6. The History of Trader Joe’s With Patty Civalleri [FourWeekMBA Podcast]

What this episode covers

For this episode, I interviewed Patty Civalleri, an author at 1-TAKE Publishing LLC. She authored many incredible travel guides. And she made sure the memoir of Joe Coulombe could come to life!Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/laf_YjRssJh6dzPq7EA55oB4a7blehaKAcHPUYFjyFyc-Ohzy9zJlJVmT6orbdRtV9CJ-Pb1-8hZtb4Q7cHHV6_rvcxLGAtudopBlzp40kUCMdtAsD1hFDNQCPSMwn4x-8txFkBd) (https://www.linkedin.com/company/8199840/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base%3BgaKrazW2TXSEeQvMB7B%2B%2FQ%3D%3D)Can we get a little bit into the story and the context of how you got into this book and the initial years of Trader Joe's as a company?Patty Civalleri:Yes. I got involved in the stories socially and Joe had written a journal about the founding of Trader Joe's and he held onto it and made changes over the years, and one day he found it in a box and didn't know what to do with it, so he gave it to his first employee Mr. Leroy Watson, who is a very close friend of my husband. And because we've been friends with Mr. Watson for many, many years, I have met Joe socially, gosh, many times over the last couple decades. So when Joe asked Leroy to do something with this book, Leroy came to me and he said, "Patty, you have published many books, can you help us do something with this book?" And I had written many books about Italy for travelers being a historian and Italy has the coolest history in the world.I took a look at the manuscript and I fell in love with Joe's story, what a great story. So I looked at it it was very raw, it needed a lot of work, so I spent many months bringing the manuscript, cleaning it up and making it work and rearranging everything. And I sat down with my agent and said, "Paul, can we sell this manuscript?" And we got several bids for the manuscript, but the winning bid was from HarperCollins, one of the largest American publishers in the world and that's how we got the story published.And as soon as we signed the contract with HarperCollins, the following week Joe passed away, which was a very sad event, and left me wondering how on earth I was going to promote this book without Joe, because he is clearly the center pin of all of this. But I realized that since Joe's passing it's much more important now to get his story out and get his history out, so that his story is not lost to history and doesn't get lost. So the book was published late last summer and it's gone global, we're so extremely happy with it and it looks like a book that's going to be around for a long time, so we're quite happy.Gennaro:Yeah. As I was telling you I'm very glad that the book came to life because it's an evergreen, the story it's very compelling, it's contemporary, the way it is written it's very practical.

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