Profitable Painter Podcast
Profitable Painter Podcast is a rich resource for anyone interested in starting, running, and scaling a professional painting business, offering valuable insights, strategies, and interviews with industry leaders. Through case studies and in-depth discussions, we deliver a vivid picture of the painting industry, with a disclaimer that any financial or tax information is general and not a substitute for professional advice.
Profitable Painter Podcast
Biography Edition: Walt Disney's Resilience, Brand, and Standards
Get ready for an insightful look at Disney's resilience, innovations, and the legacy that continues to inspire generations. Hear how Steve Jobs drew inspiration from Disney's triumphs to guide Pixar's groundbreaking success with "Toy Story," and how Disney turned setbacks into opportunities, ultimately realizing his dream with Disneyland. We'll also discuss the valuable life lessons from his journey, such as overcoming business failures and navigating intense competition. Join us for this captivating episode that promises to reveal the secrets behind Disney's lasting impact on the world of entertainment.
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Others virtually everyone in entertainment attempt to tap this same reserve. But Disney understood wish fulfillment from the inside, which may be why his own longings connected so powerfully to his audiences. During a peripatetic childhood of material and emotional deprivation at least as he remembered it, he began drawing and retreating into his own imaginative worlds that set a pattern. His life would have become an ongoing effort to devise what psychologists call a paracosm, an invented universe that he could control, as he could not control reality. From Mickey Mouse through Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, through Disneyland, through Epcot, he kept attempting to remake the world in the image of his own imagination, to certify his place as a force in that world and keep reality from encroaching upon it, to recreate a sense of childhood power that he either had never felt or had lost long ago. Just finished reading Walt Disney the Triumph of American Imag imagination by Neil Gabler and this is this is a quite a long read, but it was definitely an interesting one Got a really good in-depth understanding of Walt Disney.
Speaker 1:And just to jump into things here, walt Disney was born in 1901. He was born to Elias and Flora Disney and his father was pretty hard on Walt and also Roy, his brother, roy, and his father would often beat him and he would make him work all the time. Basically, elias was not a very successful business person or he didn't make a lot of money. They were really poor. Elias would like jump from thing to thing and he would end up failing at it. He tried farming. Then he had like a newspaper route that he would make Roy and Walt do for him and then he would often beat them with like a hammer. So it was pretty intense. So Elias was clearly a loser. I'm going to read a quote from the book here. Usually Walt would run to his mother until Elias cooled down. But a reckoning, a big reckoning, came when Walt was 14. And Elias uprated him for being too insolent, so then ordered him to go to the basement for a beating. Roy pulled Walt aside and told him to resist. Obedient to his father, walt headed downstairs anyway. Elias followed yelling and grabbing a hammer to strike him, but this time impulsively, rising to his brother's injunction, walt stayed his father's hand and removed the hammer. He raised his other arm and I held both of his hands. Walt later recalled, and I just held them there. I was stronger than he was. I just held them and he cried. He said his father never touched him. After that, broken by work, elias was now defeated in the family too.
Speaker 1:Walt had a pretty rough childhood, to say the least, and he has. You know, he picks up drawing and he's like this is kind of his escape through his childhood. He's drawing and he ends up going into joining the war effort for World War world one as a um Red Cross member. He actually joins before he turned 18. He, I think he originally wanted to go into the army but he couldn't get in. Uh, but the Red Cross had more lax standards. So he ends up going into the war effort as a Red Cross member. And you might remember if you listened to the episode on Ray Kroc, they actually met, they crossed paths. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, and Walt Disney actually crossed paths. They were both in the Red Cross at the time and Ray Kroc and his autobiography mentions that he he remembers seeing Walt Disney and Ray Kroc and all the guys would go out drinking and then there'd be this one weird guy who would stay, you know, stay in the barracks and would just draw pictures of cartoons and they all thought he was weird. That would turn out to be Walt Disney. So that's kind of funny, but anyway. So he does the World War I thing with the Red Cross.
