Create Jobs, Eliminate Waste, Preserve Value

Those six words explain a lot: Why Ken Hendricks is worth $2.6 billion, how he came to be a walking textbook on identifying and exploiting business opportunities, how he manages to make (relatively) few enemies while treating Beloit, Wisconsin, like one vast fixer-upper--and why he is our Entrepreneur of the Year.

The bronze eagle on Ken Hendricks's conference room table shares more with its owner than boundless patriotism. Captured in flight, the bird scours the earth with fierce eyes, talons extended to seize its prize. So Hendricks surveys the landscape, spying opportunities where others see nothing. He sees. He swoops.

It is a raw September morning in Beloit, Wisconsin; from the conference room window I watch canoes scud across the Rock River in the rain. Hendricks, 65, sits near his avian counterpart and scans Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans, fresh from the Web. At No. 107, with a personal wealth estimated at $2.6 billion, Hendricks has moved up 100 places since 2005, and we are looking for big names he's beat out (last year Oprah memorably ate his dust). "Two point six billion," says Hendricks, shaking his head. Then he chuckles. "It's not even real," continues the CEO, chairman, and sole owner of ABC Supply. "The money doesn't mean a damn thing."

From many people that sentiment would ring hollow. But not from Hendricks. While it would be disingenuous to claim he is still the same dirt-under-the-fingernails roofer who dropped out of high school in 1959, Hendricks remains within spitting distance of his psychic and geographic roots. Born in the town of Janesville, just north of Beloit, he lives in a 3,200-square-foot house, drives a mud-spattered Jeep Cherokee, and answers his own phone--every 10 minutes or so. The night before publication of the 400-richest list, the billionaire treated me to a Stump Burger at Skip's Friendly Village, the neighborhood tavern where he and his wife, Diane, eat several times a week. ("Treat" isn't quite accurate: It was two-for-one burger night so technically I ate free.) He is also fervidly antielitist. If the Forbes list had yearbook-style categories, Hendricks would be voted Least Likely to Attend Davos.

It's not that Hendricks doesn't enjoy being rich. But the mantle of tycoondom weighs heavy on a man who identifies intensely with the workers who built ABC into the nation's largest wholesale distributor of roofing, siding, and gutters. In Hendricks's worldview there are two unalloyed blessings: family and a good day's work for a good day's pay. "My whole life is about trying to treat the working man fairly and give him a good opportunity," he had said the day before while driving me past the packed parking lot at one of his plants. "If you've got a job you have pride. You can dream. You can go home and talk about your kids going to college."

It is Hendricks's obsession with jobs that has brought me to Beloit, a pretty, well-kept city equidistant from Chicago and Milwaukee. We spoke for the first time in July when I was working on an article about former No. 1 companies on the Inc. 500. Having covered the requisite where-are-they-now territory, I had started to make concluding noises when Hendricks broke in with, "Hey, this is kind of a neat story you might want to hear." He went on to describe his crusade to restore 3,500 jobs lost in the bankruptcy of Beloit's major employer.

The plot in précis: The Beloit Corp., the world's largest manufacturer of papermaking machines, had anchored Beloit's economy for 140 years. Family owners sold the business in 1986, and in 1999 the acquirer--Harnischfeger Industries, a public company based in Milwaukee--entered Chapter 11. The Beloit Corp. closed. About 1,500 workers were cut loose; area foundries and parts makers failed; caterers, restaurants, and other businesses suffered as well. Local estimates put job losses at 3,000 to 3,500--as much as 10 percent of Beloit's population.

The company's buildings, a million square feet of industrial and office space, sold at auction to an out-of-town investor, who let them lie largely fallow. So in 2001 the city manager called Hendricks and asked him to buy the property. Hendricks obliged, and in 2002 he began scouring the country for businesses to put inside the Beloit Corp. facilities and in other vacant buildings around town. In four years Hendricks has acquired or helped launch nearly a dozen companies and corralled them in Beloit. He has lured many others with attractive rents and custom modifications to buildings. Those businesses now employ about 1,400 people. Local companies started by Hendricks before the Beloit Corp.'s demise account for another 750 jobs.

A neat story indeed. Great entrepreneurs are like the Red King in Through the Looking Glass: They dream a dream and all around them people live it. Many Beloiters, it appeared, were now living in Hendricks's dream, a hopeful place of jobs and opportunity. I was particularly impressed by the variety of industries represented in the rescued plant. And I liked that his focus on growth companies didn't neglect blue-collar jobs in favor of white but created more of both, with an emphasis on opportunities for the socially and educationally disadvantaged. As Hendricks talked I wondered: Might this be a model for how U.S. industrial cities can thrive in a global service and information economy?

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