When I started reading the cover article in the Seattle Times’ Sunday magazine “A Man, A Fence, An Empire“, I was expecting a boring “entrepreneur IPO’d, bought a mansion, blah blah” story. But the details in the breadth of coverage are fascinating. First there’s the atmosphere of the main character’s empire’s headquarters: a shack on a pier with two outhouses. And said character, Rick Preble, is from Maine so I imagined his “beguiling accent” as he told the story of how a little pile of wood outside a New Hampshire doorway led him to a niche market in fence postcaps that provided $15 million in sales last year. Along the way I found out that Lowe’s store design and marketing are more attractive to women, who typically hold the postcap buying power as it’s a decorative item. And I learned how Preble coped with making the hard choice to move his manufacturing to China, and that, contrary to what you may believe, he is getting high quality, detail oriented work that he would not have obtained from the ultimate mechanization of his production in the U.S. Preble and his partner (owner of that little pile of wood) sold the company for $8.5 million, but Preble has stayed on in his shack on the pier and travels the world evangelizing his postcaps.