Company Histories in Memoirs

The following books I’ve written have been for entrepreneurs who have started and owned successful businesses, and we included one or more chapters about their company history as part of their life story.

Forrest Sargent (From the Ground Up) is the third generation of the Sargent family nursery business. He knows that his family history is intertwined inevitably with his family’s nursery business.

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Edward R. Klamm, Sr. (We Had Fun When All We Did Was Work, 2019) founded Ed Klamm Plumbing, in 1951 that is still going strong today. His purpose in writing the book was to prove that a person with only an eighth-grade education but an aptitude for “working with pipe” could start a business, include his family, and work with them to have it succeed.

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Steve Slaggie (Stories of Our Lives, 2016) was one of three friends who started Fastenal Corporation in 1967 “on a bit of a shoestring.” When they began, their company was the smallest of an estimated 10,000 fastener distributors in the United States. By the mid-1990s, they had become the largest. Today they have 2,200 branches around the world.

Lee Sundet (Mange Takk, 2009) became Twentieth Century Manufacturing’s owner twenty-four years after he joined it as a traveling salesman and built it into a multi-million dollar corporation. He has received many awards for his achievements including the Small Businessperson of the Year Award for the State of Minnesota in 1981. He is described as the epitome of the American Dream.

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Phil Smaby (Always a Move Ahead, 2008) and his friend Ben Bermel started Bermel-Smaby Realty Co. on 64th and Lyndale in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The year was 1946, and one didn’t need a license to sell real estate. Ultimately, with seventeen offices and 350 sales people, their company became the largest realty in Minneapolis. Mr. Smaby served as President of the National Association of Realtors in 1976 and President of the International Federation of Real Estate (FIABCI) in 1980.

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