Speaker 1:He comes back and he wants to get into drawing. His father wants him to go work at a factory and he's like, no, that's not for me and his father's upset with him. But he wants to follow his passion and go into advertisement in Kansas City. He has like a very strong belief in himself and this is a common theme we keep seeing over and over again is folks that are doing great things. They have like very strong, almost illogical, belief in themselves. And he gets his first job and he's like super happy that they're like he's writing back to his mom, like they're paying me to draw pictures, and he's super happy. And he like he crushes it at his first job drawing pictures. He like never leaves his seat, he's just to take a break. He's just wants to prove himself that he's an outstanding artist. And he gets a lot of self-confidence. He already had a lot of self-confidence before he even started the job.
Speaker 1:Getting the job, he gets even more. And then he's like I can do this on my own, I can start my own studio and back in the back around this time. I mean, drawing cartoons and animation hadn't even really it wasn't really a thing, and so, but he wanted to draw pictures and he was fascinated with animation and he wanted to get in that field. He thought it was a good opportunity because there was, you know, ground to be broken there. Animation was completely new and uh, so he starts his first studio called Laugh-O-Gram Studio and he's creating these short films, these short cartoons, and trying to sell them to distributors and by age 20, basically, this first business fails and he goes bankrupt and he's starving. People think he has tuberculosis because he looks so gaunt.
Speaker 1:But one of the things about Walt Disney is he's like, unperturbed by the most devastating of circumstances, he's just always has like a great attitude and very optimistic person. And so he fails, completely bankrupt. And then he's he fails, uh, completely bankrupt, and then he's like, okay, well, I'll just try, try it again, and this time I'll do it different, better. He moves to Hollywood and, um, he ends up creating this um animation series called Alice's Wonderland, where he takes a live action video of a little girl and then he does animation around her and he ends up selling this to a distributor and that goes well for a little. While he's not making a ton of money, he's still really struggling with the finances.
Speaker 1:Walt is terrible, terrible with with finances. Fortunately his brother, roy, is really good with finances. That helps him on out, uh, um, as you'll see throughout the book, or throughout his his life, um. But so he's still struggling with finances. But he, he does have this Alice's wonderland that's going okay. And as that starts to gain momentum he ends up being betrayed. And so I'm going to one of his. His distributor basically goes around behind him and convinces one of his employees to basically betray Walt and a bunch of other employees betray him and they basically take all his characters and he loses all his employees to that distributor.
Speaker 1:So, real quick, from the book, when Walt left for the city, for Los Angeles, on March 13th, he had nothing. No Nolan, no character, no contract except one for the Oswalds that he was obligated to animate under the terms of his deal with Mintz, no staff to save for the few who remained loyal like Iwerks, no plan and, perhaps most important of all, no cartoon land to provide a haven from the real world. So he loses most of his employees, loses the characters that he had developed, and so he has to kind of start from scratch. And that's where he's like traveling back from finding out that he basically lost all this stuff and he starts designing Mickey Mouse and he shows it to his wife and his wife likes the drawing. But initially Walt wanted to call the mouse Mortimer Mouse and his wife was like no, that's a terrible name. And he ends up going with Mickey Um and this.
Speaker 1:So this was another lesson that Walt learned was you know, be careful who you trust. Uh, and here's a quote from the book, he would say that you had to be careful for whom you trusted. That he had learned that you had to control what you had or it would be taken you, that he had seen how duplicitous the business world could be. He said he had learned all these lessons and would never forget them. So again, walt Disney learns, as with the school of hard knocks be careful who you trust. Make sure you're setting up your contracts appropriately, that you actually own the things that you're developing. Because he didn't actually have the ownership. It was in the business, not to himself. So the business, you know. He lost all the characters he had developed and then also he, I think, realized how he was treating his team. He didn't have a close connection with his team and so he uh you'll see when when he starts, uh, his, his, um, his, his Disney company, he'll develop like a cult-like following with his employees. So he really nails that piece down, um, on his next iteration.
