Constant Change: Adventures in business and life – my journey from start-up to 5,000 employees

Contents

Chapter 1: Ordinary Reality of an Ordinary American

Chapter 2: The Call to Adventure

Chapter 3: Leave No Footprint

Chapter 4: Biological Company

Chapter 5: The Art of Management Excellence

Chapter 6: Tests, Allies and Enemies on the Way to the Top

Chapter 7: Risk Management

Chapter 8: Roadblocks and Their Lessons

Chapter 9: The Moral Compass of Wealth

Chapter 10: The Moral Purpose of a Life

Chapter 11: Competition and the Desire to Succeed

Chapter 12: The Glidewell Legacy

Addendum

My Life in Pictures

Publishing details

I am dedicating this book to my five children and my wife, Parvina, who helped shape the way I operate. We all affect the ones around us.

Also, to my loyal employees and top managers, who have followed my voyage in business as if I really knew where it was all going. Every journey should have a start and a destination. This journey has no definitive ending. It is all about constant change! Sears and JC Penney’s stood still and watched Amazon march right by them. They should have been the ultimate winners in merchandising wars, but they just would not change.

There are a lot of beliefs in this book that you might find kooky. You are welcome to discard them, but keep reading for the gems that do make sense to you. Ideas I espouse are not cast in stone—neither are they black or white, but many shades of gray! You must adapt and use only the ones you truly believe will work for you!

I submit that I don’t know exactly which of my ideas are so important that they could have been removed from the mix without affecting the outcome. But if you like the idea of building and running a little sub-chapter S corporation that does over $500m a year, then read on! What you learn will help you achieve your dreams. Then you should write me and say, Thank You.

Chapter 1: Ordinary Reality of an Ordinary American

There are no extraordinary men, only men with extraordinary reactions to ordinary circumstances.

—Jim Glidewell

The early years

I can still recall the cloud of dust as my father’s tires came to a skidding halt on that dry summer day. He exited the truck and came back moments later carrying a rusty wrench he’d spotted in the dirt on the side of the road. My dad was raised in backwater Kentucky—the kind of place where travel is not an option, where land is passed down through the generations, and where families bury their dead in the front yard. Burying the dead on one’s property was outlawed in most of Kentucky, but that didn’t stop people from continuing the practice even as late a s the 1950s.

My father was born in 1913, which means he came of age right smack in the middle of the Great Depression. Being 20 years old during that challenging era shapes a man’s heart and mind. When my dad left Kentucky in 1930, my family was so poor that the men left to find work. He tried to join the Army, which would have meant money plus food and board, but at six feet tall and 130 pounds, he was too thin. A man had to weigh at least 135 pounds to enlist. He forced himself to eat as many bananas as he could stomach in order to get heavier, but in the end, he still missed the minimum weight.

This was the era when President Roosevelt started the Civilian Conservation Corps program, or CCC. The program created work for people by having them build roads and bridges across America in order to put starving people back to work. Dad was first assigned in Utah and ended up in Caliente, Nevada.

When the CCC program began to wind down, he got a job with the Union Pacific railroad. At the same time, he and a partner opened a pool-hall bar, called The Bucket of Blood. His business partner, Charlie Coverwell, eventually bought dad out so he could move to Las Vegas when his job with the Railroad became permanent.

My father met my mother, Mary Geraldine Brierly, in Vegas. They married in Kingman, Arizona in 1944, because this had become the number one destination to get married ever since Carol Lombard and Clark Gable—the most famous couple of that time—had been married there.

I was born one week after Germany surrendered in the second world war. It was May of 1945 and the world was ablaze, but I was millions of miles away from all of the action. Vegas was a very small railroad town when I was born. Nearly every baby born then was delivered by Dr. Hardy, who also happened to be the railroad doctor. And then Bugsy Siegel, an American mobster known as being one of the most infamous and feared gangsters of his day, built the Flamingo Hotel, which was completed in 1946. At that time, Nevada was the only state in the Union that allowed legal gambling.

Fifteen months after I was born, and when my little sister Luana was just three months old, my mother walked out on us. We would later say that she suffered from the baby blues. I never spent a thought on my mother for many years; she was just not there. I don’t think I missed any motherly love—you don’t miss what you never had.

My mom had been married once before, in Oregon, and had a baby girl named Linda. Six months after the baby’s birth, my mom abandoned her baby and husband and ran off to Las Vegas. All I knew for a long time was that my mother had abandoned my father with two little kids and, even though it might have seemed strange to the rest of the world, that fact became something that was no more important than the colors of my hair or skin.

Shortly after I was born, my mom’s sister moved up to Las Vegas and helped take care of Luana and me. I was suffering from asthma, and doctors recommended that I be sent to live with my elderly grandparents in Kentucky to live in a pollen-free environment. So, even though I was born in Las Vegas, I became a small-town Kentucky boy. Life in Kentucky could not have been farther removed from the craziness of the war’s aftermath back then. I stayed with my elderly grandparents from the age of four until I was nine years old.

