From the Ground Up: DFW's most successful executives continue to draw strength from their roots

D CEO
March 2009

On the surface, EDS founder Ross Perot Sr. and international interior designer Trisha Wilson have about as much in common as khaki fatigues and an Armani suit. Yet their lives share a common thread: their origins were so humble that failure wasn't an option.

D CEO has examined the lives and origins of seven of Dallas-Fort Worth's most successful executives, and found some lessons that still aspiring capitalists can take heart-in - even in today's schizophrenic marketplace.

Ironically, none of these mega-innovators worship the almighty dollar. Instead, they have a deep faith in themselves and something bigger than themselves; they treasure ideals above a fast buck; and all of them havea rabid proclivity toward finding and keeping like-minded people who will help them get where they want to go.

And, not one of them is a whiner.

SAM WYLY: A Cabin Without Plumbing

Both Sam Wyly and Ross Perot bled IBM blue, when it came right down to it.

But when they saw the company wasn't taking advantage of market conditions, they took off in different directions to pursue their fortunes.

In Wyly's case, in the early 1960s, he took $1,000 and parlayed it into the $600,000 he needed to form University Computing Co., which used transistorized computers to perform computations for scientific and engineering ends for other companies (including Sun Oil and Texas Instruments). University Computing went public in 1965 and, within four years, shareholders had a 100-1 return on their holdings.

"Not bad for a too-small noseguard from Delhi (Louisiana) High School," Wyly writes in his book 1,000 Dollars and an Idea.

From there, Wyly co-founded Earth Resources Co. (an oil-refining and silver-mining operation), bought and expanded teh Bonanza Steakhouse chain, purchased and expanded the Michaels craft chain, and founded Green Mountain Energy.

Yet it would be harder to find a more true-to-life slumdog millionaire in Dallas.

Though both his mother and father came from relatively wealthy families, Wyly's parents Charles and Flora Wyly found themselves pretty much wiped out by the Great Depression (like nearly everyone else).

Sam and his brother, Charles, and their parents lived in an unpainted wooden cabin without plumbing on a Louisiana cotton plantation. They had all but given up the notion of trying to survive on the cotton crops, which Sam's father was supposed to be managing.

They scraped enough money together to buy a newspaper (his father aspired to be a journalist at a major newspaper), a Western Union franchise, and a small insurance agency. Sam's experience with the Delihi Dispatch had him considering a career in journalism... until an IBM salesman showed up in his father's office to sell him a typewriter.

"The man was well-dressed, in a smart suit with a white shirt and a dark tie; he spoke intelligently and I remember he drove a brand-new Cadillac," Wyly wrote. "I sat there looking at him, thinking to myself how impressive he was and how he projected success."

The die was cast.