Speaker 1:So, uh, like I was saying, he's developing Mickey Mouse and he creates this cartoon called Steamboat Willie, and in this cartoon he successfully innovates a way to synchronize sound with the cartoon, and so it's like the first time this was done successfully in an impressive way. And so he innovated a way for the folks that were playing the music to follow the cartoon by doing it like a bouncing ball on the animation so that they know the rhythm on how fast to play things. And so he synchronized that sound really well and it like blew people's minds. People were going crazy over this Steamboat Willie cartoon. And he starts getting distributors to want to work with him to distribute his cartoons. So he does a bunch of Mickey Mouse and silly symphonies and that's going pretty well. And this goes into where he's expanding and innovating.
Speaker 1:Continue to innovate, because people are trying to copy him Because, like I said, animation was super new and there wasn't a lot of quality animation. And Walt Disney was like. His whole thing was like, let's make this excellent, like the only competitive edge we can have is by doing this way better than anybody else. And so he's continued to innovate and make things look even better. Continue to innovate and make things look even better, and he starts working with his team to increase the standards that he has for animators. And so he he mentioned several times that he likes to hire, like young animators and like train them the way that they should animate, instead of hiring a seasoned animators, because the seasoned animators are, um, they have bad habits and it's hard to break them up, the bad habits. And so he he basically built a school within his business on training animators.
Speaker 1:Another focus that Walt Disney has is creating a brand, and here's a quote from the book lifesavers. He told Walt they don't know you, they don't know your mouse. That made an impression on Walt as he recalled it years later. He said to himself from now on, they're going to know If they like the picture, they're going to know what his producer's name is. So on his trip he decided to stage a full-scale assault on the animation industry and establish Walt Disney as his undisputed leader, the lifesavers of animation. So he has a focus on standards for his employees, on creating excellent animation. He wants everyone to know he's creating this brand for Walt Disney Studios. And then also he ends up getting into merchandising, especially after they release Snow White, which is the first full length cartoon movie, and Snow White cost an incredible amount of money. Like Walt put an incredible amount of time and effort with his team to develop Snow White, he wanted to make it as perfect as possible and after that movie they made a ton of money on merchandising by selling I think they sold like 14 million cups with Snow White on it or something. It's just crazy. But let me read a quote from the book here.
Speaker 1:The nine months after Snow White debuted may have been the best months of Walt Disney's adult life. The picture was an astounding success. In its first week at the Carthay Circle it grossed $19,000. In its second, $20,000. And by the time it finished its 10-week run it had grossed just under $180,000. At the Radio City Music Hall in New York, where the lines often stretched down the block, it grossed just over $500,000. After it went into general release in February and after Walt had reanimated his shimmying prints, it grossed $3.5 million in the United States and Canada alone and returned over $1 million to the studio by May 1939. With $6.7 million in receipts, it would become the highest grossing American film to that point, eventually surpassing the previous record holder, the Singing Fool with Al Jolson, by nearly $2 million. Because of the low ticket prices at the time and because children, who were a significant segment of the film's audience, paid even less, walt always maintained that Snow White had been seen by more people in this country than any other motion picture.
Speaker 1:So Snow White debuts, crushes and they make a huge amount of money off of the merchandising. So this is a significant high point in Walt Disney's career. So this is a significant high point in Walt Disney's career and this is also Steve Jobs refers back to this when he is doing Pixar and before they developed Toy Story, he knew the power of creating characters in a movie like this because he read history and he realized, like Walt Disney, you know, crushed it with Snow White. And they're still making money. Disney is still making today. They're making money off of Snow White because there's new technology that comes out with the VHS, the DVD, blu-ray, streaming. It's all these new technologies that come out. People buy it again and again and again over time. So Steve Jobs knew that back in the day when they were releasing Toy Story and that's a lesson that he learned from Walt Disney. So Walt Disney has huge success with Snow White.