I attended a one-room schoolhouse called Holly Grove. There were 15 of us, but I was the only first-grader and the only kid in my class through to the third grade. An outsider would have perceived me as a quiet, nice boy who did not stand out and never caused trouble. I was certainly shy, but not a complete wallflower. I grew up living on a farm. We raised two hogs, had three or four dairy cows, and raised our tobacco allotment. We didn’t have indoor plumbing, running water, or electricity. I thought we lived like everyone else.

In the mid-1950s, outside of town, no one had any electricity. The nearest town of Burkesville was five miles away. We kids would sometimes ride on a hay trailer drawn by a Fordson tractor all the way to the ‘big city.’ Every Saturday was a big party day.

In 1954, I moved back to Las Vegas and experienced a deep culture shock. I couldn’t believe it; the bathrooms were right in the house. At the local elementary school, there were 20 kids in my class. And most of all, there was electricity!

Dad loved working for the railroad. He was a conductor on freight trains that ran between Las Vegas and Milford, Utah and Yermo, California. On the west run, the trains changed crews at Yermo, California. Then the Los Angeles crew took over. The crews from Salt Lake City also took the trains from Milford into Salt Lake City. Freight trains don’t have a regular schedule like passenger trains do. Instead, they wait until they have a certain number of cars and then they start going to their destination. Therefore, dad and our little family never knew when he was going to be leaving or when he would be back.

This kind of grueling work and erratic schedule is hard on a family. If dad came home at 3am, he would be asleep when I left for school. An entire week would go by without me seeing him. Sometimes, I got lucky and would have a chance sighting about once a week. The few times when we really had time with him, it was special. My father’s schedule and distance as a result of his work were especially hard on my younger sister, Luana, who was a little needier. She retreated into her schoolbooks and was respected as a school genius. Even today, I don’t like to get into any deep discussions with her. I’ve been wrong too many times.

When I entered the seventh grade, my father said to me one day, You don’t know your mother. It’s time for you to meet her.

Isn’t Ethel my mother? I asked in confusion. For the first few years of my life, I had been convinced that my Aunt Ethel, who had come to help out shortly after my birth, was my mother.

No son. Ethel is your aunt. When your mom took off, Ethel came up here to help take care of you guys, filling in because she realized that her sister had issues with babies.

I had no memory of my aunt not being with us. She had been a part of my earliest memories. She kind of hung around until my dad met a woman whom he married in 1952. I was living with my grandparents in Kentucky when he got married.

What’s my mother’s name? I asked my father.

Her name is Geraldine.

Overnight, I traveled by train to Glendora, California. And, just like that, I met my mother for the first time. I was 12 years old.

To this day, I don’t know if it was guilt or actual love, but my mother could not stop doting over me. She would hover, like a strange insect flying above my head. Each morning, she would bring me breakfast in bed and take me to school. She even folded my socks.

I didn’t know what to make of her constant and very sudden motherly attention. The truth is that I had never been a ‘momma’s boy.’ To make matters worse, when I got to school, I was the only non-Hispanic kid for miles. Everyone else was Mexican, which meant I was getting the crap kicked out of me on a daily basis. I was everyone’s punching bag. And as a small 12 year old, it didn’t take much to scare me.

I’ll never forget this one kid, Richard Arias. He was a bad guy. It seemed like he was 22 years old and in the same class as me. He was held back a few years. That ‘kid’ was big and tough and just loved to push me around like crazy. One afternoon, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I told my mom: There is this huge kid in school punching me around every day.

That was all I needed to say. The very next day, my mom marched over to school to give them an earful. But they said that they couldn’t do anything about it or protect me in any way. Between the awkward and constant doting of the mother I barely knew and the bullying of this kid in school, I decided I wanted to go back to Las Vegas. The trip had been some kind of trial visit, with the possibility of staying longer if it went well, but I only remained a few months before I went back on the train.

The stay had given me the chance to get to know my mother and to work in my stepfather’s machine shop, filing parts in order to pay off my bicycle. His name was Bob Price, but he had me call him Midge from the moment I met him. He would become like a second father to me. During my entire visit, my mother treated me with such deep kindness. Whether it was guilt or motherly love discovered later in life, I am not sure. But she treated me with the attitude that everything Jimmy wants, Jimmy gets.

To this day, I’m glad I had the experience of getting to know Geraldine, this mother who had given birth to me. She was a quiet, intellectual woman who was always writing. I can’t say she wasn’t a nice lady. In fact, quite the opposite. So she had the baby blues. She basically had a bad day or week or month—it happens. It didn’t bother me. I always like to remember that none of us are getting out of life alive, and holding grudges is a waste of energy. What’s the point of resenting someone? Yes, there are people I avoid, but in no way do I hate them or hold grudges against them. I avoid them because I don’t want to get into a conversation.

The other night, I was out to dinner with my family when I spotted a couple standing a few feet in front of me. I realized that I knew the man standing ahead of us, though I couldn’t remember his name. I quickly pulled out my phone to look it up. And then I remembered all at once who he was and how I had never gotten along with him very well. I had occasionally played golf with him but had decided to no longer make that happen because he complains constantly about everything. He complained and complained and complained. I recalled being at the country club we were both members of and him saying, I would be embarrassed to bring people here to this country club; this place is a pig sty.

