Word: carlson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Curtis Carlson, a freewheeling entrepreneur who made his first millions selling Gold Bond Stamps, has a gilt complex. He loves gold. The energetic conglomerateur controls the worldwide operations of his Minneapolis-based empire (hotels, restaurants, discounting) from offices reminiscent of that Bondian archvillain, Auric Goldfinger: his gold-embossed telephone, gold vinyl chair and gold-striped sofa are set off by the rich, warm shades of a gold-hued carpet. When Carlson's Gold Bond Stamp operation was at its peak in the 1960s, its executives drove a fleet of company-owned gold Cadillacs. A gold-framed saying...
...robust Midwesterner of sturdy Nordic stock, the tall, silver-haired Carlson, 64, keeps both his personal life and his business private, and he is barely known outside his native Minnesota. He has collected a string of 101 companies in ten groups without ever having sold a share of stock to the public, along the way amassing a fortune estimated at $100 million. Because his companies are private, they are not required to report sales or profits figures. But he has allowed TIME Correspondent Patricia Delaney a closer look at the far-flung activities of the Carlson Companies...
Combined revenues, he revealed, totaled $1.041 billion last year, up a remarkable 170% from 1975. Now Carlson hopes to hit the $2 billion sales mark in 1982. Carlson does not disclose profits because he plows everything back into the company and thus keeps taxes low. Says he: "Net profits are meaningless. Growth and cash flow mean everything...
...most visible part of the Carlson empire is the Radisson Hotel Group, which last year generated revenues of $90 million. There are 19 hotels with a total of 7,139 rooms, and Carlson hopes to expand by 1,000 rooms a year. He opened a resort hotel a year ago in Scottsdale, Ariz., and the Radisson Oasis, built near the Pyramids outside Cairo, will be finished by the end of 1979. Farther afield, Carlson is negotiating with the Chinese to build a hotel in Peking. He has a particularly active period of growth planned for two recently acquired restaurant chains...
...stalwarts among the Carlson groups accounted for almost half of last year's billion-dollar-plus sales. One of them, the catalogue showroom retailing operations, which grossed $216 million, embraces brand-name discount chains that require little in the way of display space, sales help and security personnel because customers order merchandise from catalogues. Thus the companies can undercut many of the big low-price chains like K mart. The other, the Carlson Premium Group, which last year got one-third of its $250 million revenues from Gold Bond Stamps, organizes incentive programs for companies that reward high-achieving...