Millionaires Like Dick Portillo Are Expanding ‘Ordinary’ Businesses

50 years ago, Dick Portillo didn’t expect to become a millionaire. When he opened a hot dog stand in 1963 with $1,100, he didn’t even know how to cook a hot dog. 

“I came from a poor family, and at one time thought I didn’t have anything to offer the world,” Portillo wrote in his memoir, titled Out of the Dog House. He explained that he grew up in one of Chicago’s most dangerous housing projects and was the youngest of three children born to immigrant parents from Mexico and Greece. 

His humble beginnings didn’t stop him from working hard. He poured hours of effort into his hot dog business and, by 2014, had created the largest privately owned restaurant company in the Midwest. The company had 4,000 employees and no franchises or external investors. One Portillo’s location could generate up to $9 million in revenue per year. 

In 2014, Portillo sold the company to private equity firm Berkshire Partners for nearly $1 billion. He used the money to buy a mansion in Chicago, a private jet and a waterfront home in Naples, Florida.  

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Portillo’s story is the kind that usually flies under the radar. He owned a private company, sold hot dogs and built his success gradually over decades in the Midwest. He wasn’t a tech billionaire or an overnight success. 

Still, he is far from an exception. All across the country, business owners are quietly building serious wealth through companies that may look “ordinary” from the outside, per the Journal. 

Some started from scratch, while others took over family companies and expanded on what earlier generations built. Their businesses may not dominate headlines, but they provide familiar services and eventually become fixtures in their communities. 

Living in an Age of Millionaires

The Journal asserted that America is now living through its first real Age of Millionaires. Though popular culture tends to depict wealthy people as part of a small, rarefied club, private business wealth has become far more widespread. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the U.S. has three million millionaires who are collectively worth more than $65 trillion. The number of millionaires worth more than $100 million has more than quadrupled since 2001. 

Chances are, you know a millionaire without realizing it. They may be coaching your kid’s soccer team, making small talk at a school fundraiser or standing beside you at a neighborhood cookout. 

They could be the veterinarian who turned one clinic into a regional network, the commercial contractor whose trucks seem to be everywhere or the owner of a local restaurant group that keeps adding locations. These millionaires do not necessarily look like the tech billionaires we imagine when we think of wealth. More often, they are simply familiar faces running businesses that have become part of everyday life.

Where do these millionaires come from? Research conducted by the Journal found that most millionaires have roots in poor or middle-class families. Only one in four business owners worth $5 million or more inherited their businesses.