Positivity: Kinko’s Founder Overcomes Dyslexia, Discovers Need to Dress for Success
From USA Today:
The guy behind Kinko’s
We’ve all heard about celebs who haven’t let dyslexia hold them back — Tom Cruise and Cher, to name two. Then there is Paul Orfalea, the man who founded Kinko’s.
As Orfalea points out in his memoir, Copy This!, “Not many kids manage to flunk the second grade, but I did.” He insists on the phrase “learning opportunities” to describe the ways dyslexia (a learning disability often characterized by difficulty reading and writing) and ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) affected his life. At 22, in 1970, he founded Kinko’s in Isla Vista, Calif. He was inspired after visiting an extremely busy copy store when he was a University of Southern California student. His father co-signed a $5,000 loan so Orfalea could lease a Xerox copier for $1,000 a month.
He gave his business his college nickname “Kinko,” for his kinky hair. “It was no accident I chose it. Customers don’t forget hard-consonant names,” he writes. A group of his friends became primary partners. This creative and mellow group formed the core of a cool, entrepreneurial culture, one that spawned growth and prevented turnover, according to this book.
All “co-workers” — the name given employees — had a share in the profit, and shop owners could run their stores as they saw fit.
As the company expanded, growing pains inevitably came. Although Orfalea “tried to avoid centralization and homogenization as much as (he) could,” sometimes ideas that could have brought positive change to all Kinko’s stores were not instituted because of its anti-cookie-cutter stance.
The customer base broadened, too: More corporate clients came to Kinko’s for help with presentations and proposals. The store’s offerings expanded from copying and photo processing to include graphics reproduction, kiosks for Internet access, digital-photo services and the ability to handle large-scale projects for corporate customers.
In a nod to the changing business — and the fact that the hippie look wasn’t so hot once the ’70s ended — co-workers were required to wear professional attire. “As I got older,” Orfalea says, “I discovered that to succeed in business, you’ve got to dress like a Republican.”
