On March 1, 1987, I opened the doors of my first industrial space. It was a 1500 square foot rectangle and every time I turned on the lights the cockroaches would scurry for cover.

Even that was more than I could afford. I split the building with George Yates, whom I'd met at the 1981 Hawaiian Ironman and who'd started Trico Sports: a company still going and famous for its Ironcase, its saddles and its seat pads.

George "cooked" his seat pads in a waffle-iron like apparatus and he needed an industrial space too, because while baking a seat pad he set his garage on fire.

Me, I was selling a wetsuit I'd designed for use in triathlon. I bought an orange Dodge van for $740 which I named Magic Fingers because a bad U-joint caused it to vibrate at speeds between 45mph and 55mph. I tried to avoid that speed band as I drove it up and down California, visiting prospective retailers and master's swim workouts filled with pro triathletes who all said, "I come from a swim background, I'll swim slower in your wetsuit." (One round trip in a 25-yard pool convinced them otherwise.)

I asked my first retailer whom I'd convinced to carry my wetsuits how payment is typically tendered. "You give us the wetsuits," he said, "and we pay you for them in 30 days."

After my first six months selling according to this program I asked my lone employee, Ray Still, "Does it seem to you we've been sending more wetsuits out than we've been getting money in?" It never occurred to me that retailers would not only fail to pay on time, but fail to pay altogether. I decided I would have to track my accounts receivable. Of course, I did not know prior to that time what an account receivable was, let alone that it had to be tracked.

I did not know what a payroll tax was, or a social security tax. I did not know about all the business returns one files. I did not know what margins, gross profits, operating profits, income statements or balance sheets were.

During my first few years at this I got into some trouble with tax agencies and had to earn my way out of each scrap. As one might guess, I never took a business course in my life, but I reckon I earned an MBA in the school of hard knocks. In fact, for several years at the end of "my" Quintana Roo era I ran a division of a public company, reporting to boards of directors and investment bankers. I'm occasionally asked to sit on boards of directors and this I can do with considerable talent, in the same way a former forger is the best sort of investigator employed by the U.S. Treasury (since I've made every bonehead move in business I know these patterns when I see others engage in them).

When I decided, a year after starting my wetsuit business, that it was time for a new style of triathlon bike, I asked a local bike shop mechanic for a list of tools I should own. Included was a Campagnolo tool set, that is, all the cutting and facing tools used to prep a frame. I taught myself how to use the tools by holding each of them up to a hole on the frame, to see where each tool went. That ought to provide a clue about my then-state of sophistication as a bike manufacturer.

During my entire business tenure since opening the first QR door I felt as if I was faking it. I have read that many successful and famous business owners, educators, writers, filmmakers, feel this way. But I really was faking it.

That is not to say the products I made did not work, just that I very clearly had no resume suggesting I should be taken seriously. And that's the beauty of so many good inventions: they are so simple and practical you don't need any special training to conceive of them, and bring them to market. Indeed, I think my naivete allowed me the freedom to engineer backward from the need in the market, instead of forward from an industry's structured state.

If I was saved, however, it was only by the skin of my teeth. Whenever I did something exceptionally well, it was simply to offset the predicament I was in through doing something exceptionally poorly.

I sleep a split shift nowadays. My head hits the pillow about 9pm, and if I make it to 2 in the morning I've had a pretty good night. I sleep again from three to five or five-thirty, when I get up to make the coffee and, in the winter, make a fire in the woodstove. Fifteen and twenty years ago I slept this same split shift, but that hour in the dead of night was spend worrying about how to get out of the jam I was in. Now that hour is spent anticipating tomorrrow's workout, or what I'm going to plant in the garden, or how I'm going to lay a Saltillo tile floor I've got planned.

I've survived myself. That's the theme of this 20-year anniversary. I suppose I ought to do some sort of theme-based routine, like a birthday set of twenty-times-something. But if I remember to do so on March first, when I wake up in the middle of the night I'll just thank twenty lucky stars in consideration of how fortunate I am to have made it this far.