"There's nothing wrong with a desire to make a huge amount of money, but it's the mission that's all consuming."
Mission 1. It was a hot, muggy summer evening in Houston, and patience was growing short at an emergency meeting of the Willowbrook Civic Club. Some 75 people had crowded into a room at a neighborhood school to discuss garbage.
Willowbrook, a subdivision of 700 houses in the southwestern part of the city, and two adjoining subdivisions were finding it difficult to get their garbage collected. A private contractor who had performed the service for several years had now decided to concentrate on more lucrative routes. As a result, bags of trash were piling up in nearly 2,000 backyards.
Tom Fatjo, Jr., a 26-year-old accountant who served as president of the Willowbrook association, listened to the complaints and suggestions, then offered a suggestion of his own: "Why don't we buy a garbage truck and have our own service?" he asked.
An angry man finally broke the silence that greeted Fatjo's question: "Tom, this is a civic club, not a damn garbage company! Why don't you buy a garbage truck and be our garbage man?"
Fatjo accepted the group's lack of enthusiasm for his suggestion. But later that evening, he began to consider the other possibility -- being Willowbrook's garbage man himself -- seriously. It was the wisest thing he'd ever done.
Now, 16 years later, Fatjo is no longer an accountant. He is an ex-garbage man worth more than $5 million, the founder of the largest solid-waste disposal firm in the world, Browning-Ferris Industries Inc., whose 1981 revenues were $661 million.
Since he stepped down as the co-chief executive officer of Browning-Ferris, Fatjo has gone on to develop The Houstonian, a resort and private club designed to help business executives lead healthier and more productive lives.
But the American dream of striking it rich and then sitting back, maybe to pontificate occasionally on free enterprise, wasn't what motivated Fatjo. He was driven by an intense sense of mission, rather than by a desire for money. "There's nothing wrong with a desire to make a huge amount of money," he says, "and sure, I wanted to make some. But it was the mission that was all-consuming." He is as intense and sincere as a Bible Belt evangelist.
Fatjo was born in Houston and raised in Richmond, a small town outside of Houston. He studied economics and accounting at Rice University. While he was at school and after graduation he went to work for Deloitte, Haskins & Sells, the Big-Eight accounting firm. "Most of my work was with businesses that ranged from $500,000 to $20 million or $30 million in sales," he recalls. "I was sizing up those companies for investment, helping out with bankruptcies. I really enjoyed rolling up my shirtsleeves and getting involved with small business."
His work with small companies fired him with enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, and led to the development of a business philosophy. "I've seen so many people with good ideas and good businesses lose the opportunity because they weren't sound financially -- they didn't do the necessary planning," Fatjo says. "I saw people who otherwise would have been successful if they only had been willing to go a little slower, and people who were more interested in retaining ownership of a company than in seeing it prosper."
His training as an accountant gave him a respect for the numbers. "I believe in being conservative financially," he says. But he also knew that accountants place too much emphasis on going by the numbers in any business decision. They don't put enough faith, Fatjo feels, in the gut reactions of the business's owner. "You look at the numbers," he says, "but you have to rely on what your judgment tells you."
Fatjo was an entrepreneur-in-waiting, frustrated by his lack of involvement in a small business. So when the emergency meeting of the Willowbrook Civic Club provided him with an idea for a business, he started to check out the realities of the solid-waste disposal business.
"I took a long look at it," Fatjo says, "and it seemed like a pretty good business: There aren't any recessions -- I mean, the garbage is going to be there." The Willowbrook association paid 90 days in advance, which provided him with working capital; the equipment was easily financed, and trucks could be added one at a time.
So Fatjo invested $500 in a garbage truck, hired a few men, and the new company, American Refuse Systems Inc., began cleaning up. But not without a few unforeseen problems: "The first day we went out to collect, the truck filled up after only 200 houses," he recalls. "I'd made a major miscalculation; we'd planned on hitting 750 houses a day, and it was a two-hour trip to the disposal site." The first order of business became the purchase of a larger truck. There were also problems with labor and maintenance of trucks, but none that Fatjo couldn't handle, even if he had to work the routes, tossing trash into the back of a compactor, himself. He later recalled the experience in the first chapter of his how-to-succeed autobiography, With No Fear of Failure: "The garbage was almost up to my armpits in the dank heat of the enclosed truck bed as the driver slowed for the last stop on the route."
American Refuse earned $200,000 during its first year, then expanded into commercial collections in Houston. By 1969, the company had annual revenues of more than $1 million.
Long hours and hard work made Fatjo a success, but Houston was the right place for him to put his anything-can-be-accomplished credo to work. "People in the estern part of the country are often negative when it comes to new projects," Fatjo says. "But here, the assumption is that new things can be done. The attitude is, 'I can do almost anything.' It's a city that accepts outsiders, that judges newcomers on the basis of their talent rather than their experience or where they're from."
Houston seems to breed a kind of college fraternity optimism, an indifference to obstacles. Tom Fatjo plunged on, searching for bigger and more exciting opportunities, having accomplished his first mission -- that of becoming an entrepreneur.
Mission 2. Before expanding American Refuse into two nearby cities, Fatjo decided to study the solid-waste disposal business elsewhere: "My impression was that it was probably a hit-or-miss sort of thing and that the people who were involved in it probably weren't very good businessmen." So he set out on a three-week fact-finding trip and discovered a golden opportunity.
