Her small retirement fund.
Equity in the house.
A loan from a community bank whose manager knew my father.
On the third night, I told her we should forget it.
She looked at me.
“Why?”
“Because I could lose the house.”
“Yes.”
“We could lose everything.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not helping.”
She smiled.
“You didn’t ask if it was safe, Walter. You asked if I thought you could do it.”
I stared at her.
She reached across the table and put her hand on mine.
“I think you can.”
That became Nowak Power Systems.
It was not called that immediately.
For the first few years, it had the old owner’s name because changing signs cost money and I cared more about making payroll.
Those early years were not heroic.
There were months when I knew exactly how many days remained before accounts receivable had to arrive.
I learned payroll taxes through fear.
I learned insurance because one mistake nearly cost us a contract.
I learned estimating after underbidding a warehouse renovation so badly that I personally worked twelve-hour shifts for three weeks because hiring another electrician would have erased the entire profit.
Danuta kept the books.
At first, she did it after Marek went to sleep.
Later, she became the financial spine of the company.
She remembered which customers paid late before spreadsheets made the pattern obvious.
She challenged me when I wanted to buy equipment too early.
She pushed me to invest when I became too cautious.
I handled field operations.
She handled money.
Together, we grew.
Six electricians became twelve.
Twelve became thirty.
Residential work gradually disappeared.
Commercial work grew.
Then industrial.
A food distributor hired us to rebuild part of a refrigeration facility after another contractor missed deadline after deadline.
We completed it.
That led to cold storage.
Cold storage led to warehouses.
Warehouses led to utility coordination.
Utility work introduced us to hospital facilities managers.
Hospitals changed everything.
Hospitals do not care whether your truck is impressive.
They care whether a backup system works when the primary feed fails at two in the morning during a snowstorm.
That kind of work rewards people who understand boring details.
Load calculations.
Redundancy.
Maintenance schedules.
Generator testing.
Transfer switches.
Things most people never notice because success means nothing happens.
That suited me.
By the time Marek was ten, we were operating across northeastern Pennsylvania.
By the time he finished high school, we were working in three states.
Today, Nowak Power Systems operates across six states in the Northeast.
Hospitals.
Data centers.
Cold-storage distribution centers.
Airport infrastructure.
Critical backup systems.
Industrial facilities large enough that walking from one end to the other can take twenty minutes.
Last year, revenue came in just under two hundred ninety million dollars.
Herb Kline, my accountant of twenty-two years, estimates the enterprise value of the company somewhere north of five hundred million.
Depending on backlog.
Equipment.
Contract renewals.
Market conditions.
A lot of numbers I still find faintly ridiculous.
Almost nobody in my personal life knew them.
That was intentional.
Danuta and I made that choice together.
Even when the company became successful enough that we could have moved anywhere, we stayed on Vine Street.
Same brick house.
Same crooked porch.
Same kitchen, though we eventually replaced the cabinets because Danuta threatened to divorce me if one more drawer came off its track.
We drove Fords.
Sometimes new.
Usually not.
I wore work boots long after I stopped needing to be on job sites every day because polished dress shoes made me feel like I was impersonating somebody.
Marek went to the public school two blocks away.
During summers, he worked at our warehouse.
Not in an executive internship.
Inventory.
Sweeping.
Loading deliveries.
Counting fittings.
Cleaning metal shavings.