff in here uh Corporation does not have a soul its character reflects that of the people in charge my favorite statement on that is that the founder is the guardian of the company's Soul uh Gaston Glock was very much in charge of his company and he was
a man with a complicated soul even those people who came to have grievances against him did not dispute his drive and tenacity well into middle age he discovered a reservoir of ambition that fed the design of a truly Innovative handgun he was a late blooming tinkerer whose breakthrough came at exactly the right moment he had enough sense to hire
an inspired marketer in Carl Walter this is the guy I was telling about earlier that really built the American marketing and sales organization in America which is by far uh the most valuable part of glock's business at the beginning Glock had no feel for the United States at all and much of anything or or much of anything outside of Austria he evolved
from a provincial manager of a radiator Factory to a world traveling industrialist that is one of the craziest in the entire book because it is true he evolved from a provincial manager of a radiator Factory to a world traveling industrialist he's owns all of the company this company is worth billions of dollars Glock built a cash
machine with margins in the neighborhood of 70% the slogan Glock Perfection was not puffery to Gaston Glock he believed it his organization projected coolness certainty and arrogance the founder was capable of charm and at other times he struck people as distant and condescending he expressed disdain this is so this is a weird thing he expressed
disdain for Glocks American employees based on nothing more than their nationality he hires a bunch of people that also speak German and that happen to work in America and they just they they like to talk in German they talk about how stupid Americans are this is what a bizarre guy uh he had an unforgiving management style when one
day which one day he summarized every morning you have to slap everyone on the head just in case they did something wrong then he does just some unwise things he goes around like uh their their American headquarters is right outside of Atlanta and so he would like meet women at he he's married the whole time uh he winds up divorcing his wife
who he starts the company with and now he is 93 and his new wife is 42 he winds up meeting a bunch of women in uh all around Atlanta then hires them and so in one case this one lady is getting hired and she's telling her she's like a young woman she's telling her mom and her mom gives her the right advice she like you be really weird like you have to assume
that he has lecherous intentions that's the word she used lecherous intentions and he does he's like kind of hires her as like this quasi personal assistant so she's got to do a bunch of stuff in the office but then he's like oh do a bunch of stuff in my house including make my bed and then put candy on my pillow and then she'd knock on the
door and he would answer it in his underwear and so there's just a bunch of highlights it just sounds like he spent a lot of his time seducing several younger women uh he traveled in luxury he has houses all over the world at this Point his female friends had cart blanch at Atlanta's most expensive stores but at the same time he would explode in
Rage when his employees bought what he considered unnecessary office supplies and so you have the weird thing is as this crazy amount of demand for the product the the product is really good and then the company that's built on top of this like fast growing rocket ship especially in the early days it may have be different now where it's like more
mature it just didn't have a lot of it just wasn't handling the demand really well the company was patched together on the Fly the company evolved in into a moneymaker powered by excellent product design and a fearful desire not to displease Mr Glock the way I would describe is like he was feared by his employees and so he evolves into what
you would describe as a tyrant and there's a great line in here that really summarizes what's happening because everywhere he goes his company's printing money he's winning Awards and he's just like oh I'm I'm amazing says he began believing his own news clippings and so in a strange turn of events he winds up firing Carl Walter
this is the guy that built that there would have been no Glock without Carl Walter but the problem was Carl tried to take some of the shine away from the founder when the Austrian company received industry awards at at any award shows it was Walter who went up on stage to accept them Glock has this big ego this is not good rule number one this
other guy working there says rule number one is that you let the guy who pays the bill take all the credit at this point Carl Walter's conversation was like a percentage of sales and he was just getting too rich and Glock didn't like that uh in 1992 Glock proposed changing his contract to cut drastically his percentage commission the owner had no
intention of making uh him a multi-millionaire taken a he refused he had lived and breathed Glock for seven years was this to be the reward for all of his sacrifice to be cheated by the man that he had made Rich Glock remained unmoved he gave me an ultimatum Carl said accept it or and I took the or without hesitation Glock fired him the
man widely created with establishing the company in America over over the next 11 years Glock would run through seven Us sales managers and this is a terrible line to have your company described as and yet it didn't even affect the crazy thing it didn't the product and the demand was so high it didn't even affect their their financial performance distinguishing
oneself within the company became a career killer later on in the book it talks about the fact that a bunch of his employees were embezzling uh money from him and they didn't feel bad about it because they thought he was such like an ass and they're like he's this guy is making $200,000 a day personally he doesn't need the money and a bunch of
them actually go to jail for this but that just gives you an indication of like what's happening and Glock goes wild you know he's got all these Mistresses the money's going everywhere uh they they have like this companywide outing every Thursday at this giant strip club in Atlanta and so it says Gaston Glock was the king of the world
the girls the guns the money and the liquor and at the center of it all was this Austrian engineer that none of us knew very well and then he doesn't stop there this guy decides to have his own theme music so he splits is time between Austria and I guess Atlanta and he would go to this casino in this restaurant so much and he would insist that when he
shows up with his Entourage that the band stops playing literally the the house band has to stop playing whatever they're playing they would pause for a moment and then the band would swing into a rendition of Frank Sinatra's My Way that was glock's theme I did it my way and yet even through all these Shenanigans the fact that his top
Financial Lieutenant tried to have him killed the fact that his senior executive and longtime lawyer were both found guilty of embezzling money from the company it did not affect this incredible financial performance by this company that he built by the late 1990s the gun business had made Gaston Glock a billionaire estimating the size of his
fortune was and is difficult because most of it remains tied up in his privately held Corporation it is impossible to say how much cash that he has stashed away that the pistol still managed to flow from the factory and sell throughout the world despite the executive chaos was one of the greatest contributes to the intrinsic quality of Gaston Glocks
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