David Green

"One of our most enduring categories is the product line that started it all for Barbara and me: frames. The small picture frames we made in the beginning were strictly a craft item. Customers would use them to hold small paintings for a grouping on the wall. Then a wholesale company (the same one that sold us that first frame-chopper machine) wanted to get out of the ready-made frame business. The owner sold us a forty-foot truckload of inventory for $2,000. We had no way to store this much in our small facility, so we parked the trailer out front and began running newspaper ads for a big sale. We spread some frames out on the lawn, while the rest could be seen by climbing up a ladder into the back of the trailer. (Fortunately, nobody slipped and fell and sued us!) It turned out to be a tremendous success; we netted five or six times our investment. So we bought another truckload for $4,000, and a third for $8,000, still managing to be profitable. This showed us the potential of large, ready-made frames. It’s still one of our mainstays. Today we stock every size from 2 x 3 inches to 24 x 36 inches. Granted, frames consume a lot of floor space, and they come in lots of different styles. But people will always want to hang a picture of their child or their mother on the wall, and Hobby Lobby will always be there to help them."

"Time after time, surveys of our customers tell us they come to Hobby Lobby most of all for the amazing selection. Newcomers walk in the front door and don’t get halfway to the back wall before uttering, “My goodness—this place has everything!” That’s exactly the reaction our company’s creative director (who happens to be my daughter, Darsee) is seeking. She calls it a creative frenzy. “Nobody brings together so many unique things under one roof,” she says."

"Another thing I don’t have to mess with is dealing with stockholders and all the federal and state paperwork of being a public company. We’re still family-owned, which keeps life a whole lot simpler. When my wife and kids and I decide to make a business move, we don’t have to ask Wall Street about it."

"We call the standing warehouse items “pull items”; the stores continually pull them into their facilities to offer their customers. The seasonals and onetimers, on the other hand, we call “push items”; we in the home office in Oklahoma City make the decision to push them into the stores for a given period. Every week, a store manager fills out his or her “pull” order. A computer printout lists all 46,000 items and tells how many of each should be on hand in that store to constitute a two-month supply. If the store’s stock is below that number, it should reorder. Within twenty-four hours (or forty-eight at the most), a truck will show up with that merchandise, so the store doesn’t even come close to running out."

"It gave me a chance to think through the essentials of markets and of ownership. Without private ownership you can’t create a market. You’ve got to have someone who cares. Even if you gave public hospitals prices, it made little difference to them. It’s still not their money. There has to be both pain and pleasure before humans will be efficient and effective. An owner of a business will be sitting on the dunny at 2am thinking about how he might save a few extra bucks; it takes that sort of commitment to survive in business. No public servant is going to do that, nor would the trustee of a voluntary organisation. That’s why ultimately I wasn’t convinced about David Green’s fondness for the role of charities and trusts in running hospitals. I’ve worked with trusts; the Forestry Corp was effectively a trust. I brought about more change in forestry than most chairmen, but I still pulled my punches on some things. If I had my own money in there, I would have done things even better."