Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the July 10, 1995 issue of Fortune.
Courtland L. Logue of Austin, Texas, just can’t help himself. It’s a compulsion with him: He loves to start new businesses. While most entrepreneurs might start one or two, maybe even three, enterprises in a lifetime, Logue, 47, has founded — or acquired with intent to expand — 28 companies. He’s had a sign business, an air conditioner factory, a dry-wall supplier, travel agencies, bike stores, pawnshops, and software companies, to name a few. He selected many of his enterprises by leafing through the yellow pages looking for solid businesses that could benefit from splashier ads.
“Corky,” as he is known, is a bolt of energy. Raised in Texas, he spent one year teaching algebra after college and then obtained a degree in accounting from the University of Texas. He started his acquisitions binge in the early 1970s and by the mid-1980s was running 12 companies simultaneously. “I like living at 100 miles an hour,” he says. “That’s where life is most fun — out on the edge.”
As near as Logue can recall off the top of his very tanned head, five of his ventures were outright failures. One, though — EZ, a chain of upscale pawnshops — is a big winner, landing a place this year on FORTUNE’s list of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies (more on that later). The rest were “pretty successful,” meaning they were making at least a modest profit before he sold them after a year or two to start something new. “I get bored real quick,” he says.
The managerial experience wrested from all that frenetic entrepreneurship boils down to some basic good sense. Here’s what this bumblebee of a businessman says he’s learned from running as many companies as there are days in February.
- First, get good people. If you don’t have good people, that’s your fault. “Remember, .200 hitters don’t win championships. Overpay and get .300 hitters. Just don’t hire more of them than you need. With partners, make sure you get along and you both know which one of you is the boss.” Specifically, he prefers that partners put up most of the money, while he does “all the work,” which can be quite a lot: He says that for 15 years he started work every morning at 4 a.m. He didn’t follow his own advice with South Gate Travel, an agency he owned in the early 1980s. When Corky jazzed up the firm’s advertising, traffic increased and his partner began staffing up faster than revenue was increasing. Costs got out of hand, Logue and his partner fought, and the partner bought out Logue’s share.
- Second, stick to what you know, and for Corky that meant mainly retail-type businesses. When he dabbled in manufacturing, he got into trouble. One of his startups, Aquacool, made an air-conditioning device called a water chiller. “I didn’t understand manufacturing,” says Corky. “We started making chillers in advance of orders, inventory built up, and then we had one of the coolest Southwest summers on record. I lost $400,000 in that one.”
Conversely, when he decided to focus on a business he thought he understood well, pawnshops, he struck gold. He founded EZ in 1974 and by the mid-1980s he had sold off his other businesses and was concentrating on expanding the chain of EZ Pawn shops. His game plan was simple: “People view pawnshops like the sewer, a place you wouldn’t want to go. But I made EZ Pawn clean and bright with colorful blue awnings so people would feel comfortable going there.” Between 1989 and 1993 he raised $123 million (in a private placement and public offerings) for expansion. Today EZ has over 250 shops, with more than $160 million in revenue.
- Logue owes much of his success to his third tenet of management: Watch the business like a hawk. “I go over numbers every day from 4 to 6 p.m.,” says Logue. “I know entrepreneurs who say they’ll look at the numbers at the end of the year. Never wait till the end of the year, or you’ll learn about trouble too late to act.”
But hawklike vision didn’t save him from getting ousted from EZ last September after the company broke tenet No. 2 by straying into unfamiliar waters: buying new jewelry. Dennis Van Zelfden, a security analyst for Rauscher Pierce Refsnes in Dallas, says the jewelry gambit was a bust that contributed to a $4.9 million charge against 1994 earnings. Logue, though, still holds one million shares (8%) of EZ ‘s stock, worth about $7 million.
Now Logue is playing a lot of golf and tennis, and boating on the lake next to his office in the hill country west of Austin. “I’m trying to learn to live at 55 miles an hour,” he says ruefully. And although he doesn’t admit it, he’s probably still perusing the yellow pages. You can’t keep a serial entrepreneur from striking again for long.