1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire

by Sam Wyly

The rags-to-riches story of an amazing business wizard—from the Louisiana cotton fields to the worlds of computers, retailing, fast food, high finance, and green energy—life lessons from a man ahead of the pack and ahead of his time.

"My work is to create companies and build them," says the billionaire whom Fortune magazine, over thirty years ago, characterized_as "one of the most, if not the most, important entrepreneurs" of the century. This was even before Wyly contributed to nearly every great technological, service industry, and investment business breakthrough in the second half of the twentieth century.

Now, in his fast-paced, fascinating, and candid memoir, Wyly reveals the thought processes, relationships, and financial machinations behind the building of his diverse businesses over the last four decades.

Here's the story of how he worked his way through Louisiana Tech selling class rings and why, after his first job in which he broke sales records for IBM (along with Ross Perot, a fellow IBM salesman) and a brief stint at Honeywell, he decided to risk $1,000 of his savings to found the first "computer utility" company in the business world. This was in 1963. Two years later, he took his University Computing Company public and became an instant millionaire.

Never losing his entrepreneurial spirit, Wyly undertook one challenge after another, such as:
• Waging a successful anti-monopoly battle against AT&T, enabling him to build a "telephone highway" for computers
• Growing the modest Bonanza Steak House chain, which he "inherited" as the result of a bad debt, to a total of 600 outlets before selling it for a huge profit
• Creating a new systems software company, Sterling Software, which he eventually sold for $4 billion
• Dividending Sterling Commerce to public shareholders and selling to AT&T_for $4 billion in 2000
• Expanding the small arts-and-crafts chain Michaels Stores from 10 to 1,000 stores before selling it for $6 billion in 2006
• Founding Green Mountain Energy, which has become the largest and most profitable green business in the country.

Part autobiography and part inspirational self-help business guide, Wyly not only provides his homespun life lessons in the practice of starting and building businesses, but he also delivers refreshing new insights into how many American businesses operated from the 1950s to the present.

Genres: Business, Biography, Nonfiction, Entrepreneurship, Biography Memoir, Memoir, Audiobook

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Sam Wyly was raised in small-town Louisiana. In 1957, he got his MBA from the University of Michigan and began his career as a salesman for IBM and then a manager for Honeywell. At 28, he created his first company, University Computing Company, which became the first of six enterprises Wyly grew to over $1 billion valuations.

Over the next fifty years, he became one of America's top multiple entrepreneurs, building companies in industries ranging from oil and gold mining to arts and crafts, from software to budget steakhouses, and clean electricity.

Wyly resides in Dallas and has six children, twelve grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. His memoir, 1,000 Dollars & an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire, was published in 2008, and his illustrated business biography, Beyond Tallulah, by Dennis Hamilton, came out in 2011. Texas Got It Right!, written with his son, Andrew Wyly, published in 2012, is a full-color, illustrated, provocative look at Texan policies, history, and culture.

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book inspired me because the author not only made many true statements but he also made many millions of dollars. Many people can collect lots of nice sayings and quotations. However, it is a different matter to apply principles in the real world and end up as a winner.
WHAT I LEARNED:
* Business is like football - without a great team, winner is that much tougher.
* Earning money is only part of making a living. You have to love what you do.
* Think positive. Look for what is and what can be.
* Bankers look for Collateral, credit and character
* A company's culture can be a great asset.

[David Hooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to understand the mindset of this guy and what makes him tick. Was interesting to me how he went from computer sales, to telephony, to oil, to steak houses, to craft stores, to green power, and all the other places in between. Obviously, as a autobiography, it's biased and we get the story he wants us to have, but that right there is more insight into who this man is and what has made him so successful.

At times, the details are a little too much, in my opinion. Great if you need specifics on hedge funds, but that wasn't what I was looking for. Your results may vary.

Good book for entrepreneurs. Shows what is possible when you think big.

