How Dick Schulze Built Best Buy: Leadership, Resilience, and Business Innovation

How Dick Schulze Built Best Buy: Leadership, Resilience, and Business Innovation
Category: Interviews
Published: April 29, 2014
Updated: July 22, 2026
Views: 155355
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After a tornado destroyed his business, Dick Schulze saw what others missed. His response forever changed consumer electronics retail.

Dick Schulze, the founder of Best Buy and EIX, shares his experiences as an entrepreneur and innovator, including how he tripled his income from his boyhood paper route; quit a retail job when his ideas were not valued; started one consumer electronics store, Sound of Music; then transformed that into Best Buy, the largest consumer electronics store chain in the world.

His lessons of finding opportunities in the ruins of dashed plans -- in Schulze's case, a tornado that destroyed Sound of Music but gave birth to the idea for Best Buy -- still resonate today in a new era of uncertainty.  

 


James C Wetherbe
James C Wetherbe
Richard Schulze Distinguished Professor / Rawls College of Business / Texas Tech University
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Cite this Article
DOI: 10.17919/X9RP4Q
Wetherbe, James C. "How Dick Schulze Built Best Buy: Leadership, Resilience, and Business Innovation." FamilyBusiness.org. 29 Apr. 2014. Web 28 Jul. 2026 <https://eiexchange.com/content/how-dick-schulze-built-best-buy-leadership-resilience-and-busine>.
Wetherbe, J. (2014, April 29). EIX interview: Dick Schulze, founder of Best Buy. FamilyBusiness.org. Retrieved July 28, 2026, from https://eiexchange.com/content/how-dick-schulze-built-best-buy-leadership-resilience-and-busine