Charles Tandy of Radio Shack (Tandy Corporation) may be most unique and impossible sale of the 20th century.

Charles spent three years in the Navy during world war two. He rapidly rose to the rank of commander. He got out of the Navy and went to work for his father who owned Tandy Leather. His father had put together leather kits to make belts, wallets, key holders and a variety of other things. He also sold leather working tools and other accessories for leather working.

Charles saw the opportunity of using these kits as therapy in the Veterans Administration hospitals. Much to my dismay he succeeded in the VA becoming a very large customer.

It was to my dismay because many years later, in 1985, I went to the VA a blind school in Palo Alto, California. One of the classes was shop. It was a required class and the purpose was to show the blind veterans that they had manual dexterity and could do things even if they could not see. Charles had been dead for eight years then but I still taught him some new words. It was not my favorite class.

In the early sixties Radio Shack had nine stores in the East with their headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. They were going bankrupt. The paper was held by the First National Bank of Boston. The board of directors was almost a caricature of the conservative Boston Brahmins that Hollywood might depict.

Charles Made and appointment with the board. He gave a long, impassioned, detailed explanation of what he would do with the company if he owned it. The board agreed that he should buy it.

He then told them he would buy it for ten cents on the dollar. They hemmed, hawed, ranted and raved but finally agreed to the price. Then Charles told them he would pay them out of the profits. I do not believe any of the board had a heart attack right then but they were probably working on it.

After he got them on the fence with people on both sides of the idea he told them his plans for expansion of the chain and that for the rest of time every Radio Shack manager would write a check for the days receipts to their Bank. He said that in the long run they would make an immense amount of money out of the float.

Charles sold the package to the board. I can not imagine anyone else that would even consider making such a presentation to these people. Charles lived up to the agreement and when he had his maximum of 8,400 stores every manager still made out a check for their total receipts to the First National Bank of Boston.

His first rule was that every district manager had to call in the sales from each of their stores every morning to the Fort Worth headquarters. Charles sat by the telephone with addressed envelopes in his hand. The envelopes contained checks to vendors and in the lower left hand corner of the envelope was the amount of the check inside the envelope.

As an example if the first check was for $1,100.00 as soon as the managers called in enough to cover that check he would drop the envelope into the outgoing mail box. That tradition lasted until computers did it automatically.

One year Forbes wrote an article about the mismanagement of Radio Shack. Later that year they came out with their ratings of companies. This rating list had many categories in it. RadioShack was never less than fifth in the list and most of the time they were number one. Forbes never apologized.

Harvard had a business class explaining why RadioShack was run incorrectly. They never bothered to check that Charles went to Harvard.

Charles generally would not get into a product in less 10% of the people in the country owned that type of product. There were exceptions.

Anyone that bought a kids walkie talkie, regardless of the brand name was buying a Radio Shack manufactured product.

Anyone that bought an audio cable that was made in the United States, regardless of the brand on it, was buying a Radio Shack product manufactured in Fort Worth.

If someone bought an antenna for a television the odds were overwhelming that it was a Radio Shack product regardless of the brand name on it.

Every major manufacturer of audio equipment tried to make a stereo receiver that worked. They all could make one that worked but they all had a severe hum problem that made them unusable. Charles went to Japan and found a little company named Treo. He financed them and told them to build a receiver that worked without any hum. They did it and RadioShack was responsible for the first working and usable stereo receiver. Trio

Became Kenwood.

Charles ran what was probably be most tightly controlled company in the country. Every store was completely inventoried every two months. The company always knew what they had and what was selling.

For many years he had the largest in house advertising agency in the country. Many people looked forward to getting the flyers every six weeks. Sales jumped radically the first 10 days after the Flyers hit. Everyone in the store had to ask every customer for their name and address so the Flyers could be sent to them. Most customers wanted them but employees never liked doing it. It was very difficult to convince most of them that this was a big factor in the success of their store.

Charles built nine bankrupt stores into a two Billion dollar company with 8,400 stores in just a few years. One of his main procedures was to spend nine cents of every dollar a store took in for advertising.

Allied Radio had a huge catalogue with many more items in it than any other electronic outfits catalog. They were going bankrupt because 80% of the items in the catalog were never in stock. If a customer ordered several items it was a certainty he never got them all at once and often he never got one or more of them ever.

For reasons I do not remember we could not determine if LTV or TRW owned Allied. Charles went to the Chicago meeting with an 11 million dollar check to LTV in his left pocket and an 11 million dollar check to TRW in his right pocket. When it was determined who owned the company he gave the correct check to that company.

He immediately fired 500 people that were associated with the departments that were dealing with and buying the 80% of the items that never sold. He cut the Allied catalog to just a few pages. Radio Shack stores could not stock any of the items in that catalog but they could order them for customers. This was highly profitable for the stores but many managers rarely took advantage of their opportunity so the system just faded away.

That gives a very short idea of a man that I highly respected and liked. He was the epitome of an entrepreneur.

Bob