Speaker 1:Then we get into and that was around 1939, we get into World War II and the United States ends up taking over his studio to basically do propaganda on behalf of the United States and that kind of is a low point for Walt Disney because he loses creative control again. A low point for Walt Disney because he loses creative control again. That's something that he desperately needed and he gets really disheartened. He ends up going and talking to Henry Ford at one point because Walt wants to sell part of his business to get some cash flow going, because one of the big struggles that Walt Disney keeps running into is the lack of cashflow, lack of liquidity he has in his business and he's really dependent on the bankers and he has this contentious relationship with the bankers because he had to take all these loans out for all the big projects that he's doing, like Snow White and then later on Disneyland, and he thinks that maybe I should issue equity in the business and I can get some financing that way. And so he goes and asks, tells Henry Ford what he's thinking about doing, a public offering. And this is what Henry Ford said. Ford was blunt If you sell any of it, you should sell all of it, he warned.
Speaker 1:Walt admitted that kind of left me thinking and wondering for a while, wondering if he had crossed a bridge and could never go back, wondering if he had surrendered ultimate control. So that was something that he struggled with. He wanted to keep ultimate control in his business because he he was super passionate about keeping that high standard of excellence and keeping that high standard of the brand that he wanted to create. So he, you know, after world war two ends, he gets back control of his studio, but he's kind of disheartened still because he feels like there's a bunch of competitors in the space now, a bunch of different animators that are copying his techniques, and he doesn't feel the passion anymore. But he ends up thinking that he should start a park.
Speaker 1:And this is the ideal land and before this point there had been no theme parks. The only thing that had existed were carnivals that were kind of seedy and they were dirty and they had kind of a bad reputation. People would go to them, but it wasn't like all of them had the same type of rides and they were all kind of dirty, and so when he was telling people that this is what he wanted to do, they thought he was crazy, because this is like a complete departure from doing animations to starting a CD carnival it doesn't make any sense, it didn't make any sense. Carnival it doesn't make any sense, it didn't make any sense. And so, but he had this vision that he wanted to create a park that would, um, that people could go to, that would be like a fantasy land. And uh, so he is obsessed with this idea and he starts working on it and getting his team together and and he uh pours an insane amount of money into this and everyone that, all the outs, outsiders looking in, are like saying he's crazy, cause he's doing everything completely backwards from what the standard model is for, like a park or a carnival like this.
Speaker 1:You know, most of the time you for for these things, you would put it in a place where it had a high, high amount of foot traffic. Um, you have multiple entrances. You know you would have a certain matter, a certain type of rides that you would have in that park and he basically wasn't doing any of those things. It was in secluded area. There's one entrance, um, he wasn't going to do any of the rides that were typical back in those days.
Speaker 1:He was doing building everything from scratch and on top of that he was also putting an insane amount of detail and expense on everything in there. So it was just a money pit. It was just like, you know, they're designing the railings on a two-story building and, you know, no one's actually going up into the building. If you've ever been to disneyland, disney world, you know you walk through the, the, the little towns that they have, and you'll look up and see like railings on the second story. Like you know, people were telling them like, hey, we can make this with cheap material, because you can't really from the, from the ground, you can't really see that high up. And he was like no, we're going to use the highest material for every piece of this. We're going to use wrought iron, wrought iron railing, for example, uh, and make it ornate and just really care about every single detail.
Speaker 1:So it was an insane amount of money but he gets a a pretty cool situation with ABC, one of the major networks at the time and they want to do a documentary and actually pay him to do a documentary about the building of Disneyland, and so this is like free advertising. Not only is it free, it's like he's getting paid to do advertising for his own thing, which is kind of crazy. But, um, but I guess ABC was looking for some programming and so he got in on that and so he starts doing this weekly kind of documentary about Disneyland and it gets you know and ABC has a huge amount of viewership, so it's basically half the United States is watching Walt Disney every week, talk about Disneyland and get them excited about it, and so when they open up Disneyland, it's like a huge success and people love it. And obviously, you know, it's continued on to today and there's Disney World now today and there's Disney world now. So, um, that vision that he had really came into into existence, much to, uh, many people's surprise.
