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November 2009 Mention Marvel Comics, and the first thing that comes to mind is superheroes like Spider-Man and the Hulk. The next thing, probably, is Stan Lee -- who helped create those iconic characters and has been the public face of Marvel for decades. So it's not surprising that Lee is pleased about Disney's proposed $4 billion acquisition of Marvel. What is surprising is that Lee doesn't stand to make a dime from it. Lee drifted away from Marvel in the mid-1990s -- indeed, he spent years in litigation with the company -- and now is chairman of another business, POW! Entertainment. Still, Lee never really left Marvel. At 86, he serves as its chairman emeritus, and though the position is largely ceremonial, it acknowledges Lee's role in building one of America's most enduring brands. | |
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October 2009 Wolfgang Puck’s accent is Austrian, and his culinary bent ranges from Italian to Asian, but Puck’s business style is pure American entrepreneur. From his start as a 14-year-old apprentice in his native Austria, Puck has built a restaurant, frozen-food, and high-end kitchenware empire. He is most famously known for Spago, his pizzeria to the stars, which opened on Sunset Boulevard in 1982. But that was just the beginning. Today, his 16 restaurants and more than 80 express bistros stretch from New York to Maui. | |
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September 2009 Alden Mills, founder of Perfect Fitness, has an M.B.A. from Carnegie Mellon, but he learned his most valuable business lessons serving in the Navy SEALs. For one thing, Mills says, SEALs are trained in unconventional warfare, perhaps the requisite mindset for company building. And SEALs never venture out without a "swim buddy," a practice that persuaded Mills to take on a business partner. Mills also considers Perfect Fitness a volunteer force: As with the SEALs, people can leave if they don't like the leadership. Finally, Mills describes SEALs as demanding the ultimate in perseverance. "They'd say, 'OK, it's a four-mile timed run,'" he says. "I'd run so hard, I'd throw up at the finish line. Then they'd say, 'Now it's a 10-mile timed run. Keep running.' You don't know when that race is over, so you can never give up." Ditto: business. |
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September 2009 Dallin A. Larsen's nutrition company was on the brink of collapse -- and then a friend tipped him off to a little-known berry found in Brazil called açai, which was said to be an antidote to premature aging. Four years later, MonaVie has sales of almost $1 billion of its namesake, an antioxidant-rich açai juice. Although the health merits of the company's products and its multilevel marketing structure have come under fire, Larsen is unfazed. And so, apparently, is MonaVie's rapidly expanding customer base. |
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September 2009 On August 16, 2007, Matt Johnston met with the board of his staffing company, Workway. But it was hard to focus on the agenda. That morning, Countrywide Financial -- Workway's biggest customer, accounting for a fifth of its business -- announced it had tapped $11.5 billion in credit lines, stoking rumors of imminent bankruptcy. Johnston knew immediately that Plan A wasn't going to work anymore. Time for Plans B, C, and D. |
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September 2009 Cedric Franklin has a knack for beating the odds -- and making money in ways others wouldn't even try. He left a lucrative career in finance in 2003 to start Harley Stanfield, a Washington, D.C. -- based real estate development and investment company. The company buys houses and makes them energy efficient, then sells them as investment properties. Franklin now has turned his attention to his native Detroit, where he sees opportunity in buying up as many as a thousand homes. |
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July/August 2009 Richard J. Heckmann, 65, builds companies via acquisitions and sells them when it no longer pays to be an acquirer. During the 1990s, he was a large shareholder and CEO of U.S. Filter: He took a struggling company with $7 million in sales, made an astonishing 260 acquisitions, and sold it for $8 billion in 1999. He used another 26 acquisitions to expand sporting-goods maker K2, which he sold for $1.2 billion in 2007. Then he quickly raised $430 million for a so-called blank-check company, Heckmann Corporation, essentially a vehicle for investors to bet on Dick Heckmann making more smart acquisitions. The first of those was China Water and Drinks, which he bought in 2008 via a deal that effectively allowed him to reduce the purchase price after problems surfaced at the operations. |
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June 2009 The origins of Birkenstocks can be traced to 18th-century Germany. In 1966, Margot Fraser tried on a pair of the sandals while visiting a Bavarian spa; their contoured foot bed relieved the pain in her toes. She would spend four decades as sole U.S. distributor for Birkenstocks. Today, Birkenstock USA, a $50 million company based in Novato, California, sells through large retailers and some of the same health-food stores that were the sandals' early champions. Fraser, 80, looks back on her long career of snatching victory from the agony of the feet. |
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May 2009 Every second, someone joins LinkedIn, a sort of six degrees of separation for professionals and the brainchild of social-networking pioneer Reid Hoffman. He launched LinkedIn in 2002 with money he made from the sale of PayPal, which he helped build. LinkedIn has 38 million members in about 200 countries, but in Hoffman's mind, that's merely a good start: He expects a quarter of the planet's population to sign up eventually. The company has been profitable since 2006 and has attracted more than $100 million in VC funding. Last year, Hoffman brought on Google star Dipchand Nishar as vice president of products; this freed up Hoffman to focus on the big picture. |
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January/February 2009 Ron Popeil made his fortune selling products you never knew you needed -- and now can't live without. From hawking the Chop-O-Matic in a Chicago Woolworth's, Popeil has gone on to invent and sell on TV some of the most iconic consumer products ever. The Solid Flavor Injector, Mr. Microphone, and the Showtime Rotisserie are just some of Popeil's products; his inventions have pulled in a combined $2 billion in sales. A pioneer of the infomercial, Popeil, 73, sold control of his company, Ronco, in 2005 for $40 million. But he is still at it, and he will soon be selling the world on the virtues of his latest kitchen gadget: a deep fryer for turkeys. |
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