As a side note, some of the info on Sam Walton, Ross Perot, and some other famous Texans and entrepreneurs was a good bonus. Another takeaway I had was that Sam Wyly has read over 1000 biographies to help him understand successful people. So I'm off to look at more of this type of book, hoping to have the same results that he did.

[BigDaddyBigz Blog · Rating 5 out of 5]

** copied from The BigDaddyBigz Blog **

Quotes from the book:
"Many people yearn for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but have no idea how to find a rainbow!"


"You have to love what you do! Earning a living is a distant second to what you do."


"Reading is one of the keys to success, because if you won't admit what you don’t know you will never discover what you need to know!"


Listen to clips of 1,000 Dollars & an Idea by Sam Wyly, read more reviews, sign up for Audible, and more by clicking here!

Sam Wyly, a Louisiana native has an amazing story! I was referred to this book by a friend from church who is on an extended visit from Canada to hear in Louisiana. I am somewhat embarrassed that as a native Louisianan myself, I had to hear about Sam Wyly from someone who lives as far away as Canada. I am so grateful that he did refer me, and I'll explain why.

Sam was born in Lake Providence, LA when my dad was 3 years old. My dad was born and raised 29 miles from Sam in a town called Tallulah, LA. In the book Sam mentions the rivalry between their two schools and his battle cry which he has used throughout life, "BEAT TALLULAH!" I can't help but wonder if my dad had possibly bumped into Sam at one of those ballgames. I'll never know, but it is kinda neat to think of it as a possibility. On to the review.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Listening to the Audible version was quite entertaining. Phil Gigante did a great job of pulling the listener into the story and keeping your attention. I was utterly astounded by the amount of high profile businessmen, people of fame, and political figures of the past and present. Sam has lead an incredibly full life and yet has remained a man of simplicity.

This book is important to anyone who has aspirations of business success. I was intrigued by his detail in the inner workings of a hostile business takeover. It was actually fascinating without getting the reader bogged down in a lot of technical jargon of the nature of such an endeavor.

Sam gives a good amount of advice throughout the book that is not only applicable to business, but also to life in general. $1000 & An Idea is not really a step by step guide to building a business. It is a step by step guide of failure and success. If you want to fly high in business you need to learn as much as you can from others who have gained altitude. Add Sam's story to your library. The nuggets contained therein are priceless. Reading the biographies of successful entrepreneurs will change the way your brain operates in turn changing the way you do life.

I hope you get Sam's book, and I hope you enjoyed my review. Be a blessing to someone. Peace!

[Metin Ozsavran · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book certainly is written by a good story teller, which Sam Wyly truly is. But his dinky, and somewhat shoddy business practices starts shining through from the beginning when he made a totally dumb agreement with town bully in Dallas. İt continues throughout his career. His initial kinda innovation of cheaper computer rentals wanes and he struggles to find new ideas to keep his businesses alive, not really succeeding in being a pure financier capitalist, etc.

[Judith the Book Gobbler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Auto-biography. Many familiar companies and events. Not all I agree with, yet Sam gives a view through a different lens than the one I have seen through. When I purchased the book I thought I would learn something totally different than I have. What a good book.

[Sachin Patel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goid

[Noble Paulson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A autobiographical journey of an tech entrepreneur

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

As Wyly explains, he wrote this book because, while "taking stock of his life," he was feeling "one overriding emotion: gratitude. The urge to tell my story hit me hard; more than just a distant hum on the background, it was a palpable force pulling at my concentration like a child tugging at your sleeve...I thought that my story, properly told, might inspire and help others, too. So the next day I started to write it." Wyly reviews the details of a number of his business successes such as founding University Computing Company (UCC) in 1963 with an initial investment of $1,000, acquiring and then substantially expanding the Bonanza Steakhouse (1967) and Michaels Stores (1982) chains, co-founding Sterling Software (19881), co-founding the Maverick Capital (1990) and Ranger Capital (2000) hedge funds, and founding Green Mountain Energy (1999) in order to document the evolution of his business career. I was especially interested in the lessons he learned, especially from his bad decisions and their consequences. (I presume to insert African Proverb #1:"Trust but verify" and that is specially true of due diligence before hiring people, making investments, evaluating potential acquisitions or divestitures, etc.) Over a period of several decades, Wyly minces no words when recalling several mistakes he made. What were the most important lessons he learned from them? Here is one of several, in his own words:

"To grow a business by acquisition, you need to do several things. First, you need to integrate quickly and smoothly. Second, you need to find a way to keep your new employees as passionate about their work as they were before you acquired their company. Third, you need to clarify your vision, which is central to the first and third things." (Pages 153-154) Over time, Wyly took the lead in negotiations as Sterling Software acquired 35 companies. Only one was hostile. "But that was the big one. Details are provided in the narrative that follows.

Thank you, Sam Wyly, for the pleasure of your company as you share the quality of your own journey to success. Hopefully many others, especially those now enrolled in schools or colleges, will be inspired by your example of self-creation. And hopefully they will soon realize, as did you when you were a 5'7" and 155 pound noseguard playing for Coach Raymond Richards on the Delhi High School football team, that almost all human limits are self-imposed.

[Andrea James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually couldn't remember who Sam Wyly was before I got this book on audible! A good thing about the book is that it is fairly systematic; it goes through his family history, his influences and how he started out in business. The downside of the book is that it feels like a checklist of here's what a biography should have and each area lacked the depth needed to make a real connection with the author.

How did he overcome a particular struggle. What was going through his mind? How did personal and business relationships blossom or sour? What were the details that caused or led up to his failures, how did he get out of them? It would have been nice if those questions were answered with candor and soul and insight.

Instead I thought that it was "And then I did this, and then I worked in this reputable company, and then I had this problem, and then I..." and so on. A bit like a laundry list of his life's events.

I gave it three stars because it did have some information and as I listened to it whilst running, I thought it was time reasonably well spent (I like reading/listening to biographies and learning about how people achieve success) but I'm not sure I would have taken the time to read it independent of another activity.

[Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“1000 Dollars and an Idea” is an intriguing memoir because it is a business guide and a fun to-read story mixed together. Sam Wyly was a very famous billionaire who started out in a family that had run a cotton-plant and was dirt poor from the Great Depression. Wyly worked at IBM during his early adulthood and later moved on to create companies that were real competitors with IBM such as University Computing. The way Sam became a billionaire is both interesting and intriguing because he was very spiritually minded and was proactive, never losing his cool in tough situations such as losing millions of dollars during the recession in the late 1960s. In the book, Sam Wyly worked really hard to take down monopolies, such as the AT&T monopoly, to create competition and better products in the U.S. This makes me think of him as a true American hero and I admire him for the many works he was able to accomplish and the many small goals he set up along the way to get to being a billionaire. This book kept me turning pages not just because of his accomplishments, but also because he was an inspiration to me in keeping goals in check and being sure that he could get to them.

[Christopher Lewis Kozoriz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Reading is one of the keys to success, because if you won't admit what you don't know, you'll never discover what you need to know. I read to conceptualize challenges. I read to know what I'm getting into. I read for ideas." (Sam Wyly, 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur To Billionaire, Page 197)

Once a billionaire; however, unfortunately, according to google searches it seems he was not a man of integrity and did not pay all his taxes and follow the rules of the government of the U.S.A. The irony of this is that he preaches integrity in his book. However, despite being this, you have to give him credit for building many successful businesses with his partners.

I liked many of the ways he illustrated his business principles in this book. He uses many sports analogies which help the reader to understand what he is communicating to his audience.

Personally, I think he fell short and fell into the temptation of greed. He did a lot of good, but as the saying goes from the Bible "little foxes spoil the vine" (See Song of Solomon 2:15).

