Russ: This is the BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at the BusinessMakers.com. And now it's time for the Aflac BusinessMakers Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work. And for this mornings' Flashback we're going to share with you snippets from four former guests on The BusinessMakers show who all happen to be very successful and who happen to be Octogenarians – first up we have Stewart Morris former CEO and a member of the family that started Stewart Title, the 120 year title company, the 4th largest such company in America. I started off the discussion by asking Stewart to tell us about the company today:

Stewart: Well, Stewart Information Services, better known on the public street, Stewart Title. Same family and management since its organization in 1893. All I know is Stewart Title. I'm a very old man. I came to work in 1930. There was no doubt about where I was gonna work. They had told me, "Come on to the office." So he also then told me, "What do you do with your money?" I made $5.00 a week. I remember very well. If you had a salary, you give a dollar of it to the church, you save a dollar and then you can throw your $3.00 around any way you want.

I saw the Depression. I saw bread lines. I saw my dad making $1,000.00 a month. He was well paid back in the early '30s and then he came home one day and announced he was making $300.00 a month. Salaries were cut, but the company survived. The company survived. He taught me always look at the 20-year pull not just now. Dad died in 1950 and Stewart Title had eight offices and a few agents in Texas.

Well, I had been well trained with my brother, Carlos, having been on the payroll then for 20 years, getting a few college degrees on the side, but I did learn how to work. I learned how to get to work on time. I found that work is fun. I enjoy my work, but I realized Stewart Title has got to expand. Well, it took me a few years to get organized there and in 1956 we entered Albuquerque and we lost money. Fifty-seven, we went into Phoenix. And we lost money. Fifty-eight, we went into Tampa and I lost money. Fifty-nine, we really lost money.

Russ: Man, I think y'all started going to these... [Laughter]

Stewart: Went into San Diego, California. Yet, today, oh, I don't know, 10, 15 percent of our revenue comes out of Texas. Today, we do business in 50 states. We've done business in 30 foreign countries. We've grown to a network of 8,900 offices and agents. We have probably 10,000 direct on the payroll and another 50,000 in the agency network.

Russ: That is quite impressive. What I understand, too, Stewart, is that you're the fourth largest company in the title business in the United States. Is that accurate?

Stewart: I don't know what's accurate when you're talking about my competitors. They never send me any business. I just don't worry about them. I don't look at them. Stewart Title is a fulltime job just trying to see that we do well. I can tell you this: None of them have a better financial rating than the Stewart Companies. I do look at that to be sure that we owe little money and have great liquidity.

Russ: I love his comments about the competitors. To hear the entire interview with Stewart Morris, go to TheBusinessMakers.com and in the search box just enter MORRIS. Ok, up next from our octaganarian lineup, we have Truett Cathy, founder of Chick Fil A. We enter the discussion where I had just asked him to roll back to 1961, when he started Chick Fil A, and tell us if he had any foresight that his concept was going to lead to an operation today that has more than 1,000 resturants across the country.

Truett: Well, not at all. It wasn't in my plan at all because I always considered myself a two-restaurant operator and I wished at times I didn't have but one, but this was a product that was originated in my own restaurant which I started in 1946 right after World War II, a little coffee shop-type place, and we'd always never served chicken. We'd like to have a chicken product on our menu, but it took longer to cook chicken than any other item on the menu, which had slowed up our service. But as my friend says, "Nothing's so great about taking the bone out of the chicken breast and poking it between two pieces of bread and serve it as a sandwich." So we experimented with our customers there and taste factors and finally we were selling more chicken sandwiches than we were the hamburgers in 1967. At that time, they had no fast foods in malls. They wouldn't even talk to you about fast foods. Says, "Well, it has fumes and smoke and paper and it's a mess." But we proved the need for a fast food in shopping malls because we was paying about ten times our base rent because of the sales we had generated and actually this was on the side mall of 384 square feet, if you can imagine that size. It was very, very small, really just a cubbyhole, but we had a very simple menu where we practically just trying to build a business on a simple idea, Chick-fil-A.

