Amway-The Foundation
(Excerpt from Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community)
Grand Rapids is a West Michigan — almost a Lake Michigan shoreline — community that is defined by it’s entrepreneurs, many of whom would be considered to be bootstrappers.
Two of those entrepreneurs are Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel — conservative, religious men — that are best known as the co-founders of Amway Corp.
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| (left to right: Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos) |
They were best friends at Grand Rapids Christian High School, separated only by World War Two.
Rich and Jay stayed in touch through those years and almost as soon as they arrived home, they opened their first partnership — a flight school that mostly catered to military veterans who wanted to learn how to fly.
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| (Rich Devos and Jay Van Andel at their flight school) |
Military veterans also get hungry. Sensing an ancillary business opportunity, the DeVos-Van Andel team also opened a drive-in restaurant to feed their students, serving butter-fried hamburgers, using their mothers’ recipe.
Jay and Rich were taught a lesson that almost all entrepreneurs may have to learn. Failure is a part of the experience.
Neither of their first businesses did very well. Both were sold.
Jay and Rich didn’t stop. They began another adventure.
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| (Rich Devos and Jay Van Andel on the ill-fated Elizabeth schooner) |
Even though these entrepreneurs were the first to admit they knew nothing about sailing, the pair set off for South America in 1949 on the schooner, “Elizabeth.” It sank off the shore of Cuba. The pair had to be rescued by an American freighter.
Was this yet another DeVos-Van Andel failure? The answer was “no,” at least not as far as they were concerned.
“That is part of our folklore,” Steve Van Andel, one of Jay’s two sons, told me. “For most people, once the boat sank, it would be the end of the story. For them it was just half-way through (the journey).”
The logic is astoundingly simple. “Their boat had taken them as far as they needed it to take them. They didn’t need that boat anymore.”
Rich and Jay eventually got to South America.
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| (left to right: Steve Van Andel and Doug DeVos in front of portraits of their fathers) |
Steve still has the bell from the “Elizabeth” in his office at Amway Corp. where he serves as chairman of the corporation his father and Rich created, sharing leadership duties with one of Rich DeVos’ sons, Doug, who is Amway’s president.
“People may say, ‘Rich and Jay were great visionaries’ but they were just trying to feed their families. And our dads would even say, ‘all we did was go to work every day,’” Doug explained as he, Steve and I spent an hour together in Amway’s Ada Township corporate offices. “But they went to work every day with an attitude that they were going to make the business better.”
Amway had a humble birth in 1959, launched in the basement of Jay’s home, selling a product billed as “an all-purpose household cleaner.” Hardly glamorous, but this was the business that would make them billionaires.
“It was 1959, when it was Castro versus the United States and communism versus free enterprise,” said Doug. “Freedom was an idea they wanted to have a piece of.”
A direct selling and manufacturing operation, Amway (which is meant to be an abbreviation for “American Way”) eventually went global. It now has more than 21,000 employees around the world and better than 3 million distributors.
Steve believes you tend to hit what you are aiming at. “And if you are aiming low that is probably where you are going to go. But if you aim high, you are probably going to go there. I think as a business you need to keep aiming up and you will eventually get there.”’
Doug agreed believing that things will get better, and if you aim high you will score high, are basic, core entrepreneurial beliefs.
“There are a lot of people doing it right now, people who are building a better mousetrap, coming up with a better idea,” he said.
“Look at our iPads and with Steve Jobs passing, we celebrate the way that entrepreneurial spirit thought of a way we could live our lives better.”
(c) 2014 Lyons Circle Publishing Inc.
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| (Rick DeVos) |
Start Garden, founded by Rich DeVos’ grandson, Rick, is helping a new generation of entrepreneurs. Read More.
For the latest business news and more stories of BYOB entrepreneurs go to the free Rod Kackley app for iOS and Android mobile devices. Download through the App Store or Google Play.
Last Chance Mile: The Reinvention of an American Community by Rod Kackley tells the story of how the DeVos and Van Andel families entrepreneurial heritage helped create a cluster of prosperity in Grand Rapids, the Medical Mile. It is available wherever books are sold online including Abbott Press as well as on the shelves of Barnes & Noble-Woodland Mall, Schuler Books & Music-28th Street and West Coast Coffee-Monroe Center Grand Rapids.
The Apartment Lounge: Building an LGBT Community by Rod Kackley tells the story of two men who did what was at the time unthinkable in Grand Rapids, Michigan: they opened a gay bar. Afraid to even put the name of the establishment on their front door, Milt and Ed not only kept it open, they helped lay the foundation for this West Michigan city's LGBT community.
Grand Rapids Needs Talent by Rod Kackley: This article examines the need in the Grand Rapids, Mich. information technology community for software and app developers, and what the business and educational communities are doing about it.
Michigan Could Miss the Next Wave of Automotive by Rod Kackley: This article examines the problem of the “Missing Middle” being faced by the Big Three in Detroit. It’s a talent problem. Find out what the auto industry is doing about finding its Lost Generation.
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