QuestionerIf I were to take you back to the start of your investing careers, I assume it would have been harder for potential acquisition opportunities to come by. How did you ensure then that you had good enough deal flows coming to you to be able to choose from?
WarrenWe don't think I'm as deals exactly. That has a little too much of the connotation of something to be bought and then again something to be sold. But we do like acquisition opportunities. And really, that's just achieving that so that we get the calls when we should get the calls. And there aren't lots of those because we're talking about good-sized businesses. We're talking about owners that love their businesses. And it's going to happen occasionally, but it's going to happen a few times a year probably. I think in the U.S. now that we get a pretty reasonable percentage, of the calls that we should get. And that was not true 20 or 30 years ago. We didn't hear from anybody 20 or 30 years ago to speak of because we were looked at much more as being a marketable securities operation. And we just weren't as well known. It feeds on itself, obviously. If we acquire companies and the people from whom we acquired them are happy about the deal, you know, we're going to hear from more people. We bought our first furniture operation in 1983, that really led to four other transactions. Because the people in the first one were happy, and they talked to us about the second one, and the people in the second one were happy, and so on. So, you know, it's like a – Charlie always describes compound interest as being like, you know, being at the top of a very – of a very large hill with wet snow and starting with a snowball and getting it rolling down a hill. And that's a little bit like the acquisition situation works. We've been on a, by being around 38 years, it's been a long, it's been a high mountain in terms of the length of the snowball is going. By now, it's going at a pretty good clip and it's pretty good size and it tracks a lot of snow. And that's good for us. Outside the United States, we do not seem to be on the radar screen, so we don't seem to hear about those as much. But we're hearing about enough in the United States. It's not a flow. in a sense of, I don't hear about one a week. You know, I don't probably hear about one a month. But the ones we want to hear about, most of them, I think we're getting the calls now. I think we're getting a higher percentage of the calls now than ever in our history we would have gotten. And, you know, that's all to the good. And if we can do the same thing outside this country, that would be a plus, too. But this country's a big market. And we'll just try and spread the word further.