Leslie Brokaw

The Founders

 

"David and I knew at that moment we were going to be a competitor," Cohn says. "For one thing, we knew they were going to try to go around us to get our products at a lower margin. And we knew that we could be in this business. We loved making the ads, shipping the products, making the phone ring. We had this business in our blood." There was another thing, too: "I always felt that I knew more than the people I worked for."

Damark surpassed that company and more -- in 1990 it sold almost $194 million worth of discounted consumer merchandise such as fax machines, water purifiers, and brass planter sets. It's now one of the largest sellers of general discount merchandise. Russ retired this past summer.

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The Activists

Shari Tresky, Lee Tulp, Way Konigsberg, Deborah Starnes; #43
Abacus, San Francisco
$13.7 million in sales; 84 employees

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When they first began operating out of their Haight-Asbury household in 1973, the founders of what would become Abacus were producing an environmental magazine. Members of an all-women business collective, they added housekeeping, gardening, and taxi operations to the venture because friends needed jobs. A graphic artist on staff led them into design work, and eventually they began selling computers, too.

Abacus now could be categorized as a computer sales and support company -- the bulk of last year's revenues came from computers, network and computer repair, and applications training, although the company also does graphics and multimedia production, runs a temp agency for technical workers, and operates a travel agency. That diversity isn't just to protect the company from recession -- it fits into the overall vision. "Our motivation has always been more abstract," says cofounder Lee Tulp.

"We're in the technology business," explains CEO Shari Tresky. "We want to take technology as far as it can go in terms of lifestyle options and improvement for humanity." Their ultimate goal, she says, is to help establish communities for cooperative living, re-creating ideas about how work and family life and artistic impulses can be combined. Twenty-eight Abacus employees, including the four owners and their management team, live in a cooperative now.

"Our basic impulse always was to do something very, very cool, very, very monumental, taking our ideas as far out there as we could," Tulp adds. Abacus, she says, is their way to develop technical skills and resources to do those bigger things. "In principle, integrating computers is not very different from integrating communities. In both cases you're providing services and comprehensive solutions."

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The Big-Organization Convert

Lawrence Ybarrondo; #247
Scientech, Idaho Falls, Idaho
$17.4 million in sales; 139 employees

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"I rose through the ranks at the Idaho National Engineering Test Site, got to be second-in-command, supervising 2,000 people, overseeing a $150-million budget. We ran the premier nuclear-safety tests in the world, and I was having a lot of fun, running experiments late at night, blowing up fuel bundles.

"I was sent to the MIT business school's senior-executive course. It's 10 weeks, very intensive, and it's a total spectrum -- we went back and read the Constitution, Karl Marx, ethics and business, the law.

"It was a turning point for me -- actually more like a renewal. I had gone to a Jesuit university and had taken courses on moral philosophy and ethics. The MIT session focused me like a laser beam on how all that fits into business. I just absolutely loved it.

"I came back all fired up to do strategic planning for the site, trying to think ahead five years and point out that the commercial nuclear industry was approaching maturity, that we had to be thinking about what the mission of the place was, where the jobs might be for these 4,000 people. But then the government decided that such questioning was a sinful activity -- that it was a threat to government power. It became clear that if I persisted, they'd kill me, in a business sense.

"I left six months later, and shortly after that it dawned on me: I'm free and clear now. It all crystallized one day when I was reading the Wall Street Journal at the airport, an article on entrepreneurship. I thought, That's what I want to do. I came back and talked to my wife about it and said, 'Let's start our own company.' "

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The 'I've Always Had This Idea' Romantic

Rex Hardin; #416
Insta-Plak, Toledo
$1 million in sales; 27 employees
For 30 years Rex Hardin was perfectly happy being a dentist. The money was good. There was time to golf. He had no complaints.

But in 1985, at age 60, shoulder surgery fried his career; he couldn't even hold a mouth mirror for more than a few moments.

What Hardin could hold on to, though, was an idea that had been percolating for a couple of years. Whenever he'd golfed in a pro-am -- paying $750 for the privilege of putting next to the stars -- the photo plaques he received to commemorate the great event came many months later. One plaque was broken down the middle. Another had the right photo, wrong names. "It kind of took the gloss off, getting them like that," Hardin says.

Someone could make a good business, he'd always figured, running a mobile photo-developing and engraving service to furnish plaques on-site. Since he now needed a job, he might as well be that someone. Nine months after his surgery Hardin launched his company with the dentistry-reminiscent name Insta-Plak. Last year the company serviced 90-odd professional-tour events and a smattering of corporate customers.

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