Building a successful business is hard. Making sure it stays successful is even harder.

And Joe Schoen has spent nearly 40 years learning that firsthand as the CEO of U-Haul.

His parents founded the company in 1945 and when he took over,

he had to answer the question every second generation owner faces. How do you keep a company

growing without messing up what made it great in the first place? On this episode, Joe shares

how U-Haul continues to solve customer problems

80 years after they started and the leadership principles that have helped the company thrive

across multiple generations. If you want to know the secret to building a business that outlasts

you, listen in. Okay, so Joe, I've done a little research, but I want our audience to hear this.

I want them to hear the origin story of how U-Haul comes to play because we love how, you know,

businesses start to just become a solution to a problem.

And I want to hear about this road trip that

I think is the origin story. Share that with us. Well, my father ended up in the Navy during World War II

and he was stationed in Corona, California. So when the European theater shut down and we

declared victory there, they started letting

people go home.

So in June, before the Pacific War was resolved, he was released and my mother and him, she

lived in a little trailer.

They had an infant son and now they needed to get back to basically the Portland, Oregon area where they lived.

So they had a 44-2-door, and so they could only take a certain amount of stuff, and they ended up, even though they didn't have a lot of possessions, they gave things away because they couldn't go.

So my father observed that they

were renting trailers in downtown Los Angeles. So he went to Los Angeles and tried to rent a trailer.

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