Sarah Blakely was standing at the door of yet another office that did not want to see her coming. For seven years she sold fax machines door to door, getting business cards ripped in her face and being escorted out of buildings so often that, as she put it, ‘rejection is my middle name.’ That relentless conditioning turned out to be the exact preparation a self-funded founder needed. When she finally sat down with her only investor – herself – and spent the $5,000 she had saved to start Spanx, she was already completely unfazed by the word no.
From Beverly Hills to Atlanta in search of real answers
The hunt for that story started on the streets of Beverly Hills, where a film producer mentioned almost in passing that she had amassed close to $2 billion in revenue before brushing past the camera. A few blocks later, a finance veteran who had been buying residential real estate since the 1990s paused long enough to share the structure behind her portfolio: more than 50 LLCs, one for every business and every property, because, as she said flatly, ‘an LLC is a veil of protection and everybody should understand their taxes.’
The journey then shifted overnight to Atlanta, touching down at 5:00 a.m. and heading straight into Buckhead Village. There, a tech founder who had left Wall Street in 2013 broke down exactly where the wealthiest people she had encountered actually keep their money. Her formula, drawn from direct access to billionaires’ bank accounts: roughly 80 percent in marketable securities such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and ETFs; about 10 percent in cash; and the remaining 10 percent in alternative investments like real estate and private holdings. ‘You cannot save or work your way to wealth,’ she said. ‘You can only invest your way there.’ She made just under $10 million in her single best year and described herself as the first person in her family to attend college, the first entrepreneur, and the first millionaire – a Howard University graduate who once felt like she did not belong on her Wall Street floor, until she realized that being in that room was itself the proof she belonged.
The $5,000 bet that changed women’s wardrobes
Blakely’s account of launching Spanx carries the texture of someone who learned by doing rather than by asking permission. She kept the idea entirely secret for a full year before telling anyone, reasoning that ‘ideas are the most vulnerable in the moment you have them.’ When she finally landed a spot in Neiman Marcus, she bought bins from Office Depot and quietly moved them to every cash register in the store, a placement nobody had approved. By the time management noticed, customers were already buying like crazy, and the CEO told his team to let her keep going.
She sold Spanx after 21 years for $1.2 billion, having never taken a single outside investor. Every scaling decision, every intuition call, every risk belonged entirely to her. ‘I always pay attention to intuition over data,’ she said, ‘and I don’t think investors really understand that. So that worked in my favor because intuition’s not on a spreadsheet.’
Her final advice to anyone trying to build something: solve a problem, bet on yourself, and have fun.
The fax machine she eventually stopped selling
Somewhere in Atlanta, the bins Blakely once smuggled into a Neiman Marcus hosiery department are long gone, but the logic that put them there is still running.
Blakely spent seven years knocking on doors for a product that became obsolete, and then used everything that job taught her to build one that filled a void women had been waiting for. The $5,000 she did not spend on a vacation is still the most cited startup figure in the story – a number she arrived at after a very short meeting with her only investor.
