A few weeks ago, I listened to an interview with Syed Balkhi, founder of WPBeginner and Awesome Motive. He recommended the trilogy of books on Roy Thomson, who founded what became the Thomson Reuters media empire and whose family is one of the wealthiest families in Canada. I wanted to learn more about Roy, so I read Roy Thomson of Fleet Street by Russell Braddon.

Roy was born in 1894 and raised in Toronto, Canada, by working-class parents. As a kid, he developed a love for numbers. For fun, he manually calculated the statistics of all baseball players from information he found in newspapers. At age 14, to help his family, he dropped out of school and started working full-time doing administrative work for local businesses.

Roy’s aunt was a shrewd investor. But Roy was shocked to learn she didn’t keep any records. He used his newly acquired bookkeeping skills to record her investments. She rewarded him by loaning him money to invest alongside her. Roy was obsessed with making money and was excited to invest with his aunt. At 17, he proclaimed to coworkers he’d be a millionaire by age 30.

The investments with his aunt did well, and Roy reinvested profits to buy his employer’s stock. He built an impressive $15,000 portfolio. Roy excelled at work. He became a branch manager and did outside sales for a local company. That role was pivotal because it taught him how to sell and, more importantly, helped him discover his passion for doing deals.

In 1917, Roy married Irma, and by the end of 1918, they had two children. Anxious to get rich, he took his $15,000, quit his job, and moved his family to remote Saskatchewan to become a farmer. The decision to purchase and farm 640 acres was a disastrous mistake. Roy lost much of his investment when he gave up farming within a year. He was 25, and he realized he couldn’t take losses like that if he wanted to become a millionaire by 30.

Automobile sales were exploding in 1920. Roy and his brother Carl pooled their money to start a company selling replacement parts to garages. To expand, they bought a machine shop, and by 1924 they’d grown the company to $700,000 in sales.

Roy was buying parts from manufacturers and selling them to garages. Expanding this business required inventory, which required capital, which Roy and Carl didn’t have. When the garages were slow to pay their bills, Roy and Bill had cash flow issues. They almost went bankrupt.

The brothers reworked their debts, and Roy left Toronto for Ottawa, which he saw as an untapped market for automotive parts. He and Carl set up a new Ottawa company, Service Supplies Limited. At the same time, in 1925, radios were new. Manufacturers were eager to sell them to businesses that sold to consumers. Trying to dig himself out of debt, Roy started selling radios too. By 1928, the new company was doing $80,000 a year in sales and the debts from their shuttered business had been paid off.

Roy wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to grow the company more. Hearing about Trimmis and Kirkland Lake, two rural cities thriving because of gold mines in Ontario, Roy moved his family to North Bay, Ontario, in 1928. Roy realized he had to help rural dealers. They didn’t know how to sell radios to consumers. Roy devised a door-to-door sales strategy that let consumers test radios for a week. If they liked them, he hoped they’d buy them. The strategy was innovative, but there was a significant problem that Roy and his dealers had overlooked: there was no radio signal in this remote area. There was nothing for people to listen to on the radio.

With the depression beginning to affect Roy’s dealers and payments from them to Roy slowing, Roy started to ponder how he could solve this problem. The more he thought about it, the more he realized there was only one way to solve it. He had to start a radio station.