Wilson was now free to spend his days pioneering for Jehovah. He roamed the neighborhoods of Ashland, knocking on doors, citing scripture, and generally alerting the community to the imminent arrival of Jehovah's kingdom. On his evenings off from work, he would return to those families interested in learning more and lead Bible study sessions in their dining rooms. "If there was ever a time when I was happiest," Wilson says, "that was it. I love to talk about the Bible." While the experience, no doubt, advanced Wilson's celestial standing, it also enhanced his innate ability to communicate with the secular world of business. Today, when he promotes one of his buffers or floor finishes he achieves a sympathetic urgency in his delivery that might easily convince the listener that grasping Wilson's pitch may somehow contribute to the salvation of one's soul.
Apparently, Wilson was a world-class floor shiner from the very beginning, an indefatigable wunderkind who "just worked like a steamroller all night long." Soon he was asked to take on the four other stores in the Mussetter's chain. This modest opportunity had ramifications far beyond its immediate significance. Wilson was surprisingly, even amazingly, well prepared to exploit it -- a Mozart waiting for his first piano. In a sense, he had already graduated from a business school of his own design. Although in his youth Wilson carried the normal course load of odd jobs -- mowing lawns and delivering newspapers -- he had gone on to advance studies well ahead of his peers. At 14, he was repairing vacuum cleaners in a neighbor's business; at 16, he was a tax preparer for H&R Block; and, at 17, he was a bookkeeper in charge of the payroll at Jimbo's, a Parkersburg restaurant -- and all this in addition to the usual burdens of a high-school student. The sudden press of greater responsibility also forced to the surface the first visible sign of his future management style -- a kink of stay involved in everything all the time and make stuff up as you go along. A time would come when this approach would bring him to grief, but that day was a long way off. Right then, it was perfect.
Wilson hired four other Witnesses, and the group fanned out among the Mussetter's stores. Of course, Wilson ordered all the floor finishes himself, maintained the scrubbing machines himself, and charged around in an old van orchestrating his crew. Less than a year later, Wilson and his band had added several more local stores to their ongoing Mussetter's contract and were now doing business as Pioneer Floor Care Service. By 1974, as business flourished, this loose aggregation of Bible-toting entrepreneurs had grown to 12. That same year, though, Wilson and his wife had their first child and decided to move to Sparta, N.C., in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where life was less citified and where Wilson hoped to help establish the area's first congregation of Witnesses. All of the existing contracts were distributed among Wilson's associates who preferred to remain in Ashland. The stage was now set for the discovery of shineology.
Wilson had anticipated his move to Sparta by convincing a few of the area's larger stores to let him maintain their floors -- Ed Barker of People's Drug being one of his earliest clients. Naturally, Wilson wanted to take on more work, but his prospects were limited by several factors: he was alone, some of his jobs were far apart -- 30 miles between Sparta and Barker's store, for example -- and the work itself went very slowly. At the time, the only technique available to people in Wilson's trade was known as "spray buffing," a tortured procedure in which the operator of the buffing machine hand-sprays a small patch of liquid wax in front of the machine, buffs it, stops, sprays a little more wax down, and so on, proceeding a foot or so at a time until the entire store is done. Today, using Wilson's system, one operator can compete a 20,000-square-foot store in one hour; back then, the same space required roughly six hours of costly direct labor.
"That's when I started to rebel," says Wilson. "I had no such travel time to deal with that I had to develop a faster, better way to clean floors. Necessity was the mother of invention."
Resting from his labors one day in the summer of 1975, Wilson spotted a small news item in a trade journal about a company that was manufacturing an unusual custom-made buffer selling for $1,200. It was powered not by electricity but by propane, and it could spin the buffing pad at the unheard-of speed of 1,000 revolutions per minute at a time when every other machine on the market produced a paltry 150 to 300 RPMs. To a professional like Wilson, the advantages were obvious -- that is, if the machine wasn't some kind of a joke. For one thing, he would no longer have to drag a long extension cord around with him as he worked, but more importantly, now he might be able to buff three times as fast. So he bought one. It wasn't a joke, but it was close. The buffer used a seven-horsepower lawn-mower engine that was far too weak for the job. As a result, the machine conked out with exasperating regularity. "Still," Wilson says, "as bad as it was, it was still better than anything else. I could see the potential and I thought I could improve it." Five years were to pass before Wilson would perfect the design. In the meantime, he bought more buffers whenever he could afford them and tinkered assiduously -- using different engines, changing the shape of the buffing pads, altering the handle bars, improving the propane tank -- trying anything and everything a former vacuum cleaner repairman could think of. And each time, he would haul his latest contraption over to People's Drug for a trial run as Ed Barker rolled his eyes toward heaven.
