I nearly went broke at 35. I sold my company for $40 million at 55.

Dayton, Ohio. A drawer full of IOUs.

My father ran Garrison Hardware for forty years. Six days a week, seven in December. If you needed a box of nails and didn't have the money that week, you got the nails. He kept the IOUs in the second drawer under the register — forty thousand dollars of them. When the chain stores came, he needed that money back. Nobody had it. He lost the store. He left me a ring and that drawer.

Hard work wasn't his problem. Nobody taught him the other half.

One truck and a kitchen table.

I was twenty-four. One truck: pipe, fittings and water heaters for plumbing contractors around Dayton. Every Sunday night I sat at the kitchen table and read my own books. What came in. What went out. What I owed. What I kept. I opened six accounts for a company with one truck. The banker laughed. Then he gave me a credit line, because a company that knows where its money goes is a company you can lend to.

Suit No. 1.

A trade fair in Paris. A woman named Margot looked at my gray suit and told me I dressed like a mortgage. I spent a month's pay on a navy one to prove her wrong. I still have it.

Two weeks from missing payroll.

I was thirty-five and sure of myself. I signed for a second warehouse in the wrong part of town and didn't ask Ray, my foreman. In one afternoon I lost a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. By spring I was two weeks away from not paying sixty people who had never once missed a delivery for me.

I sold two trucks. I called every supplier myself and asked for sixty days. I didn't pay myself for six months. Ray ran the floor and never said “I told you so.” We made payroll. Every one of them.

The bad winter.

When the housing market fell, half our customers stopped building. We had a reserve we'd been feeding for ten years — “for a bad winter.” We didn't lay off a single driver.

Thirty branches. Sold.

Thirty branches across the Midwest, two hundred people, eleven small companies bought along the way. At fifty-five I sold it for forty million dollars. I paid every one of the two hundred a bonus.

Forty suits.

Not a yacht. Not a house. Forty suits in every color I couldn't wear for thirty years as the gray guy in the office. Red linen. Seersucker. A tweed Ray said made me look like a history teacher. Each one has a number. I still do the math on what each one costs per wear.

Retired at 55. Busiest man I know.

Charleston most of the year, the coast of Maine in summer. Bad golf, better sailing. And this: teaching the other half my father never got. For 31 years I sat on the side of the table that profits from your decisions. Now I'm on yours.