There is no greater success than hometown success.
—Buzz Oates
RMITs are perhaps best described as the rooted rich. They make their fortunes in the places they know best, and their stories prove that success can take place anywhere and everywhere. The hundred examples in this book come from cities with populations as small as 169 (Belspring, Virginia) and as large as 8 million (New York City). In short, most RMITs (81 percent) are doing business in their hometown.
As Buzz Oates, Sacramento’s favorite son, says, “There is no greater success than hometown success.” Alex Hartzler, the lawyer-turned-tech-entrepreneur-turned-real-estate-developer of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, agrees, but takes it one step farther: “I happen to think that small towns are a great place to do business and have a real meaningful impact.” Hartzler and Josh Gray bought a controlling interest in the performance-based advertising solutions company Webclients, where Hartzler served as general counsel. In just four years, after the Internet bubble had burst, Hartzler and his partners were able to sell the company to ValueClick for $141 million. Today Hartzler is developing the historic areas of midtown Harrisburg through his real estate development company, WCI, which stands for Webclients Inc.—the source of his and his former partner’s initial wealth.
Jonathan Nelson loves his hometown. “There is a reason why Providence Equity is headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, and not New York or London, where we have offices,” he says. “It has to do with personal choices about lifestyle and culture. The motivation for starting the firm in Providence was not about money [see RMIT Commandment #1]—it was about having a company with shared values and taking a different approach to the human side of our business. We succeeded here where conventional wisdom would say we should not. In fact, we turned those differences into a competitive advantage. Not starting in New York, having a different perspective, having a brand that is best identified as Providence, differentiates us from our competitors. And it turns out that difference is appreciated by CEOs and investors around the world.” Nelson found his perfect pitch in Providence.
Fred Levin—Pensacola, Florida’s star trial attorney—made his fortune in his backyard, too. He is also one of the few attorneys who has achieved the position of being an RMIT. Levin is proud of his hometown and says, “I never thought about living or working anywhere else.” Jim Oelschlager of Akron, Ohio (population 209,000), notes, “A lot of brokers and analysts from New York City ask me why I don’t live in New York, to be in the center of the action. When they come to Akron and see how close my home is to my office, they understand. I am close to work, close to the woods, and I had a nice place to raise the kids. With modern communications systems, you can do the job from anywhere.”
Anchorage’s RMIT, Bob Gillam, who manages $17 billion of investor funds out of his Alaskan hideaway, agrees: “No one ever told me I couldn’t do it here.” Gillam’s mission at McKinley Capital is to provide alpha to his investors—beating the benchmarks in each product category, whether it is large cap, small cap, global growth, or US growth. He notes, “We can do that anywhere in the world—why not here in Alaska, where we have three million lakes, which means I have three million runways for my floatplane? Besides, I couldn’t find a place to land my floatplane in New York City.”
Bob Stone of Carrollton, Georgia (population twenty-two thousand)—my hometown—lands his jet near his hangar at the West Georgia Regional Airport and can’t imagine landing it anywhere else. The former college professor with a love of computers and a gift for math merged his talents to form his perfect pitch, which helped him create his fortune by virtue of a good deed. The local office of the Family and Children’s Services approached Stone when he was still teaching at West Georgia College in 1973 and asked if he could create a computer program to facilitate the management and distribution of food stamps. He spent an entire weekend working on the challenge, and the program he wrote was so successful in taming an otherwise unwieldy and largely manual process that the word spread to all the other counties in the state. Stone was in business, and soon his company Systems and Methods was handling the food stamp programs for all 159 counties in the state of Georgia. His only competitor was Citibank, the largest bank in the world. (That’s high cotton for small-town Georgia.) Stone proves that success can happen anywhere if you have the right stuff and the ability to adapt to change. But perhaps the right stuff that he has the most of is his resilience. He has reinvented his company three times when the landscape shifted beneath him, but each time he kept his feet on the ground, and he continues to land his jet and keep his fortune in Carrollton, Georgia.
Buzz Oates was born in California’s state capital, Sacramento (population 407,000), and built his businesses and his fortune there. Oates says, “I never intended to leave. This is my home.” It is, too, although now he owns most of it. When it comes to building a fortune, size matters, but when it comes to where you build it, population size clearly does not. The idea that you must go to one of America’s biggest cities to be successful is simply not true. From Pensacola to Palo Alto, from Savannah to Sacramento, the individuals in this book prove that great wealth can be created anywhere in America. Frank Hickingbotham built three companies, including TCBY Yogurt, in Little Rock. Former schoolteacher Judi Paul built Renaissance Learning in her Wisconsin Rapids basement, before moving to Boulder, Colorado. In 1968, pregnant women were not allowed to teach school, so instead she began building her company as a stay-at-home mom. Hartley Peavey made his music and his money in Meridian, Mississippi, population forty thousand. Red Emmerson of Anderson, California, created his multibillion-dollar timber and forest products fortune in a town of approximately eleven thousand. George Johnson built his billions in Spartanburg, South Carolina, population thirty-nine thousand and RJ Kirk built his biotech businesses and his billions in Radford, Virginia, population sixteen thousand.
• Hometown success is indeed the sweetest success.
• It’s the size of the bottom line that matters, not the size of the town.
• You can build a billion in any town in America.