Masonry Magazine March 1962 Page. 5
By Ralph B. Rogers
President
Texas Industries, Inc.
Financing For The Mason Contractor
One of the highlights of the 1962 MCAA Convention in Houston, Texas, was the presentation by Mr. Ralph B. Rogers, Tuesday morning, February 13th, on Financing. Due to the many requests for his speech, Masonry will print, during the coming months, Mr. Rogers' entire speech.
Did you ever hear a speaker who started off by suggesting that there are a great many people in the audience who ought to leave the room, and not listen to him? There are two groups of people in this audience I feel would be wasting their time to stay for the remainder of the period. And I'll tell you who the two are, and why. First of all, those of you who are first class businessmen and financiers are going to learn absolutely nothing, and your time can be better spent in the coffee shop, walking in this beautiful sunshine, or anything else you want to do. I will not be insulted; please get up and leave.
Secondly, the customers of Texas Industries. I am not going to hesitate, today, since most of you are from out of this district, out of Texas. I am not going to hesitate for a minute to tell you instead of requesting or asking, but I don't want my customers to leave because they are going to be angry, and they won't be customers any more. So I suggest that they all leave.
That leaves me, then, with an audience that, if I in- sult them, cause our company no financial loss. So, with that warning, giving you a chance, if you are in either of those two categories, to leave, I would like to address myself, if I may, to the subject of financing. Incidentally, this is one of the dullest subjects that the association is going to listen to. It was not my choice; I would much rather have talked to you about freedom, politics, economics; but the chairman of your arrangements suggested that when they got to about 11:00 o'clock
ONRY-MARCH 1962
"THE AUTHOR-Ralph B. Rogers is President and Chief Executive Officer for Texas Industries, Inc. He has been the head of this firm and its twenty-five affiliated companies since 1950. Under Mr. Rogers' guidance, Texas Industries, Inc., has grown from a company having $356,000 in assets in 1950 to one in excess of $25,000,000 today. Texas Industries is understood to be the first vertically integrated concrete company in the United States which mines and processes its own raw material and with those raw materials manufacturers and delivers concrete in various forms.
in the morning, they could stand a dull subject, because they were ready for a nap after lunch. Now, as you know, all of us have problems in this world; and the trouble with most of us is that when we have a problem, we look for a magic formula to solve it. And, of course 99 times of a 100, there is no magic formula; there is no simple way to solve the Berlin crisis, there is no simple way to solve the crisis in Laos; there is no simple way to solve the farm problem; there is no simple way to solve any of these great big problems that confront us. The politicians who run for office, to whom we listen eagerly, offer simple magic formulas, but they are not simple and they are not magic. And so it ought to be a great relief to all of you to know that there is a very simple magic formula in financing-in financing your business. It's not difficult; it does not call for a PhD degree. In some cases you can do it if you haven't had a high school education. So here you are at the millennium. You are about to find the magic formula for financing your business.
But, you are not going to like the magic formula, and I have warned you about that. So let's start in, first of all, with the very, very simple question: Have you ever talked to a man in your business and asked him to show you his financial statement? Have you personally ever talked to a banker when you wanted to borrow money or to expand your business, without having him ask you to show him your financial statement? The answer, of course, is, in that case, you haven't.
Now, how many people in this business who would show you their financial statement, or who would show the banker the financial statement, would say, "Well, now, I kind of hesitate to show you this statement, because, you know, it isn't right up to date. We have been awfully busy, and the auditor hasn't got around to bringing the books up to date yet, and our bookkeeper was ill, and this statement is a little bit old, but in the next two or three weeks we can get you up an up-to-date statement." Or alternatively: "Now, when you look at this profit and loss statement, Mr. Banker, I don't want you to pay any attention to it, because it does not accurately reflect how much money we actually make. You see, this being a privately-owned business, we expense everything we can. We don't capitalize things, you know, like a publicly-owned business would, and we do this to save taxes. Consequently, we don't show the kind of profits we would show if we capitalized things properly. So don't pay too much attention to this profit and loss statement, because we really make a lot more money than it shows."
Do either of these two things sound very familiar to you fellows? Because they are awfully familiar to the (Continued on page 14)
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