My father always said working for somebody else never amounted to anything. You have to be an entrepreneur

Some family trees bear an enormous crop of nuts.

The faster we grew, the more stores we had open, the more money we made. Employees move quickly up the ranks of a company that's growing fast. Shareholders made a lot of money. If you invested $25,000 from January 1987 to January 1994, you'd have more than a million dollars. I get a lot of personal satisfaction from that.

I'm going to miss Blockbuster. I'm gonna miss being CEO and all that stuff. We had an atmosphere where everybody was happy. When people make money, they're happy.

Overcoming hardships and working around and through their obstacles to achieve an education is what I call a true success.

If you're going to be an entrepreneur... it's not all textbook. It's gut feeling, it's intuition, it's a feeling you have that you can do this and make it happen. I think you have to have a personality.

I really would not change anything. Have a passion for what you do, work hard, have great people with good personalities, enjoy the ride.

We're looking for something where we can make something happen: an industry where the competition is asleep, hasn't taken advantage. It's going to be hard to find another Blockbuster, but that doesn't mean you can't have three good companies growing. The point is, we're going to be busy.

The good things take care of themselves. We want to find all the negatives.

Despite winning the world championship, it has not altered the reality of the situation.

I don't want to be just a voice on the phone. I have to get to know these guys face-to-face and develop a sincere relationship. That way, if we run into problems in a deal, it doesn't get adversarial. We trust each other and have the confidence we can work things out.

Our philosophy has been to be fiscally conservative, so we can be operationally aggressive. We're not using borrowed money to grow. So we'll put up a store just to get there before the competition. If it doesn't work, we'll close it and lose a little equity. It won't kill us.

I'm not leaving until you say yes.