47 years building and selling companies.

Chapter one

A toy shop in East London, South Africa

I grew up in a humble home in East London, South Africa, the only boy among four children. At twelve I took a Saturday and school-holiday job at a toy and bicycle shop owned by a man named Wilf Winspear. The pay bought me bicycles and motorcycles. The lessons bought me a career.

Winspear drilled two habits into me that never left. Hire the best accountant and the best lawyer you can afford, and keep your books, taxes, and legal house in order before you ever pay yourself. He also taught me to over-deliver, always, no matter how small the job.

Chapter two

Choosing the shop over the bank

After school I did a short stint in a bank, then two years of national service. When I came back, the bank wanted me and so did Winspear, who offered me a permanent job and a small stake in the business. I turned down the safe banking salary and took the 1.5 percent instead.

Six months later a Durban toy chain called Reggies came knocking, looking to expand across the country. Winspear left the choice to me. I sold my slice, cashed out for very little, and bet on the bigger group.

Chapter three

Youngest director, 120 stores

I married Lynda in 1980 and moved to Pretoria to start the inland region. They made me a director of Reggies at twenty-one or twenty-two, sitting in a room full of men in their forties and fifties. Over the next seven years we grew Reggies into a national chain of about 120 toy stores.

I opened most of them myself, from picking the site to signing the lease to hiring the staff. In a small market under sanctions you learn to be a generalist: buying, importing, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing. In 1987 we listed Reggies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

Chapter four

The buyout and the Toys R Us deal

When the manufacturing side started dragging on the listed company, my partner David and I led a management buyout in 1991, backed by an M&A firm. We took control, sold off the factories, and rebuilt the group as the biggest toy and baby retailer in Southern Africa.

I even built my own Toys R Us in South Africa. When the real Toys R Us came after me, I turned the lawsuit into a partnership and sold them the trademark for about ten million dollars, plus a ten-million-dollar franchise deal. As I told them, I didn't want a fight. I wanted to be their partner. And because we structured it with Arthur Andersen's help as an outright sale of the trademark, in a country with no capital gains tax at the time, the ten million arrived tax-free, roughly four and a half million dollars better than taking the same money as a settlement. Structure, not luck.

Chapter five

Aquila Growth Limited and the move to America

In the late 1990s I co-founded a listed private equity company, Aquila Growth Limited, that spread into casinos, coffee shops, a breakfast cereal company, watch and toy distribution, and a software firm in Chicago. That last deal brought me across the world. I moved Lynda and our two sons to Chicago on a simple idea: the same work pays more in a market of 340 million people than in one of fifteen million.

By 2005 we had sold the assets, returned the cash to shareholders, and delisted. Two of the companies I co-founded ranked on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange for return on shareholders' investment, number one in 1998 and number three in 1999. Our investors and banks all did very well.

Chapter six

From $50,000 to an eight-figure business

My American chapter was Protect A Bed. I bought about a quarter of a tiny mattress-protector business doing fifty thousand dollars a year, moved manufacturing to China, and built a training team for mattress retailers. We rode the bed-bug boom with a patented encasement and grew it into an eight-figure business, selling in 48 countries.

I ran it the way Winspear taught me: spotless books days after month-end, a top CFO and a long-time lawyer, profits put back into the business, and myself paid as an employee, kept separate from the company.

Chapter seven

The clean exit

Two buyers started bidding against each other. I had never meant to sell, but I accepted. The business sailed through a five-month due diligence with no surprises, because it had been run that way for years, and I sold the whole thing in an eight-figure exit.

I retired on my sixtieth birthday. Today, at sixty-seven, I want to help owners my age, the ones who built a business that gave them a good living but have no children to take it over, get it ready and sell it for what it's worth.