“Look to Yourself” – Jack Wilson, ABEC founder
In 1974, Jack Wilson started a company on a wing and a prayer. In order to breathe life into it, he served as president, salesman, designer, machinist, and financier. For years, he refused to draw a salary. When times got tough, he looked to himself for answers. He had learned early in life that there are no magic beans and no magic beanstalks. He did whatever it took to keep the company running, including refinance his own farm—twice. One telling sacrifice: the man with a lifelong love of great automobiles was forced to sell his beloved XJ-12 Jaguar, a sleek, collector’s convertible with wire wheels. But the biopharma projects were big, took months to fulfill, and payment was slow to arrive.
Today, the company Jack Wilson founded, Associated Bio-Engineers and Consultants, has not only outrun its competitors but outlived them and, after five decades in business, utterly buried them.
Real Life Stories, LLC, just completed the memoirs of Jack Wilson, whose company, ABEC, became the largest supplier of biotechnical stainless fermenters in the world.
One of Jack’s many quips is, Look to yourself: “I think the very first lesson that I understood was the lesson, loud and clear, that if you wanted something, you better get off your duff and get after it, because it wasn’t going to arrive self-propelled. I think that was the core lesson of my youth. It’s probably the reason why I say I never look outward. I always look to myself if I want something.”
As with most of the books produced by Real Life Stories, LLC, Wilson’s book will be privately published and not available to the general public.