[21twelve]

A guy pulled into me next to the hardware store today in a new Jaguar sports car. Got out with baggy worn-out jeans and a slight pot-belly under his tee shirt. I like every-day guys that are wealthy.

A friend of the family was probably a billionaire. Had the largest yacht around. We would go with him sometimes, and I would help him with the chores. I asked him once why he was up here in the heat sanding the teak deck rather than hiring someone to do it.

“Not much fun in having a boat if you can’t get to work on it.”

[poconopundit]

Great story about the yacht. Memorable!

[HotHunt]

My wife's favorite uncle is the sole owner and president of a commercial electrical contracting company that does business all over the southeast. He is worth millions, employs up to 100 employees and is a successful businessman, who never got more than an high school education.

However, to see him you would not recognize him as a business executive. He is instead a good old boy Floridian who dresses in old jeans and cowboy shirts and drives a beat-up old minivan back and forth to work. He is the first on at the shop in the morning and the last one to leave usually. But you would never recognize the man as anything but one of the lower level worker bees for the company. His only office is what can be best described as a junk room, full of electrical parts, catalogs. He never uses it, preferring to be out in the field on the job sites working with his employees.

I met a neighbor who told me a story about when he used to work for my wife's uncle a couple of years back. He says he and some employees were out on a big job in the heat of the Florida sun. At the time, he was new to the job didn't yet know all of the employees he was working with. At the lunch break, he befriended a fellow worker sitting under a tree eating a brown bag sandwich. It wasn't until several weeks later that another employee told him the man he befriended and worked along side, was the owner himself. He said he would have never guessed that the man he worked with and became friends with, was actually his employer. Unassuming, humble and generous to a fault.

It is good to know that there are still employers in this country that run successful companies that don't fit the image of the fat, greedy capitalists that the liberals stereotype them as.

[tiki]

I went to a wedding reception where if the hosts cleaned up and put the tables and chairs up they saved $500. There was a multi-millionaire and his family there and they worked as hard as anyone there w/o being asked.