The End of an Entrepreneurial Journey

It is with great sadness that I share the news that my father, Robert Cornwall, passed away this past Tuesday.

Over the years Dad grew to become my mentor and my friend.  Dad helped me to shape many of my entrepreneurial values.

Dad was born near Chicago in 1921.  His family moved to Oconomowoc, Wisconsin when he was young.  After high school, America was embroiled in WWII, so Dad enlisted in the Navy.  After the War, he took a job with a company back in Oconomowoc.

Dad was a prudent risk taker.  He was never impulsive.  But, when an opportunity came his way he analyzed it carefully and then, if it had potential, he took a chance.  His first big risk came when he decided to leave his home town, move his family to Ripon, Wisconsin, and take a position in purchasing with Speed Queen, which was a popular brand of washers and dryers in the 1900s.  This decision opened a flood gate of new opportunities over the coming decades.

Dad had a strong sense of purpose.  His entrepreneurial career was not a typical one by today's standards.  The first part of his working life was spent working his way up the corporate ladder.  He knew he wanted to become successful within the corporation, so he put in the time and effort to make it happen.  Over the coming decades he methodically made his way from purchasing clerk all they way to president of the corporation. 

But he was always driven by the entrepreneurial spirit.  He used his corporate success to become what we might call today an "angel investor".  He and his partners bought, invested in, or founded a number of businesses, including a candy company, a marina, a box company, and various other ventures.  However, he never ran the day-to-day aspects of any of these businesses.

When he was in his fifties, he took his next major risk by deciding to leave the corporate world and became a full-time entrepreneur. He also decided that it was time to leave Wisconsin.  His first stop was Houston, Texas, where he owned an executive placement business.  The economy was tough at that time, so this deal did not work out as planned.

His next stop was Miami, Florida, where he joined two other partners in a plastics manufacturing business.  Over the next twenty plus years, they successfully grew this business.  When he and his partners reached their seventies they sold the operating units of the business, but kept all the real estate.  None of them were even close to being ready to retire.  They took the proceeds of the sale and used it as a base to grow their commercial real estate holdings.

Dad always had a sense of responsibility.  He told me that corporate bankruptcy was never an option for one of his deals.  When a deal went bad, he did what he had to do (including using his personal resources) to make things right. 

My commitment to bootstrapping comes from my Dad.  He always was, to put it in his own words, "cheap."  As an entrepreneur, he never wasted money on things like fancy offices or extravagant travel.  In fact, being the cheapest seemed to become a competitive event between he and his partners.

He was a child of the Great Depression, so bootstrapping came naturally to him.  I remember a conversation I had with him a few of years ago. We were talking about an investment he was considering in a potential deal.  He made the statement that he wanted "protection" in this deal. That was an interesting word to me. After all, he was not running a bank that can get a personal guarantee on debt. Any investment would be at risk.

But, he meant something else. He looked at every deal and imagined what it will look like if it went bad. What could he hope to take away from it?  He thought this way because his generation saw the ultimate worst case -- they lived through the depression. It is not that the Great Depression made him risk averse -- to the contrary. Rather, he was always soberly realistic that deals go bad, and we should understand where that will leave everyone involved. This is a perspective that we seem to be losing in our society. It is this perspective that made him the ultimate bootstrapper.

I will miss you, Dad.  I will miss our frequent phone calls.  I will miss the fun we had when we got together.  I will miss our conversations about business opportunities.  In years past we dissected and analyzed deals that each of us were looking into.  More recently, we talked about the businesses being started by my students and alumni.  We shared the love of "the deal."

Thanks, Dad, for instilling the entrepreneurial spirit in me that has shaped my life.