Comfy Profits

David Jennings knows something about building a manufacturing company.

He and five partners built Advanced Lighting Technologies from a startup inside the basement of a 100-year-old farmhouse in Ohio, and turned it into a corporate giant with 1,500 employees and $100 million in annual sales. Together, they took Advanced Lighting public in 1995, raising $29 million in an initial offering and another $38 million in a secondary offering eight months later.

By the time he left in 1998 as president of Advanced Lighting, the company's annual sales of metal halide bulbs reached $185 million. Jennings and his wife, Elizabeth Sotz, an electrical engineer with General Electric, retired to Fort Myers. “We looked all over and as far as Hawaii,” Jennings says of his experience seeking a retirement home. “This is the best area in the world to be.”