And I might reply with something like, You know they’re going through a remodeling. They’re reworking the ground. They’re giving the place a facelift, and it’s going to take two or three months before it looks good again.

It didn’t matter what I said, he was too committed to complaining. The reality is that I have no patience for people who whine about things they cannot change. Am I supposed to be listening? Am I going to be changing it for you? Why are you talking to me about it? It’s a waste of the air in your lungs. I’ve always believed that successful people see the perfection in all things, while unsuccessful people only see the imperfections.

As I had predicted, the country club now looks amazing. It’s funny how people can be so negative sometimes. We live in a society where people have a tendency to focus on the undesirable aspects of a situation, even if everyone is working for a common good. If one person decides to remove even a dead tree from a communal space, I can guarantee you that a handful of people will come out of the woodwork to bitch about it and say how they removed the wrong tree, or the tree should have been left alone, and so on. I, however, believe in taking the path of least resistance.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe fighting for what you believe in and what you want to bring to fruition. But, in the end, it comes down to that serenity prayer said by addicts in their meetings: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I’ve been surrounded by enough addicts to know that this prayer speaks to the truth that the only things worth focusing on are those that we can change. The rest needs to be left alone.

In 1952, my father married my stepmother, Eileen, who was born in England in 1912. The queen knighted her father in 1913. Eileen had travelled to Las Vegas to get a divorce from a wealthy ex-husband—favorable Nevada laws attracted a lot of women seeking divorce. She also had income from some English real-estate holdings and owned a couple small houses in Las Vegas that she rented out, allowing her to live comfortably. My stepmom liked to drink and gamble. That’s an easy occupation in Las Vegas, so she was often gone from the house. I would run into her just a couple times a week and simply say hello. And since my dad was gone several days each week due to his work, I was often on my own. Today, I would be described as a ‘latchkey kid.’

I learned a thing or two from Eileen. The first thing was about British arrogance. I also learned from her own resilience and sense of pragmatism. Eileen never believed I would amount to anything. Generally speaking, I agreed with her and felt I didn’t deserve all that I had in those days. Eileen thought I should be a carpenter or an electrician. She convinced me I would never succeed outside of a trade. I suppose she was right, since being a dental technician is definitely a trade!

When my father married her, we became one large family—I gained two new stepsisters, Barbara and Dorothy. Eileen always put her kids above Luana and me. She thought they were perfect and, in retrospect, I agree with her. She was a very hands-off parent who never knew anything that my sister and I were up to—including the fact that I received a report card from school. Eileen was so typically British that her comments always sounded so upper crust to me.

The British are different. One can move to England, but you can never become British! Heavens no, you must be born into it. In many ways, it was kind of neat having Eileen for a mom. I got to see firsthand how one group of people could look down on another group simply for being different. It was in those early days that I realized ethnocentrism is a form of prejudice that can negatively affect your business.

Dad was always the soft one, and mother Eileen a little more demanding. She wasn’t too tough, just preoccupied with her own life. At the time, my parents were never quite sure where I was or what I was doing. They just knew I worked in grocery stores.

My older stepsister, Dorothy, probably tried to shape me more than my mother. She was always so thoughtful, and tried to guide me into being a responsible man. But she was married with children and moved to Chicago by the time I was 14. So, I was really on my own. I feel eternal gratitude to Dorothy and my other older sister, Barbara—both were angels.

When I did spend time with my dad, I watched how he interacted with people. He was soft and agreeable, always seeing the best in everyone. He owned three rundown houses, which he rented out. My dad always tried his very best to take care of his wife, and they were together for 20 years before his death.

What’s the point of school?

After I returned to Las Vegas, I finished grammar school. I was not a real studious kid and I couldn’t quite figure out the point of studying. Why should I work so hard? To do what? My first brush with business was when I had a paper route and started delivering newspapers for the Review Journal. I still wasn’t a good student, but I was making $12 a week delivering about 120 newspapers. I collected money door-to-door, paid for my papers, and that was business. My dad once asked if we ever got report cards from school and I told him that they didn’t give them out anymore. He bought it. For the rest of my school years, I signed his name on report cards.

At age 14, I gave up papers and started working in a local grocery store, where I worked as a ‘box boy’ stocking the shelves and working my way up to operating the cash register. I’m sure I wasn’t a standout employee, but by age 15½ I had made, and more importantly saved, enough money to buy myself a ’56 Chevy for $600 cash. I couldn’t drive it until I was 16, but I loved that car.

Overall, high school was hard—especially if you never remove your books from the trunk of your car! I graduated 328th out of a class of 331. In the end, I concluded that I worked too hard, not too little. I could have been 331st!

I don’t imagine anyone would have suspected me capable of any exceptional success through high school. The local pastor at my Episcopal church did tell me I seemed to be a natural leader though. I was involved as an altar boy for a couple years. The counselors at my high school told me that their testing showed great intelligence. At that time, I thought they were very wrong and