How a Billionaire Saved my Career

Sounds click bait-ish doesn’t it? But it absolutely is the truth. I’ve written about my career many times. I’m a chemical engineer and spent much it running a large chemical complex in a rural southern state. It was my only 9 to 5 job after graduating college and when I finally stopped enjoying it I was already in the financial position to never have to work again. Blogging is one of my non-monetized hobbies and I also consult a little for entertainment. So how and why did a billionaire personally save me from making a big mistake?

To make sense of that I need to start at the beginning. When I got out of college with my engineering degree I already knew where I wanted to work, at the place I had interned between my junior and senior years. I explained why I picked that place in my last post, but in short it was because it was a growing company run by chemical engineers, like me, and one in which they were poised to do a lot of hiring. I was going to get in the door first and have a competitive advantage over all the ones hired after me. I also liked the guy who would be my boss. He was a fast mover and I felt the chances of following him up the corporate ladder were excellent. All that worked flawlessly and I was able to develop a tremendous skill set by designing multi-million dollar improvements to the complex almost from the day I walked in the door. It was a Fortune 500 publicly traded corporation but still had a family feel to it. I could not believe I had my dream job when most of my classmates seemed lukewarm at best about their jobs at other companies.

I was promoted twice and given large raises and when the corporation sold us my boss was promoted, just as I had expected. And I got his old job which was arguably the number two position in the company. The new owners were much different than our previous ones. They were a private company, owned by a single individual. In fact he owned some 60 companies, although ours was the newest and largest in the stable. He was in his sixties and had some of his grown kids in the business too, but none of them were engineers. That was important to me because that meant that there would not be a problem with nepotism being a barrier, at least not prior to hitting a C-suite level job. They did not pay quite as well as publicly traded companies but I was still treated to very good raises. And I enjoyed my first few years working for them just as much as I loved working for the original owners.

After awhile though I began to tire of turning down recruiters on the phone who were offering me higher paying jobs and jobs equivalent to my bosses position. I also worried about the market segment we were in. While it looked to be around for a few more years the writing seemed to be on the wall as far as the glory days being in the past. My skill set fit extremely well with a similar industry that was poised to greatly expand in the future and so for the very first, and only time in my career, I decided that maybe I should change industries. I interviewed with an exciting company in Dallas and they loved me! I went as far as tentatively accepting the job, but had not told my employer yet. If any one reading this remembers the television series, Dallas, that had the infamous J.R. Ewing as the main character, the golden tinted windowed building in the opening credits for the show was where my office was going to be. Only I was going to work for the real company that lived there and not for the evil J.R.

I apologetically told my boss about my plans to leave, I felt I owed my employer quite a lot. They had been very good to me but just did not have a job open imediately at the level I was ready to fill. He did not say much but the next day I got a call from the owner. THE OWNER! I knew him because in spite of the 60 companies he owned he always spent most of his time at his newest prize, which was us. But he rarely called me, I was several levels below him on the organization chart.

To give you some perspective of this man, this billionaire, he had started with virtually nothing as a young adult. But he was a tremendous entrepreneur and risk taker. Over the next forty years he went from flat broke to billionaire status. How wealthy was impossible to pin down because all his companies were privately owned, by him. But Forbes magazine listed him on their top 200 Richest in America list. He had a jet. He had an impressive vacation compound on a private island at the beach. He had his own yacht and a large private hunting preserve. Yet he would show up at our facility at 5 AM, when he was in town, and hand deliver dozens of donuts to our hourly workers. He would ride a bicycle around our plant and stop and talk to every employee he met about their family, their job or sometimes just the weather. He really cared about his employees to the point that he even kept one of his unprofitable companies in operation until the very last elderly employee retired, because he had never laid off a single employee in his life. He would also write personal checks to individual employees that had suffered a medical or family crisis above and beyond what company insurance covered. He was an amazing individual but also a shrewd businessman and expected hard work in return for your paycheck. He demanded the best from everyone but also helped inspire us to deliver it. He had no patience for laziness or dishonesty but he never fired anyone for a lack of talent, as long as they tried to perform.

The next day when my phone rang and it was him, I wasn’t sure if I was going to hear harsh words or kind ones. He simply said he understood what my plans were and asked if it would be OK for him to hop on his jet and come to my office the next day. He said he thought he had information I would be interested in. It felt like Jeff Bezos was calling and telling me he had heard I had some problems with my last order on Amazon and was there anything he could do to help. This man was a legend and I was still just an engineering department manager, nobody that should ever pop up on his busy radar. Of course I said yes and immediately began to wonder what in the world he was going to say to me in person.

He came into my office the next morning with a bulging file folder and got right to business. He said I needed to know something about the company I had agreed to work for and began to lay out some profit/loss charts. Then he showed me the debt history of the company. I have no idea where he got all of the information but it painted a very different picture of the other company than I had been given on my interview trip. They were bleeding out financially, had enormous debt and were making no money at all. In fact, based on the numbers, they would be bankrupt in a matter of months. Then he switched to talking about me. He told me that I figured into their plans for the future greatly. They wanted me to move up rapidly and already had plans for my next promotion. He told me he hoped I would stay with them and help them build the company but that either way, thanks for what I had already contributed. Then he got up, shook my hand and drove back to his jet.

I decided to stay, I reasoned where else in the world would I ever find a company whose billionaire CEO/owner would personally try to prevent me from making a bad career decision? Ironically an industry friend ended up taking the job I had originally accepted but then turned down at the debt ridden corporation. And just as my owner had predicted they went bankrupt a few months later. Instead of becoming unemployed I was given a large raise and it was not long until I received the first of several promotions. These eventualy led me to becoming a corporate officer and in charge of that division of the company. I felt fortunate that someone so important and so busy took the time to help keep a young man from making a career mistake. Over the years I saw him take that same kind of interest in many others. His life was not about making money, he had made more than any human could ever spend. He passion was in building things and in building people to run them for him.

He was a great leader, one who genuinely did not think he was better than you because he had more money. He remembered not having any money at all. He honestly felt that by building successful businesses he was serving others and serving his employees in particular. And while we were never close friends, he taught me more about leadership than anyone else I ever worked with.

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Have you ever worked for an inspirational leader, or for someone who changed the course of your life?

Are there even still people like this around in the business world?