Russ: Ok, Chick Fil A, and what an incredible success story. To hear the entire interview with Truett Cathy go to TheBuseinssMakers.com and enter Cathy in the Search box. Ok, up next from our octogenarian lineup, we have the inventor of the Weedeater and the founder of Weedeater Inc. George Ballas. We enter the exchange where I had just asked George to take us back to 1973, and share with us what triggered the idea for the Weedeater.

George: Well, I used to walk to school every day and I used to pass by the home of the richest man in the area, and he had a square block that was magnificently trimmed at all times and in the back of my mind subconsciously I considered a lawn like that as success, so when I bought me a big house the weeds were growing all around my trees and everything and I couldn't get anybody to do it.

Russ: [Laughter] I understand why.

George: I found – finally, I found somebody that would do it and he reached down into the grass and he got bit by a snake, and I spent the rest of my day trying to save his life rather than getting my yard done.

Russ: So from there we wanted to know a bit more about the evolution of the idea, the mechanics of the prototype, and this is what he said.

George: One day I was so frustrated I went to the garbage can, picked up a popcorn can, which I still have, and stuck holes in it and then stuck wires through it, attached it to a trimmer. You know, I removed the metal blade and everything.

Russ: Like the edger?

George: Yeah.

Russ: Yeah.

George: And I got my son to help me and, anyway, I turned it on and it flew off and I looked around and –

Russ: The whole can flew off?

George: Yeah.

Russ: Yeah.

George: So I looked around. My son was hauling his rear-end off, and I said, "Hey, man, where you going?" He says, "I don't have time to waste with all that crap." So I've reminded him of that many times over the years.

Russ: Well obviously at that time George's son didn't know where this was leading...to hear the entire George Ballas interview, go to TheBusinessMakers.com and enter Ballas in the search box. Ok and for our final octogenarian success story we have Bill Sherrill, serial entrepreneur, a pioneer in teaching entrepreneurship at the University level, a former appointee to the U.S. Federal Reserve System and Director of the U.S. FDIC, we enter the conversation with Bill Sherrill where I asked him to tell us about the beginning of his entrepreneurial endeavors.

Bill: The first one I can tell you about – the very first business I ever started – was Tropicoa. It was a business of importing bamboo from Mexico to make decorative fencing. I'm pleased to report I lost my entire $20,000.00, so it was a great way to learn entrepreneurship.

Russ: What year was that, Bill?

Bill: That was 1958.

Russ: Okay. Okay, great. So where did we go from there? You –

Bill: Well, to Depression.

Russ: [Laughter] Interesting.

Bill: I immediately, you know, thought I had a mental deficiency. I thought character defect. I thought all those terrible things you think when you have your first failure.

Russ: Hey, but you were getting that experience, man.

Bill: I really was getting experience. It was being shoved in my ears, you know, and – but, you know, I drew the wrong conclusion at first and then I really took the lesson from it that was important. The first thing I thought was I was defeated because the mean old Mexicans took my permits away. I realized later that wasn't the problem. The problem was I had a single source of supply.

Russ: Okay, there you go.

Bill: And it really doesn't matter if your brother is making your product and his factory burns down. You're still out of business with a single source, so that was a valuable lesson to learn early on. It's really important, you know. In life you really have no hope of avoiding making mistakes. It's learning how to recover from them that's important, so for entrepreneurs especially true. Well, my friends picked me up and I joined with four other ex-University of Houston alums and we started Jamaica Beach and so we – that was my first success. It worked well because the five of us and Mr. Bob Smith, who was our mentor who cosigned our notes, we were worth an average of $200 million, but he had a billion-two and we had 35 cents, so.

Russ: [Laughter] That's another good lesson to learn. Partner with the right people, right?

Bill: It really – oh, it really was.

Russ: To hear the whole interview with Bill Sherrill go to TBM.com and enter SHERRILL in the search box. And that concludes our octogenarian feature and that wraps up our Aflac BM Flashback, brought to you by Aflac, ask about it at work.... Stay tuned in for a success story from the other end of the AGE spectrum as we visit with Anthony Broussard, 22 year old founder of Quantum Potato Software. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at TheBusinessMakers.com.