Idea Lawyer Blog

It's easy enough to say you should encourage creativity, but even good ideas have to be used wisely. It takes time to execute any idea, and that can take your focus off your Main Business Objective--what we've been calling your "dot." Yes, Sol Price recalls fondly the freewheeling early Fedmart days. Yet he now admits that many of those ventures, exciting as they may have been, really drew his focus away from his main business, and so, overall, hurt the business more than they helped it.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part X: Keep the Ideas Focused" »

The very fact that businesses live or die by the details means that you have an infinite demand for creative solutions to problems of every sort. In your early days, frankly, you'll probably find it easy to make changes, improvise, listen to others.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part IX: Principles of Success: Keep Creating Ideas" »

Many analysts have called Price Clubs the most important retail idea of the past quarter century. What does Sol Price think about that?

"The idea counted for very little; the execution was almost everything."

Continue reading "Sol Price Part VIII: Principle of Success: Master the Details" »

What were the principles that made the Price Club idea work?

Continue reading "Sol Price Part VII: Five Principles of Success" »

The idea was a winner--so, how well did it work? Great--except for one "detail."

A few months after opening, they were, in the words of the man who ought to know, "losing their butts."

The problem might have been any of a dozen things, but proved to be one of the last they suspected. There just weren't enough small businesses ready to try the new approach.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part VI: "We Were Losing Our Butts" " »

At an age when many people start thinking of retirement, Sol Price started walking the streets of San Diego with his son, Robert, and talking with small businesspeople about their needs and wishes. Shortly, the key insight struck him.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part V: Walking the Streets--the Big Idea Hits" »

By the early 1970s Fedmart was a publicly held corporation, operating as far east as Texas and active in a wide range of businesses, but its stock had gone flat. In 1974, Price tried taking the company private again in a leveraged buyout, then dropped the idea when the SEC seemed likely to object.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part IV: FIRED!" »

The creation of Fedmart proved the opening shot in a multiyear battle with the San Diego establishment. As the New York Times recalled in 1988: "Manufacturers and local merchants were outraged. . . . Newspapers refused to carry Fedmart's advertisements; the Better Business Bureau refused its application for membership."

Continue reading "Sol Price Part III: "The Business World Hates Change"" »

For someone who's received almost unbroken cheers for business creativity over the last fifteen years, Sol Price came to the game by a curiously roundabout route.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part II: The Accidental Retailer" »

You're interested in business ideas. How about this one?

It's 1975 and a fifty-nine-year-old San Diego businessman named Sol Price comes to you with an idea for a completely new approach to retailing. He wants to build a warehouse-size building on the outskirts of town, fill it merchandise for small business owners, and then charge them an annual fee to shop there. In return, he'll give them the lowest prices possible on every single thing he sells.

Continue reading "Sol Price Part I: The Man Behind Price Clubs (now CostCo)*" »