A Chat with John Economaki, Founder and President, Br

Quite frankly, there's an element of luck to all successful businesses. I would say the first element of luck for me was that in 1982, the IBM PC came out. When I first started running my ad, I was keeping notecards. I had a shoe box full of notecards in three months, and I knew that wasn't going to work. That was a disaster, actually. I'm up at night writing out cards and sticking them into a box and alphabetizing them, color-coding them and then dealing with the catalog requests — which initially annoyed me, because only one in 10 catalog requests had actually sent a check for a tool in with their request. I wanted more with checks! We grew really fast.