Speaker 1:So I think there's some key lessons that we can learn from Walt Disney. One of them is brand. A brand is like it's so important, and Warren Buffett, I think, at some point commented on brand in relation to Disney, because he said something to the effect of if you think of Disney, you have a certain idea in your mind of what that brand is versus Universal. You know, you probably don't have quite a clear sense of what Universal Studios is versus Disney Studios or Paramount, for example. So the brand of Disney has some sort of meaning for a lot of people. And, um, he accomplished that, I think, through the amount of control he put over what went out into the world under his brand. And so that's something that I think we can take away in our own businesses is really trying to control the brand and the perception of what people see in association with your brand and try to cultivate it. And I'm going to read a few quotes from the book If you want to know.
Speaker 1:The real secret of Walt's success, longtime animator Ward Kimball would say, is that he never tried to make money. He was always trying to make something that he could have fun with or be proud of. And then here's another quote. In numerous ways, disney struck what may be the very fundament of entertainment the promise of a perfect world that conforms to our wishes. Here's another quote Walt Disney seldom dabbled.
Speaker 1:Everyone who knew him remarked on his intensity. When something intrigued him, he focused himself entirely, as if it were the only thing that mattered. And then here's another quote here. He had founded a school of arts and nearly 40 years after his death, his name would adorn a concert hall in downtown Los Angeles, financed largely with Disney family money. Yet all of these accumulated contributions paled before a larger one. He demonstrated how one could assert one's will on the world at the very time when everything seemed to be growing beyond control and beyond comprehension. In sum, walt Disney had been not so much a master of fun or irreverence or innocence or even wholesomeness, he had been a master of order. And that's something that you definitely see when you go to these places like Disneyland or Disney World. You know, even today, the level of detail that is carried on with. You know the folks in the park, to the way things are designed, the level of detail and things.
Speaker 1:He really set a high standard for the things that he put out in terms of animation and theme parks, and everyone has just been copying him for like the last hundred years. Then the second lesson. So the first lesson was branding. Second lesson is like holding a high standard for your employees, because in order to accomplish this brand, you got to have super high standards for your employees. He basically created a cult of employees that were striving towards excellence and there was actually a chapter in the book called the Cult or something of that nature. So he created a cult of employees that were just innovating and striving to be the best animators in the world. So here's a quote from the book.
Speaker 1:Part of Walt's secret was that in insisting on quality from individuals of whom it had never been required, he inspired commitment. And so he was always pushing the pace on the animation, from getting sound synchronized with the cartoons to making them more realistic so you could identify more closely with the characters in the cartoon, so it was more emotionally impactful. He was always pushing the standards, pushing his team. Here's a quote from the book by the mid 1930s, the Disney studio operated like a cult, with a messianic figure inspiring a group of devoted, sometimes frenzied, alkalites. And then here's another quote at Hyperion, the employees were not just making cartoons to divert or entertain the public, they were disciples on a mission. So that's the second lesson having a high standard for your employees.
Speaker 1:And then the third lesson is tackling adversity or facing up to adversity. You know he had a huge, huge amount of adversity in his life. You know he had a huge, huge amount of adversity in his life. He came from a super poor background and he worked his whole childhood. His dad was abusive and you know he went into the world with a huge belief in himself and he failed immediately, like at 20 years old, he went bankrupt. But he took that in stride, started another business, started that business Then most of his employees were stolen from him and to include the characters that he had developed in that, and so then he started over again and then he hit success with Mickey Mouse and then Snow White.
Speaker 1:Success with Mickey Mouse and then Snow White. And then he had the issue with the United States government taking over his studio for propaganda purposes for World War II, which was needed. But from his perspective that sucked, understandably, and then he had all these competitors basically catch up to him and he had to overcome that adversity. So it was just a lot of adversity in his life that he continually, just you know, took in stride and and did the work to to make things happen. So I definitely recommend you take a look at the biography, biography of Walt Disney really interesting read and I think there's some good lessons to um to get from from Walt Disney, and with that I'll see you next week.
