Q: What can you tell us about your background?

A: I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. First we were cotton farmers, and then we published a weekly newspaper—my parents ran the Delhi Dispatch in Delhi, Louisiana. 

Q: What is 1,000 Dollars and an Idea about?

A: My book is about the entrepreneur and the work of the entrepreneur.  I’m sharing some of my stories.  As an entrepreneur, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.  Sometimes you have a triumph; sometimes you have a disaster. One of the biggest joys of the entrepreneurial work for me is to be able to work with some of the best and brightest people around.  I think vital ingredients of being an entrepreneur are to be innovative, find solutions to challenges, and, in one way or another, create value for the customer and rewards for those you employ. 

Q: Why did you want to write this book?

A: I think writing is kind of in my blood. I come from a long line of teachers and preachers and newspaper people.  Sharing stories is a great way to impart knowledge about what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, and I wanted to inspire others with my book. 

Q: How did you start your first company—literally with $1,000 of your own money?

A: I spent my first three-and-a-half years out of college helping IBM build up their computing business in Dallas, followed by two years at Honeywell, an IBM competitor, putting them in business in Texas and Oklahoma.  After a few years, I realized that if I could put Honeywell in the computer business, maybe I could put Sam in the computer business. 

I identified an opportunity that others couldn’t see, because the cost was too high. Several of my customers, including an oil company, had a need for a scientific computer, but couldn’t afford the purchase (remember, this was in the early 1960s, when mainframes cost three million dollars, were very large, and had to be housed in a large space). I figured out how to purchase a used computer, have a university (SMU) house it and use it for their needs, and then leased time to my customers for their computing needs.  

The used computer cost $600,000, and I had $1,000. I went through a lot of steps working out my plan, and put up my $1,000, getting the bank to loan me the remaining $599,000.

Q: Your book opens with the sentence “I learned some real good lessons in the barbershop.”  Can you share some of those lessons?

A: The most important lesson was the whole concept of hedging as the farmers would talk about their crops in the barbershop. Would they sell their crops forward, or just take chances on the future price? Prices were set at harvest time, and if they hadn’t hedged and prices dropped, then all their hard work making the crop may have gone for nothing. So, I learned to risk-reduce. I also learned there are some risks you can’t hedge—like the Mississippi River flooding!

Q: One of your focus areas is on creating an appealing corporate culture, recognizing and rewarding talented employees.  How important are these for the life of a company?

A: I learned early on while working for other companies, really before I started my companies, that a company has got to be a good place to work.  If it’s not, good people won’t stay. While setting up a good place to work, you need to bring onboard people who believe that too.  Most of the companies and the organizations that I put together have been very collaborative, not authoritarian.  Creating and serving customers is vital to the business, and you need happy employees to do this.  The first constituency you’re serving is the customer, then the employees, and then you have to have vendors who will provide good value or they won’t be your vendor.  The entrepreneur has to put it all together, like an orchestra, so they all play well together.

Q: Time after time, you recognized opportunity, and then acted.  How can people sharpen in themselves the ability to recognize opportunity?

A: I think everybody is different, but it’s real important to know who you are. If you don’t know who you are, then being an entrepreneur can be a very expensive way to find out. Doing what you love is more important than doing something you think is going to make you a lot of bucks because you may not make a lot of bucks. The joy of the work to be done is more important than the dollars attached.

Q: One of your career highlights was going head-to-head with communications giant AT&T in an anti-monopoly battle.  Can you describe for us the thinking that precipitated a move like that?

A: The AT&T monopoly was government-granted and government-protected. But they were moving too slowly for us computer people.  They had analog equipment, good for telephone calls, but not so good for us computer folks who needed digital technology to move data. It was hugely expensive to push data through the telephone pipeline. AT&T had no motivation to give us the kind of service we needed because they didn’t have any competitors. To grow the original business, a telephone company for computers, we had to find ways of getting the cost of telecommunications down, and it became clear I had to bust up the telephone monopoly. I thought I had enough time and money to do it. It actually turned out that I spent eight years trying to do it, and it took twelve years to get AT&T busted up.  Along the way, the price of a telephone call has gone from a dollar to a penny.

Q: You did not have experience in retailing when you bought Michaels. What did you see in those 10 original stores that made you think this was a major business opportunity?

A Michaels was sort of accidental. A friend of mine had the job of selling it. I looked at their financial history and I saw that every store had a 10% same-store sales increase—whatever they were doing was good. I also called my cousin Betty, in Lake Providence, Louisiana, and found that she was driving sixty miles to go to the Michaels Store. So, it didn’t matter whether or not I understood Michaels’ 35,000 products. What was important was that 95 percent of Michaels’ customers were women, and every single woman in my family knew about and loved Michaels.

Q: Green Mountain Energy was created over 11 years ago – the most successful green energy business in America.  What was the motivation for turning your attention to the environment?

A One day my daughter Christiana came home from school, asking, “What are we going to do about all these toxic pollutants we are putting into the air?” So I started thinking about it and studying it, looking at the environmental problem. I also knew they were deregulating the electricity industry. I thought maybe we could create a company offering a green choice, so that’s what we set out to do. I am eleven years into Green Mountain Energy, and it’s tremendously successful and highly profitable now. But there were some long, tough times in the beginning – we were losing money during the first seven years. 

Q: One of your most recent purchases is the independent bookstore Explore Booksellers and Escape Restaurant, in Aspen, Colorado. It may also prove to be one of your least profitable. What led you to purchase this store?

A: I bought the bookstore in Aspen because it was going to be shut down and turned into condominiums. I didn’t want the bookstore to close, so I bought it. I know the people who work there.  They know and love books, and there is no reason it can’t be economically viable. And, the fact is that it’s my favorite place to walk to in Aspen!