A Chat with John Economaki, Founder and President, Bridge City Tool Works

CS: What has been your greatest career challenge, and how did you deal with it?

JE: There have been two, the small business banking issues created by the Savings and Loan debacle of the late 1980s, and the economy post-9/11.

In 1991, I had a $600,000 line of credit at the bank, and they called me in to talk about the line of credit, so I went in. And they said, we'd like you to pay it back tomorrow. I laughed. I just laughed. Because it was right after we had mailed our catalog. I said, "You've got to be kidding me." So they started putting the screws to me, and I had never had any experience like that. As you might imagine, we have a really high-end expensive product, and so we have a lot of high-profile customers, or we did at the time. And I just said that we weren't going to pay it back. And that got me into a situation where I wasn't able to mail a followup catalog.