"My Name Is Dave, and I'm a Growthaholic"

"This is the new me," he offered. "No schedule. No itinerary. All I know is the group has decided to go, so we're going."

For years, Pitassi has looked to poetry for inspiration and reflection. He reads it every day, while working out on a Stairmaster, a stationary bicycle, or a treadmill. "I've always enjoyed poems, but I never let myself before, because I was a business guy," he says. At first, he tried Shakespeare but found the Bard's period diction too difficult to grasp while working up a sweat. Instead he sticks to "popular inspirational stuff," rhyming verse, much of which he can recite by memory. Among his favorites is a folksy overcoming-the-odds poem called "It Couldn't Be Done," by Edgar A. Guest, with lines like the following: "So he buckled right in with a trace of a grin / on his face. If he worried, he hid it. / He started to sing as he tackled the thing / that couldn't be done, and he did it."

Doing "the thing that couldn't be done" is a theme that crops up over and over again in Pitassi's life. "Dave loved overcoming all odds, doing the impossible--turning a negative into a positive--and still does," notes wife Elaine. What's most interesting to him, as Pitassi himself admits, is "putting yourself in a spectacular position to fail." (In fact, he's currently writing a book with the working title A Chance to Fail.)

Is Pitassi's attempted immersion into his family just another way for him to get the perverse rush he apparently derives from the ever-present possibility of failure? After all, as he points out, "parenting is very complicated. There's no answer book. For every expert who will tell you how to raise kids, there's another one who will tell you the opposite." When Pitassi asks himself if it's possible to be an entrepreneur halfway, he confesses, "My basic belief is you probably can't." But the words sound less like an admission of defeat than the firing of a starting gun.

Toward the end of our interview, Pitassi casually mentions that he and his wife are contemplating starting another company--when the kids are more on their own, of course. Is he regressing? "I don't worry about that at all," says Elaine. "If he chooses to, that's OK." The point isn't whether he starts another fast-growing company or not; it's whether he does it because he chooses to or because he can't stop himself. "What's more gratifying than walking into a store and looking at a shelf where nothing exists and then saying, 'This product will exist. People will be employed. A company will be here'?" he asks. "I'm into that creation, watching things flourish, where products and companies don't exist and then become something of substance."

Pitassi, it seems, has no intention of depriving himself of such satisfaction. He'd just like to wait a little longer--if he can--to reach some sort of understanding about what he finds so addictive about a fast-growth environment. After a while, he may simply grow comfortable with never having an answer. "It might be interesting in the future to start a business where I can be active but where the kids can gain value and education from it as well," he says. "If my wife and I jumped into something like that, I think our attitude would be, 'We're going to build this thing with a sense of normalcy.' But common sense tells me this is probably not possible."

Back for more

If the temptations of fast growth eventually lure Dave Pitassi back to the Inc. 500, he won't be the first. Several CEOs on this year's list have appeared with previous companies in earlier rankings. What's the attraction? On the following pages, they tell us.

Charles Pesko

Hank Post

Donald McMullen

Charles W. Jackson

Fred Burke

Additional CEO interviews were conducted by Shane McLaughlin and Nicole Burnham Onsi.