When Bill Child graduated from college, his dream was to become a teacher. Instead, he found himself taking over his father-in-law's business and taking small steps to build it up to the R.C. Willey present today.

"It was not something we did quickly," said Child, former CEO of R.C. Willey. "It was done year by year, day by day and customer by customer."

Child is well-known for his management of the company through fundamental principles that attracted the attention of Warren Buffett and eventually led to the sale of his company to Buffett.

In Jeff Benedict's newly published book, "How to Build a Business Warren Buffett Would Buy: The R.C. Willey Story," he tells the story of how integrity, financial responsibility and customer loyalty helped Child turn a struggling appliance business into the thriving R.C. Willey furniture chain, according to an email from Shadow Mountain, Benedict's publishing company.

Child will be signing copies of Benedict's book today at the BYU Bookstore from 4 to 5 p.m.

"It's basically a book about the American Dream," Child said. "A company starting out in Davis County in 1932, during the Depression, clogging along." He said in 72 years, they built a successful company.

Child said in the book that R.C. Willey's success can be attributed its adherence to 13 simple management principles.

"Everybody has their values and everybody learns a lot of things as they go through life," Child said. "Those are some of the things that were very important to me."

Child expanded on some of these guiding principles, including avoiding unnecessary debt.

"When the economy takes a downturn, debt will sink you and that has happened so many times lately," Child said. "I think you have to worry about leverage, not leveraging yourself too heavily."

In addition to using the list of principles as guidelines, Child also has two pieces of advice for students.

The first is patience.

"There are a lot of lessons to be learned," Child said. "One of them is patience, that things don't happen overnight."

The second is to take advantage of opportunities and to understand the business beforehand.

"Even in the worst of times there are wonderful opportunities," Child said. "However, they [students] have to apply the principles in the book such as knowing the industry, knowing the business. You need to work within your 'circle of confidence,' as Warren Buffett puts it. In other words, don't get into something you don't understand."

Bill Price, executive director of the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology said Child is a wonderful role model for students.

"The book is perfectly timely because a generation ago is when he [Child] started what became the R.C. Willey Company," Price said. "It was also at a time of upheaval and a time of opportunity and because of his character, he was able to seize upon the opportunity and build a business that Warren Buffett calls 'a jewel of a company.'"

Benedict, author of the book, thinks it will be refreshing to those who have been reading bad news from Wall Street these past few months.

"The R.C. Willey story is a great anecdote to what's wrong with the American financial system today," Benedict said. "Most of the problems that the country is in are a result of greed and excess and this story is about simple principles like honesty, moderation, customer service, putting employees first and those lessons are easy to dismiss as simple. But if you consider the mess we're in now, it's obvious that these principles are what we need."

Copyright Brigham Young University 2 Apr 2009