Collection: Warren Buffett - #97 Investing 'Character of Business'
[Transcript]
AUDIENCE MEMBER 00:09
Good afternoon. My name is Robert Rowland (PH) from London, England.
I’ve been in Omaha all weekend with my wife on the first leg of my honeymoon, and I’ve noticed you’re quite a buyer of nostalgic assets. Can I ask whether nostalgia is one of your filters? (Buffett laughs)
Are there any assets like that left in the U.S. to buy? And if not, can I suggest you come to the U.K. where all we do is sell them? (Laughter)
WARREN BUFFETT 00:39
Well, I don’t want to interrupt your honeymoon. (Laughter)
But if you’d send me a list of those companies over there that are long on nostalgia, that might be to our liking. Because Charlie and I tend to operate from sort of a Norman Rockwell frame of mind. And it is true that the kind of companies we like sort of do have a homey, Norman Rockwell, Saturday Evening Post-type character to them there.
They have character. And they’re the kind of companies, I think, frequently, that people, when they join them, expect to spend the rest of their lives there rather than look at it as something to stick on their resume.
And there are businesses like that. If you look at the businesses that we’ve bought in the last three or four years, there is real character to the businesses and to the people that build them. And that’s why the people that build them stay on and feel very strongly about running them correctly, even though they have no financial consequence to themselves whatsoever, so —
If you’ve got a list of those in England and you still have any strength left after your honeymoon, drop me a line. (Laughter)
Zone 9, please.
(Source: https://buffett.cnbc.com/1998-berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting/)
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