Profile of Success: All Eyes on the Road

WHAT GOT HIM HERE: A failed retail venture. After a toy store in San Francisco in the late 1980s went under, Bauschinger was left unemployed and virtually broke.

“I was bankrupt, and the only idea I had at the time was, well, ‘there are these little Schuco [international toy manufacturer] cars and a lot of residents,’” Bauschinger recalls. So he took the little money he had left and placed a two-column, 6-inch coupon ad in the western edition of The New York Times to market the remaining inventory of toy cars. Response to the ad was much better than he ever could’ve imagined, allowing his company to raise some money, add products and establish a name.