Word: sokolof
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...uphill from there. Today Sokolof's privately held firm, the Phillips Manufacturing Co., has 120 employees and two Omaha plants that specialize in producing various dry-wall channels and metallic building studs. Profits from the company and some shrewd stock investments have made Sokolof a wealthy man, with a fortune that he admits is "well into eight figures...
...success, Sokolof says, cannot compensate for the one great tragedy of his life, the death in 1982 of his wife Ruth, after a 15-year struggle with cancer. "I don't cry easily," Sokolof says, but when he talks about Ruth, which he does incessantly, there are tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice. In his spacious condominium, where he lives alone, he proudly shows visitors her paintings and clippings about her charitable work with blind children. "She made me a better person," he says...
...time he was 21, Sokolof says, "I realized that life wasn't just hats and horns." Returning to Omaha, he went into business with his father, who owned several liquor stores and bars. In his late 20s, Sokolof turned to building houses, one or two at a time, on speculation...
Around that time, in the early 1950s, when dry wall was rapidly replacing plaster in new houses, one of Sokolof's employees arrived at work with two cartons of corner bead, the metallic strips used to join dry wall at a corner. "I looked at the price," Sokolof recalls, "and thought, 'My God! That's really high.' " After checking the cost of steel and the fabricating technique, he decided he could undercut the only two national companies producing the bead...
...machine, rented a building for $75 a month and went into business. "I made the product, went out on the road and sold it, and came back and did the invoices." Offering the corner bead at a few dollars less per 1,000 ft. than his big competitors, Sokolof began turning a profit by his second month of operation...