You can start a company with the money in your savings account. Win a client and use what they pay you to hire another person. Repeat that for long enough and your customers build the company for you. The hard part is to keep going when the numbers stop going up.

Bill Stone started SS&C in 1986 with about $20,000 in savings ($63,000 in today’s money). He was 30. In the first year he had 4 people and $86,000 in revenue. SS&C now employs 29,000 people, Forbes puts his fortune at $3.6 billion , and Stone still leads the company 40 years later. Those 40 years included hard decisions, a market crash that stopped demand for his first product, and a share price that collapsed within months of going public.

I started my first business at 22 with less than $1,000, after 15 jobs, and sold it for seven figures 10 years later. We had a lot to talk about when I interviewed Stone about how he kept going. Here are the 6 decisions that took him from a one man show to 29,000 people.

How Bill Stone built a multi-billion-dollar company from his modest life savings

Let your first clients fund the company

Stone quit his consulting job at KPMG in 1986 with an idea and no investors. “I could win a few clients and that became my capital,” he told me. “When I would win clients, I would hire people.” I asked if it was that simple. Get clients . “That’s right,” he said.

The first outside money came in 1990, about $4 million of investment from General American Life and Conning. I asked whether having that capital gave Stone the financial security to go to the moon. “We might not have been able to go to the moon, but without that, we might’ve gone down.” Stone has watched cash ever since. “Companies don’t go out of business because they’re not making money. They go out of business because they run out of cash.” Make sales before you raise. The cash in the bank decides how long you get to keep playing.

Go where the opportunity is

Finding the opportunity wasn’t always simple. His first market disappeared in a day. At the time, SS&C sold systems to brokerage firms, and on October 19, 1987, the Dow fell 22.6% . “After October of ‘87, people weren’t buying brokerage systems,” Stone said. “That game was over.” He moved to asset managers and insurers and built CAMRA , a new accounting system for them. After his first live demo, people lined up to ask the price. “For a minute there, I thought I was a rock star.” Stay proud of where you started, and leave the market when people stop buying.

Stone is one of 9 siblings. All 9 grew up in Evansville, Indiana, and all 9 left the state, following their parents’ advice to go where opportunity is. Stone and his wife, Mary, have committed $50 million to projects in Evansville. When people criticize their hometowns in front of him, Stone tells them, “Seems like it was good enough to make you.”

Make customers happy enough to hire you back

Customers pay every salary at SS&C, and Stone makes sure nobody forgets. “They’re the ones that pay us,” he said. “When they quit paying us, it means trouble.” He always says “earn” rather than “win” clients, so they hear how seriously he takes their business.

Happy customers still get upset, and Stone listens. “You can’t just be some expert wizard and think everyone is going to fall in line,” he said. “People are humans.” He warned about hurting a client’s feelings by accident. “If you don’t know that you did, then you don’t know how to apologize. And that’s about the end of that relationship.” Your best client can leave over one hurt feeling you never noticed.

Do whatever the company needs

Ask Stone what his job is and he gives you a list. “If I need to sell, I sell. If I need to work on designing a system, I work on designing a system,” he said. “Whatever the company needs, that’s my job.” Call it roll-up-your-sleeves leadership. Earning business “doesn’t come to people that are unwilling to do the work.”

Stone kept the habit as SS&C grew. With 29,000 people in the company, he still answers his phone himself, along with every email and text. Roll up your sleeves at 4 people and keep them rolled up at 29,000. Commit to the front line so you don’t miss a thing.

Let your team make the big calls

SS&C had to pick a computing platform in the late 1980s. Stone asked his smartest people, “What should we do here?” They picked Windows on Intel chips, and they were right. He gave them the decision and kept asking questions. His method for empowering people sounds easy. “Well, you let them. And if it doesn’t work, you stop letting them.”

Giving people authority also means telling them when it goes wrong. “If you want to be the boss and you’re never going to be willing to give anybody bad news, you’re not going to be very successful,” Stone said. When clients yelled at his staff, Stone called the clients himself. “Yell at me,” he told them. “These people are just doing the best they can.” Give your team the decision. Take the yelling yourself.

In 1988, SS&C had 38 people. A year later it had 26. “I had to let 12 of them go. Not easy.” The company went public on May 31, 1996, at $19 a share. Its first earnings report missed by a penny, and Stone says the stock went from $25 to $3. As CEO, Stone had allocated 5% of the IPO shares to friends and family. “That’s when you learn that, well, you still got family. The friends all scatter.” Around 1999, their Y2K and euro conversion work stopped overnight, and headcount fell from 610 to 250.

Every founder I’ve interviewed has a different strategy for almost everything. The one thing they all agree on is don’t give up. “You get knocked down, you know what you do? You get up,” Stone said. “Good things happen too,” he tells his team, and then a big contract comes in. “When you’re in the middle of a thicket, the only way out is through,” he said.

The billion-dollar lessons behind Bill Stone’s 29,000-person company

Stone can recite his headcount and revenue for almost every year since 1986. He remembers the details because he cares. “The more things change, the more things stay the same,” he said. AI speeds up his code reviews. It won’t tell someone on your team they did a great job. Counting families, Stone feels responsible for close to 100,000 people. “I had these people trust me. So I never wanted to break that trust.” Win another client this month, and treat every person who joins you as someone who trusted you.

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