"In order to achieve long-term success, it is important not to stop after your first fortune or failure, but to use what you learn from your triumphs and mistakes and keep going!" Bob Elmen, author of "Fifteen Fortunes: An Octogenarian Reflects on Life as an Entrepreneur" As a young boy growing up in the Midwest during the Great Depression, Robert Elmen contributed to his family's meager income by growing tomatoes in a community garden and delivering them in his wagon to a local grocery store and a hospital kitchen. As the only supplier in town who replaced spoiled tomatoes on a daily basis, he quickly gained a reputation as a reliable and enterprising young businessman. In Fifteen Fortunes, this feisty octogenarian looks back over a long and productive career in the equipment rental business, and conveys his own brand of wisdom in narratives on a variety of topics-such as risk, luck, hard work, and wealth. He also describes how the hardscrabble work ethic of his Scandinavian ancestors, along with the financial insecurity of his childhood, motivated him to become an entrepreneur. In letters he wrote to his wife Rita more than sixty years ago, Elmen not only professes his love for her, but also invites her to be part of the entrepreneurial vision he would later realize. And, in a much more recent letter to his grandchildren, he shares some of the fundamentals of investing that a favorite uncle taught him long ago. A number of activities outside the realm of business have inspired Elmen's successful philosophy. His time as an officer in the US Navy during the Korean War served as an entrepreneurial training ground-giving him the chance to test an early equipment rental business model in California that would later be adapted and replicated in multiple locations throughout the Midwest. And, offering "proof positive" that pursuits outside of business can inspire innovative thinking, Elmen credits the boy scouting experiences of his youth and his life-long passion for the outdoors for nurturing the adventurous spirit that helped him succeed as an entrepreneur. Regardless of whether the topic of discussion is business or fly-fishing, Robert Elmen's approach to life is passionate, principled, and inventive. In Fifteen Fortunes, his writing debut at eighty-five years of age, he pens a book as enlightening as it is entertaining!
About the Author: Robert Elmen spent six decades in the equipment rental business. His father, Lloyd, started the business in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1950, before Bob opened a store in Vallejo, California while serving in the navy during the Korean War. He and his brother Jim built the company into, at one time, the largest privately owned general rental enterprise in the US. Ultimately, employees throughout the eleven-state enterprise had 51 percent ownership interest in the company through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) when Elmen Rent All, Inc. was sold to Greenwich, Connecticut-based United Rentals Inc. (NYSE: URI) in 1999. Elmen served on the South Dakota Investment Council from 1992-1997 and was chairman the last two years. In addition to earning an undergraduate degree in history and a master's degree in economics, Bob was granted an honorary doctorate in 1997 by Augustana College in Sioux Falls, and was inducted into the American Rental Association's Rental Hall of Fame in 2013. He and his wife Rita, who have been married over sixty years, have three children and nine grandchildren. An avid outdoorsman, Bob has hatched and refined many enterprising ideas while fishing in South Padre Island, Texas, or hunting on the family ranch in Buffalo Gap, South Dakota.