Feb. 6, 2006
McCombs Recalls the History of His Success for Option II Alumni
By Sandie Taylor

Red McCombs has been interested in business for as long as he can remember. Speaking to a roomfull of graduates from the Texas Executive MBA Program at the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center Jan. 27, the benefactor of the McCombs School of Business recalled, “I was an entrepreneur before I knew what the word meant—and certainly before I could spell it.”

In particular, McCombs has cultivated a lifelong curiosity about business processes and people’s roles in them. “I wanted to know how you got to be a banker or a pharmacist, and why you wanted to be one,” he said.

Though McCombs can’t recall a specific moment that piqued his early business acumen, he began running his own businesses event before he was a teenager. One of the young businessman’s first profitable ventures was a two-year stint as a paperboy for the Lubbock-Avalanche Journal.

At 12 years old, McCombs decided to move on and sell his paper route to a father of a less ambitious boy. He made an agreement with the man to pass on his paper route for $50, but the distributor told him the newspaper didn’t sell routes.

“Well, that’s okay,” McCombs replied decades ago. “I’ll just keep the route.”

“I thought that was the logical thing to do,” he explained—after all, the route earned him $1 to $1.25 each week, and he could always pass it on to his younger brother.

At that point, the distributor pulled young Red aside and suggested that he could give his route to the other boy and charge a $50 “consulting fee.” While McCombs wasn’t quite sure what that meant, he agreed. “That was one of my earliest negotiations,” he told the audience.

Since the beginning of his career, McCombs says he has spent most of his time buying underperforming assets. “I’ve never been interested in start-ups,” he said. “I try to improve on businesses that already have a customer base.” From car dealerships to radio stations and sports teams, McCombs has found new ways to revive a variety of dying ventures.

And while some of his businesses have failed or been sold to others who could make them work, McCombs said he doesn’t carry much baggage. “I quickly jettison,” he explained. “It’s almost as if it didn’t happen.”