General Finishes was founded in 1928 by a Milwaukee lumber company to make finishes for their cabinet-shop customers. When I bought the company in 1984, sales were $200,000 and our plant was a 2000-square-foot dry cleaning storefront in a residential neighborhood of West Allis. General Finishes started with two employees: Rob made the product one can at a time, and I sold the products one store at a time. By 1988 we had moved into a real plant and added a six-head pour machine with an automatic ladder. We bought a used forklift and our ranks swelled to six.