Read any story about Tracy Britt Cool, and you’re likely to come across the same anecdote. After graduating from Harvard Business School in 2009, she mailed a letter to Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett asking for a job at the legendary firm. After meeting with the Oracle of Omaha, she got one working as Buffett’s financial assistant.
Once she got her foot in the door, her star rose quickly. She became the chief executive of Berkshire holding Pampered Chef, and built a reputation for quickly solving problems at struggling companies, prompting Buffett to nickname her “the fireman,” in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
In 2020, Britt Cool cofounded her own private equity firm, Kanbrick, whose investing philosophies echo Berkshire’s, but that is built around Britt Cool’s unique ethos of executive mentorship, hands-on management and building businesses “brick-by-brick” (hence part of the firm’s name).
The letter, and the tremendous success that it’s led to, is the stuff MBAs and aspiring entrepreneurs daydream about. It may seem like a one in a million shot. And maybe it was — but Britt Cool was willing to take a million shots.
“The risk is pretty low — it’s that someone is going to say ‘no,'” she tells CNBC Make It. “So why not try?”
When persistence and a ‘thick skin’ pays off
Britt Cool spent much of her childhood working at her family’s farm stand in Manhattan, Kansas (the other half of “Kanbrick”) where she heard the word “no” a lot.
“It was such a great training ground, because you have to sell your produce, and you have to talk to people. You have to ask, and you get rejected a lot because people aren’t interested in something,” she says. “I grew a thick skin. I didn’t have any issue with people telling me ‘no.'”
As a high school student, Britt Cool began writing letters to different organizations she wanted to learn about. “I wanted them to send me brochures and pamphlets. A lot of them didn’t respond,” she says.
In college, she wrote to executives at companies she admired. “I found that when I productively and proactively reached out to people — and respectfully — that the vast majority would not respond or say, ‘no,’ but a small group would say, ‘yes.'”
The latter group included the CEOs of Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns. When Britt Cool met with them, she came prepared with well-researched questions.
“I wasn’t doing it because I wanted a job. That’s not why I reached out to people,” she says. “I was doing it because I wanted to become more thoughtful. In [Berkshire’s] case, it evolved to that.”
Britt Cool likens the experience to her process of applying to college, which she had to pay for on her own. Before the days of internet search, “I went through two 400-page books and checked every scholarship I qualified for, and then applied for those scholarships,” she says.
Many said, “no.” But some said, “yes.”
For Britt Cool, finding those yeses is about having the persistence to endure a lot of nos.
“It requires the discipline and the time and the energy to do it. And to invest in that.”
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