Building a Business: The Jim Walter Story

by Alvin Moscow

Building a Business reveals the free enterprise system at its best—a success story for our time, tracing the rise of a tiny, entrepreneurial home-building company from its origins on the back roads of Florida in the late 1940s through its takeover by the power elite on Wall Street in the 1980s and '90s. As a young man of twenty-three, Jim Walter borrowed $500 to buy an unfinished house, selling it within three days at a profit. The idea for the “shell home" was well-built, affordable houses to be finished by their new owners. During the next fifty years, Walter Industries sold more than 320,000 single-family homes, and by the mid-1980s it ranked among the 200 largest industrial companies in America. More than a biography, Building a Business is a how-to manual of the American dream, illustrating how the American values of decency, ethics, hard work, and perseverance can lead to success. This book will inspire anyone who cherishes the American spirit. A former journalist with the Associated Press in New York City, Alvin Moscow has written or collaborated on fifteen nonfiction books that reveal the lives of such notable Americans as Richard M. Nixon, William S. Paley, and Harold Geneen. His first book, Collision Course , was an international best seller.

2 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1995