Les Schwab: Pride in Performance

Les Schwab founded a tyre retailing business in Oregon in 1952 and built it to hundreds of stores across the western United States. This memoir is his own account of how he did it.

The operating model is the substance. Schwab's central decision was profit sharing at the store level: store managers received a share of their store's profit, which in many cases produced incomes far above what a retail manager would ordinarily earn, and employees participated as well. He argues throughout that this is why the business worked, because managers behaved as owners and made decisions accordingly, and because the compensation attracted and retained people who would not otherwise have stayed in tyre retail.

The service practices that made the brand are covered in detail: staff running to the customer's car, free flat repairs whether or not the tyre was bought there, free rotation and inspection, and honouring warranties without argument. Schwab is explicit that these were commercial decisions about generating return business rather than gestures.

He also covers his refusal to franchise, keeping every store company-owned, and his promotion of managers exclusively from within, generally from people who started changing tyres.

The book is self-published in origin and is a memoir rather than an analysis. The reference has not verified its specific figures. It circulates among founders because the profit-sharing model is stated plainly by the person who ran it and because the connection between compensation structure and service quality is made explicit.