Business groups invited me to speak.
People wanted to know my secret.
They expected me to talk about marketing.
Timing.
Product development.
Hard work.
All of that mattered.
But the truth was simpler.
I built the company because two little boys needed winter coats.
I grew it because they needed stability.
I kept going because every time I felt tired, I remembered two toddlers standing on my porch beside a garbage bag.
The business had never been the point.
They were.
One afternoon, about a year after the court hearing, I found Jeffrey and George on the porch.
It was nearly the same spot where they’d stood in pajamas ten years earlier.
Only now Jeffrey was almost as tall as me.
George was eating an apple and dropping crumbs everywhere.
I stood inside watching them.
For a moment, I saw both photographs at once.
The toddlers.
And the boys they had become.
