When Ed Stack started working at his father as a teenager, he hated it. Instead of playing baseball with his friends outside, he had to spend his summers holed up in Dick’s Bait and Tackle, his dad Richard “Dick” Stack’s 600-square-foot sporting goods store in Binghamton, New York.

The teenaged Stack unloaded merchandise trucks, attached price tags and fought frequently with his father, an unforgiving boss. He dreamed of the day he could go to college and never return.

Dick Stack opened the first Dick's Bait and Tackle in 1948 at age 18. He started the business with $300 from his grandmother.

That was the unlikely start of one of America’s greatest retail success stories. Despite his fantasies of skipping town for good, Stack did return home after getting a degree in accounting from St. John Fisher University in Rochester, New York and ultimately fell in love with the business. In 1984, he and his siblings agreed to pay his father $1.25 million for his two stores, which they later renamed “Dick’s Sporting Goods.”

In the four decades since, Stack has built his family business into a juggernaut with over 860 locations across the U.S. and a market capitalization of more than $18 billion. He remains executive chairman and largest individual shareholder with a net worth of $5.6 billion.

Ed Stack (right) and his four siblings bought out their father more than 40 years ago. He is the only one still involved in running the business.

Stack sources Dick’s’ current success to a series of lessons learned along the way. Below are eight key takeaways from Stack’s 40 years at the helm of Dick’s - that are relevant to just about any entrepreneur. Read the extended profile of Stack and his success here.

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