Taking A Ribbing

"I was probably like most kids when I was young," says Anderson, "not knowing what I wanted to do in life-kind of feeling lost." But at 19, he witnessed a live performance by Ziglar, who would years later become as equally impressed with Anderson. Acting under a zealous fire stoked by Ziglar's uplifting speech, Anderson decided to invest in the direct marketing company his new idol touted. Anderson's father, who also attended, helped supply the capital. "They were selling oil conditioner, but I never sold a one," says Anderson. "But out of that, I got a set of four cassette tapes from Zig Ziglar, and I'd fall asleep listening to them."

Anderson says that's what launched his entrepreneurial career. But it also sent his ego into orbit. It was hard to avoid when, in his final teenage year, he (with some financial help from his dad and a loan from a very trusting bank) started a successful wholesale floral business. At 21, he secured accounts with all the Sears and J.C. Penney stores in Chicago and nearly every major Chicago retail florist. But in 1979, the same year he and his wife, whom he had married three years prior, had their first child, a devastating snowstorm crippled Chicago streets (and business orders) for months, made Anderson bankrupt and sent him to the unemployment line. "I didn't seek help. I was pretty cocky and thought I had all the answers," he admits. "I blamed the world, the snowstorm, not having enough finances." Now he knows that until you accept 100 percent responsibility for your own actions, you can't improve doomed situations.

But even before this knowledge came to him after "surrendering to God" years later in the mid-'90s, pride prevented him from becoming a victim. He stood in the unemployment line-all the way up to the window, in fact-but once he reached the clerk, he walked away, refusing to accept a government check. "My wife probably would've preferred it so I didn't have to pawn her jewelry," says Anderson. But that's what he did to pay the rent and put food on the table, along with digging through seat cushions for spare change and waiting for the appropriate time to ask fast-food employees for leftovers.

This article was originally published in the May 2000 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Taking A Ribbing.