Buffett wants managers who "love their businesses the way I love Berkshire" · Transcript · BuffettMungerGPT

WarrenWhen you hire a manager or evaluating the management team of a business you're thinking about buying, what are the qualities you look for? We love managers that have a passion for their business. And when we're buying a business, we have to ask ourselves, do they love the money or do they love the business? If they love the money, there's nothing wrong with that, but they probably wouldn't be running the business for us a year or two down the road. I think one difference is that people that create their own businesses, the entrepreneurs, probably on average, would have a significantly greater degree of passion for those businesses than somebody that was just brought in a few years ago and sees themselves as making a profit in a few years on reselling the business and leaving. We've had terrific luck with the entrepreneurs and basically love their businesses the way I love Berkshire. I mean, they are not going to let anything happen to their businesses. They can, you know, they'll tell me to butt out if I'm going to screw up something in their operations. We can spot it when we see it. And when we also can avoid it, we have never, I just got one in the other day, from an investment banker on somebody that wants to resell a business they bought a few years ago. Well, you know, the chances that they haven't doctored up the figures in some way or trying to sell. I mean, you know, it's a piece of meat to them. And if it's a piece of meat to them, you know, what am I going to do with it? So we, if we make the proper judgment about the passion they have for their business, They're going to keep running, they may have a lot of money in the bank, but they're going to keep running the businesses for us because they love those businesses. Certainly, Berkshire is full of people who have a peculiar amount of passion in their love for their own business. And I would argue that probably the passion is more important than the brain power. We're not going to see an incompetent but passionate manager by the time we start laying out a lot of money for a business. They got weeded out a long time ago, so I don't have to weed those out, but I do have to weed out the ones who want to cash a big paycheck and go off and do something else at some time.