When Steve Allen established Allens Plumbing on the Hawaiian island of Maui in the early 1980s, he had no grand strategy for becoming the owner of a multimillion-dollar-a-year operation. Instead, he found himself attending the School of Hard Knocks.
“My main business plan was hunger — just trying to make a living so I could eat,” Allen says. “Happiness is being too stupid to know what to worry about, so I just kept plugging along.
“I did business like that for about five years,” he continues. “Then I found a little source of direction and I’ve been following it ever since.”
