From a review published: in Knowledge@Emory
http://knowledge.emory.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1345
In 1960, Harry Gilham, not quite 30 years old, had worked for four years in Dalton, GA, for a plumbing supply company with a small lighting department that he had established. A Navy veteran and graduate of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, Gilham had a plan to start his own lighting company, and he walked into an Atlanta bank with confident expectations. “I felt Lady Luck favored me and my dream,” Gilham recalls in his....memoir, Lighting the Way: The Story of Georgia Lighting Company (Middle Camden Press, August 2010). That feeling was short-lived. The senior vice president of the bank—a friend of Gilham’s family—turned down his request for a loan, telling the young man he didn’t have enough experience.
“The banker was wrong,” Gilham writes in his book.
Gilham’s memoir chronicles his Navy service and his 40 years as founder and president of Georgia Lighting Company and World Imports Lighting, which grew to become the second largest lighting company in the U.S., with annual sales of nearly $40 million in 1998. The book closes with the story of the company’s acquisition by The Home Depot in 1999 under the watchful eye of Home Depot co-founder and co-chairman Arthur Blank, and it ends with the lighting company’s dissolution six years later during the tenure of chairman and CEO Robert Nardelli.
Georgia Trend
Publisher Neely Young:
Shining A Light
I want to recommend a book called Lighting the Way by my friend Harry Gilham. It is a warm reflection on his career at the company he founded in 1960 called Georgia Lighting. For our readers who might want to start a new career, Lighting the Way is chock full of good advice on how to begin and implement a successful business plan.
Gilham started his company with only $15,000 in capital and built it into a $40-million operation that was the largest of its kind in the industry. It is more than a business book; it is a book about people, especially those who helped guide him along the way to a major business success story.
In the book Gilham tells delightful stories of the people he worked with all over the world as he traveled to find high-end and moderate-priced lighting fixtures.
To read more, click here:
http://georgiatrend.com/neely-young/11_10_neely.shtml
Copyright 2010 Lighting-Way. All rights reserved.
