I drove Dad's truck all the way to High Point, North Carolina. The furniture capital of America.

I didn't know anyone. I rented a garage behind a laundromat for two hundred dollars a month, and I started making tables. The way Dad taught me. Solid Michigan maple. Hand-cut joints. No shortcuts.

I sold the first one online for nine hundred dollars. I delivered it myself, in Dad's truck, to a couple in Charlotte.

Then I sold another. And another.

People were tired of furniture that fell apart in three years. They wanted something real. Something made in America, by people who cared.

I called my company Harlan & Co.

The first year, it was just me. The second year, six people. The fifth year, a hundred and twenty.

Ten years later, Harlan & Co. had three hundred employees, a big factory in High Point, and sixty million dollars in sales a year.

And a problem.

We couldn't make furniture fast enough. Customers were waiting four months for a dining table. We needed a second factory.

That summer, I saw a notice online. A property auction in Michigan.

Former Haddon Furniture Works. 180,000 square feet. Equipment included. Offers invited. I bought it a month later. For one point four million dollars. Through a company with a boring name, so nobody would guess.

Nobody in Haddon knew.

Not even my dad.