If you're going to be an entrepreneur... it's not all textbook. It's gut feeling, it's intuition, it's a feeling you have that you can do this and make it happen. I think you have to have a personality.

Some family trees bear an enormous crop of nuts.

Our philosophy has been to be fiscally conservative, so we can be operationally aggressive. We're not using borrowed money to grow. So we'll put up a store just to get there before the competition. If it doesn't work, we'll close it and lose a little equity. It won't kill us.

My father always said working for somebody else never amounted to anything. You have to be an entrepreneur

The faster we grew, the more stores we had open, the more money we made. Employees move quickly up the ranks of a company that's growing fast. Shareholders made a lot of money. If you invested $25,000 from January 1987 to January 1994, you'd have more than a million dollars. I get a lot of personal satisfaction from that.

Overcoming hardships and working around and through their obstacles to achieve an education is what I call a true success.

If you're going to be an entrepreneur... it's not all textbook. It's gut feeling, it's intuition, it's a feeling you have that you can do this and make it happen. I think you have to have a personality.