I started in business at twelve years old, sweeping the floor and selling toys and bicycles in a little shop in East London, South Africa, for a man named Wilf Winspear. I worked every Friday afternoon, every Saturday, and all the school holidays. The money I made bought me bicycles and motorcycles, and the lessons I learned bought me a career.
Mr. Winspear drilled two habits into me that I have never let go of. Hire the best accountant and the best lawyer your money can buy, even when you are paying them more than you pay yourself. And keep your books, your taxes, and your legal house in perfect order before you ever take a dollar out for yourself. He also taught me to over-deliver, no matter how small the job. I have lived on those three rules for more than forty-seven years.
Here is the short version of what I did with them. I joined a Durban toy chain called Reggies, and at twenty-one or twenty-two I became its youngest director, sitting in a room full of men in their forties and fifties. Over seven years we grew it into a national chain of about 120 stores, and I opened most of them myself, from picking the site to signing the lease to hiring the staff. We listed it on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1987. I built my own Toys R Us in South Africa, and when the real Toys R Us came after me, I turned the lawsuit into a partnership and sold them the trademark for about ten million dollars plus a ten-million-dollar franchise deal. As I told them, I did not want a fight, I wanted to be their partner.
In the late 1990s I co-founded a listed private-equity company called Aquila Growth Limited, buying and selling across retail, casinos, coffee shops, a cereal company, watch and toy distribution, and a software company in Chicago. By 2005 we had sold the assets, returned the cash to shareholders, and delisted, with two of the companies I co-founded ranking on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for return on shareholders' investment, number one in 1998 and number three in 1999. That Chicago software deal is what brought me to America, on a simple theory: the same hard work pays you more in a market of 340 million people than in a market of fifteen million.
My American chapter was Protect A Bed. I bought about a quarter of a tiny mattress-protector business doing fifty thousand dollars a year, moved the manufacturing to China, built a training team for mattress retailers, rode the bed-bug boom with a patented mattress encasement, and grew it to roughly sixty million dollars in North America, with sales in 48 countries. I ran it exactly the way Wilf Winspear taught me, with spotless books, a top CFO and a top lawyer, profits put back into the business, and myself paid as an employee kept separate from the company. When two buyers started bidding against each other, the company sailed through a five-month due diligence and passed with flying colors, and I sold the whole thing to a New York private-equity firm. I took the check the same day and retired on my sixtieth birthday, which made for quite a birthday present.
I am 67 now, and I have sat on every side of the deal table, as the kid who cashed out a tiny stake for almost nothing, the director who took a company public, the operator who bought a company back, and the founder who sold a global business and walked away the same day. I will be honest about how this works, because honesty is the whole point. When you are ready to sell, I can run the sale for you, the way a broker does, and bring the right buyers to the table. What I give you first is forty-seven years of buying, building, and selling real companies, and a clear method for getting a business ready so it sells for the most it possibly can. This playbook is the readiness part of that promise, and I can stand behind it completely. Let me show you what I would do.