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

With my experience in the high tech industry, this book was extremely interesting reading about some of the early developments in that area. Sam Wyly's book about his different investments and work expriences is a fairly easy read. Some of the information about different financial investments were confusing to me. I also found that he seemed to do a lot of name dropping and quite a bit of patting himself on the back. Since I didn't know much about him I decided to look him up online and found out that since writing his book he and his brother have been charged with fraud by the SEC. But still think some of his ideas especially in his early work life are good for everyone to know.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fantastic story of optimism as told by an ethical entrepreneur. Sam Wyly's candor was refreshing, and he didn't vilify anyone—unless they were completely deserving. The last two chapters made the book for me: they covered motivation for the tome as well as a chapter that warmed my tree-hugging heart.

However, I wish he included details about his failures rather than merely alluding to them in the final notes. We don't like championing our failures, but they do offer some of the best learning experiences. That omission keeps the book at 4 stars. Nonetheless, a great read.

[JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

My early reaction was that this book seemed too "folksy," but then it quickly captured my attention because the down-to-earth phrasing is Wyly's genuine self. This peer to Ross Perot, Michael Milken, and other noteworthy players in the business world is more admirable because of his humility. I took away a rare combination of insights crossing the areas of character, personal success, business, and leadership.

[Brent Shedden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had not heard of him before, but he claims to have been the instigator of the lawsuit that upended the AT&T telephone monopoly many years ago. He was able to grow $1,000 and lots of living on the edge to become a billionaire. He grew Bonanza Steakhouses and made some money, but the big bucks came from the sale of a computer company and a software company.

[Dan Rheingans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and inspiring book about one of the leading American Entrepreneurs of the 20th Century. Not a book genre I've normally read, but I gained a ton of insight and knowledge from this well written book. It was definitely an enjoyable and informative read ending in the present with the current economic situation.

[Peter Galamaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a quick enjoyable read - for the most part.

I found the biographical elements of Wyly's from poverty to multi-millions to be fascinating reading.

However, the sections where he goes into great detail regarding business deals made my eyes glaze over.

Lessons learned - pursue your passions, work hard - very hard, and hook up with rising stars.

[Alyne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Checked out this book for my husband, he read it and asked me to read it. It is very informational. Teaches about stocks, etc, going big, reading, being smart. For me it was a 3 star book because it's not really in my field of interest, but I gave it 4 stars because I understand its value. Also I definitely started skimming a bit towards the middle/end, sorry XD

[Wellington · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea who this guy was when I picked up the book. He's a world class entrepreneur and a class act. Book was rather episodic/formulaistic but does give a good peek into the mind of one really successful entrepreneur.

[Glasspixie Pixie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other biographies and autobiographies I've read about businessmen don't get into the details of what they had to do to get their businesses started. It was nice to see his thought process and see examples of how he gathered the resources he needed to get things off the ground.

[Cliff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in the computer biz and I'd never heard of this guy before I read this book. But I guess that could be said about a lot of people. There have been a lot of people in our racket. An interesting story with some practical advice to the aspiring businessperson.

[bookreader]

Charming, folksy, aw-shucks memoir from a contrarian, monopoly-busting digital entrepreneur. Additional hidden value as an industry pioneer's history of the early industrial computing & systems software markets.

[Ahmad Cendana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Development of one's character is crucial for success.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good auto-biography. Nothing earth shattering, but a few good ideas from it.

[C A Rollins · Rating 4 out of 5]

On page 43 Chapter 5. Just received the book Friday May 8th, 2009.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sam did a great job of writing about his work life and goals. He has a lot to be proud of and, as he is a personal friend of my Dad's, I can vouch for his high integrity. A very good read.

[creativate · Rating 4 out of 5]

very fine!

[Lori Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

A should-read book on entrepreneurial success stories for the knowledge worker or aspiring entrepreneur.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best books I've ever read. Super inspirational, I would recommend to anyone who is thinking of opening up their own business or buying a franchise.