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.

If you would like to leave a comment just click on the title of the post!

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?

17 Replies to “How a Billionaire Saved my Career”

  1. Steve,

    What an excellent example of leadership – thanks for sharing. Also, your information on how to land your dream job is timeless.

    What I find so valuable about your site and others is how you have played your hand that was of good fortune. In addition, I also read about individuals who were dealt a bad hand. Then again, its not the hand your dealt but how you play it.

    We are all dealt a few good hands in our life, an unexpected inheritance, a corporate career in which the planets aligned, an extraordinary spouse, etc. Just as in the military we learn more from defeats than victory, a badly played hand is extremely instructive.

    As I journey through FI, I look forward to reading and learning from your future posts.

    Semper FI,

    Luis

    1. Luis, sorry for my delayed response. My wife and I were bushwhacking in remote north Arkansas wilderness and I was off the grid. Insightful comment as always. I do feel lucky in life since everything has generally worked together in my favor. I know that is not always the case and rarely the case do so many things work out so easily for someone as they have for me. I sometimes fear that having had life so easy for so long that there must be a boatload of problems just around the bend for me!

  2. People like that are so rare in this world and it truly was a blessing that you had one in your life.

    It looks like you were rewarded with your loyalty to the company and has to be a great feeling that the owner of so many companies noticed you and wanted to retain you.

    Great story and thanks for sharing

    1. X,I think they are rare indeed, and often are not widely noticed because modesty goes along with their other fine qualities and much of the good they do is anonymous. The only thing he ever did that I did not like is that when he sold the company I was running the sale included me along with the facility so I had no option to stay with him. I guess that was a compliment of sorts but it felt kind of like being abandoned after 28 years with him. However it worked to my good both financially and in giving me the push to walk away from my 9 to 5 and to explore a whole new and better life!

  3. Maybe you should have given your industry friend a heads up about the company (in vague terms) before he took the job you passed on. Would have been doing him a favor!

    1. Oh wow, the way I wrote it looks like I hung an old friend out to dry. Fortunately that is not what happened. I never knew who took that job until later and did not even know my old friend had applied or accepted it. He came to work for me two jobs later and that is when I learned the whole story. I would have told him at the time if I had known he was looking at the job. He lived in another state and we did not keep in touch except when our paths crossed which was not very often.

  4. i had the great pleasure of knowing one leader like this. he was an older englishman and president and owner of my little silver company. i’m not sure he was filthy rich on the same level but i know he started out as a humble chemist back in england. well, i only worked a couple of years for his company but he was around all the time and even helped out humping silver ingots around to put in a huge reactor. those things must have weighed 60 pounds or more but he was out there getting dirty right along with his workers at times.

    i got lucky and solved a couple of big problems for him and he tried to talk me out of leaving when i met the future mrs. me and told me there were promotions in my future had i stayed. it was a hard choice and i somehow feel loyal to the guy to this day even though i left. he acted in the same manner you described and had a sense of humor as a bonus. i’m glad it worked out for you, steve.

    1. That is a great story Freddy, I really think you should write a book because your life experiences are so rich and unique. It is hard to define great character in words but you know it when you see it, a lot of character is revealed by seeing how they act when they don’t have to do the hard thing and in how they treat people that have little to offer them. When I see someone talk down to the cleaning crew or to a wait person at a restaurant I can’t help but think they are showing that they think they are better than others. But when the boss gets down on his hands and knees to clean up his own spilled coffee or to pick up somebody else’s trash. That tells a lot about what is inside them.

  5. Wow, what a wonderful story. A “faith in humanity restored” type indeed. The world need more of people like him. I also had an inspirational boss back in a part-time job while attending university. He was not rich but had a very special mindset and a huge load of experience as a world traveler. He always tried to widen my perspective on the world and I honestly think that today I would not be the same person without his lessons.

    PS: just watched the Dallas theme video because of this post and childhood nostalgia flew through my body. Thanks for this. 😉

    1. You are very welcome. I had a lot of opportunities to watch our owner and others who had been with him longer had so many stories. And I never heard a single person criticize him or relate a single time he acted badly. He stayed on the job until his death at approximately 90 years old. He was no pushover, if you were not working for your pay or if your laziness hurt the company he could be fierce but it was not driven by meanness. It was driven by his love of creating and his honest feeling that he owed his employees a secure and prosperous workplace. Very old school in the best possible way.

  6. If more leaders acted this way, I think we’d have a much happier workforce. I’ve had some bosses over the years that were kind in parting ways and provided a lot of guidance or were great throughout the time working together and guided me to continue on. Great post!

    1. Thanks Kate! One thing I did not put in the post, or at least I don’t remember mentioning it, was a time when my team had installed a new project, a several million dollar “improvement” to the plant. When we tried to start it up it did not work, at all! We had no idea what to do because the whole plant could not run at all until we got it fixed. He was at the plant at the time for some meetings and I remember I was standing out in the plant looking at the non-functioning equipment and he walked up next to me and put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Steve, you are the smartest guy I know, I have no doubt you’ll get this fixed.” Then he got in his truck and drove to the airport and got on his jet and flew home. We had the plant running a couple days later, because we would have done anything not to disappoint him.

  7. That’s quite a story! Clearly you were valuable to your company and they told you that by their actions. The owner is quite a leader!

    1. He was indeed. I was very lucky that I found a job that I could be good at. I know that I enjoyed my career because I was able to become skilled at it even though a lot of people would not have liked that kind of work at all. Thanks for the comment John!

    1. Thank you Michalis! It would have been hard to mess up a story about someone so remarkable.

Comments are closed.