The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content)

by Chip Gaines

  And I looked at him and said, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you?” Chip said.

  I know I should have said, “I love you too,” but this whole thing had been such a whirlwind, and I was just trying to process it all. No guy had ever told me he loved me before, and here Chip was saying it after what seemed like such a short period of time.

  Chip got angry. He grabbed his basketball from under my arm and went storming off with it like a four-year-old.

  I really thought, What in the world is with this girl? I just told her I loved her, and that’s all she can say? It’s not like I just went around saying that to people all the time. So saying it was a big deal for me too. But now I was stomping down the driveway going, Okay, that’s it. Am I dating an emotionless cyborg or something? I’m going home.

  Chip took off in his big, white Chevy truck with the Z71 stickers on the side, even squealing his tires a bit as he drove off, and it really sank in what a big deal that must have been for him. I felt bad—so bad that I actually got up the courage to call him later that night. I explained myself, and he said he understood, and by the end of the phone call we were right back to being ourselves.

  Two weeks later, when Chip said, “I love you” again, I responded, “I love you too.” There was no hesitation. I knew I loved him, and I knew it was okay to say so.

  I’m not sure why I ever gave him a second chance when he showed up ninety minutes late for our first date or why I gave him another second chance when he didn’t call me for two months after that. And I’m not sure why he gave me a second chance after I blew that romantic moment in the driveway. But I’m very glad I did, and I’m very glad he did too—because sometimes second chances lead to great things.

  All of my doubts, all of the things I thought I wanted out of a relationship, and many of the things I thought I wanted out of life itself turned out to be just plain wrong. Instead? That voice from our first date turned out to be the thing that was absolutely right.

  TWO

  NEW DIRECTIONS

  The first year Chip and I dated turned out to be my year of letting go—letting go of the notion that my life was going to be predictable in any way, shape, or form.

  By his midtwenties, Chip had already been through a whole series of different businesses. Every time I thought I’d heard it all, he would tell me about something else that he’d done to earn a buck.

  Like in college, I sold Scantron test forms. Those are the answer cards you use when taking certain kinds of tests. The teachers were able to run them through machines, and that sped up the grading process. Students at Baylor had to buy and bring their own Scantron forms to class with them, but hardly anyone ever remembered to do it. So before a test, the teacher would sit up at the front and say, “Who didn’t bring their Scantron?” Two-thirds of the class would raise their hands, and she would sell them Scantron forms for two dollars apiece. This was kind of a slap on the wrist, so-to-speak, because at the bookstore they only cost, like, a dime each.

  I went to the bookstore and bought a whole bunch of these things, and the next time she offered to sell some, I stood up and said, “Mine are only a dollar.” I had so many people buy a Scantron that day, I walked away feeling pretty good about it. After all, I was a business major. I thought that move should’ve earned me an instant A.

  I also sold books for a company called Southwestern Book Company for two summers in college. It was a program where you were sent to a town, usually pretty far from home. Your first objective was to convince people you’d never met to put you up for the summer—for free! And then you’d walk around town selling books door-to-door.

  I’ll tell you—that job changed my perspective as a college student. If you sold a lot of books you could pocket a lot of money, and because of the setup, you had really low overhead. The downside was that it was a ton of work, and it was far from home. Most kids weren’t willing to do that.

  I only spent about three dollars a day on a sandwich and some eggs, so all of the money I made went into my pocket. If I’d been a lifeguard or if I had waited tables over the summers, I would have wound up going out with my buddies and spending half my pay jacking around. But doing that program was almost like being sent to an island somewhere where all you do is work and sleep. And I was good at it.

  I remember reading about work on Alaskan fishing boats where, if things worked out, you could earn north of $6,000 a month. It was grueling, potentially deadly stuff, but with no overhead, the money was all yours. These were the kinds of things I’d sit and think about while I was in class. I realized most people don’t want to do what it takes to do a lot of things. I made up my mind right then and there—I would do whatever it takes to be successful.

  The second summer, in the middle of selling books, I went to east Texas to open a fireworks stand. You can only sell fireworks in Texas during the two weeks before the Fourth of July, so I took the money I’d earned from half a summer’s worth of bookselling and bought a fireworks stand and inventory. This probably seemed like a bonehead move to my parents, but I’d heard there was good money in it.

  My friend Eric and I went in on the stand together. And it was not easy—no doubt about that—but I learned a lot. It was my first experience with investing. I did that the next two summers as well, opening three or four stands in east Texas, and my friend’s uncle, whom I call Uncle Ricky, played a huge role in all of that. From selling books I knew I enjoyed hard work and the thrill of selling, but it was Uncle Ricky who recognized the entrepreneur in me and encouraged me to follow that dream.

  There was something about the way Ricky would say, “Chip, you can do this,” that made me believe I could. He really believed in me and trained me to some extent about simple business practices like paying taxes or understanding assets versus liabilities.

  I took all that experience and used it to open up a lawn-mowing business, which quickly expanded into a full landscaping business with employees, equipment, and clients. Then I got the idea to buy some cheap properties on Third Street in Waco—sort of on the other side of the tracks, so to speak, but within a mile or so of the Baylor campus—so I could rent them out to incoming college students.

  I was rocking and rolling. I wasn’t inventing Facebook or anything like that, but I was definitely what you would call a serial entrepreneur.

  Chip’s experimentation with lots of different kinds of businesses had eventually evolved into flipping houses. By the time we met, he’d successfully done it for a few years. Flipping seemed to be his thing. I have to say it quickly became my favorite venture of his too.

  When explaining to my friends and family what Chip did, I was always a little at a loss. He wasn’t a realtor—at least people would’ve been able to understand that—and I’d never known a career could be made out of buying and selling houses. So even though I spent a lot of my time with Chip kind of playing catch-up to understand it all, it was exciting to me.

  As I said before, Chip was a smart guy. Unconventional, maybe, but he always had the entrepreneurial spirit and business sense to back it up. I was intrigued by this lifestyle of his, maybe because it was wildly different from the “safe” world I’d grown up in. Every day seemed to bring a new adventure, because Chip really did refuse to be put in the nine-to-five box people filed themselves into after college graduation.

  Even when things got complicated, Chip remained fearless. It seemed as if nothing could stop him, and I was hooked. I think that’s why, when we were first dating in our twenties, we were doing things most people our age weren’t doing.

  Before he ever graduated from college, Chip had already figured out the game—banking, negotiations, selling, all of it. Most people in college are studying and dating, and Chip was certainly doing his fair share of that. But mostly he spent his time thinking, What’s the next business I can get into? In that regard, he was kind of a step ahead of a lot of our peers.

  By the time I started helping him with his properties, Chip was known as th
e unofficial “Mayor of Third Street.” He owned a bunch of tiny little houses along this stretch of road that was also home to a school for troubled youth. Before he came in and fixed up some of the old houses to rent to Baylor students, a lot of people in Waco just steered clear of Third Street. But Chip was his fearless self and saw the area as a spot full of underpriced properties with potential.

  The kids at the school were young, and there was something about that age group that made Chip think he still had time to make a difference. He would cruise up and down that street on his four-wheeler, checking on the progress at his various properties and checking in to make sure the tenants didn’t need anything, and when he saw those kids walking by after school, he’d get into conversations and joke around with them.

  He wound up convincing a few of those kids to help out doing lawns and odd jobs on the properties he owned, and he paid them well, which ended up making him a pretty popular guy with them. It seemed that every time he’d give one a job, four more would show up the next day, ready to earn a little money. It was inspiring to watch him work and to see how well he got along with everyone from his crew to his clients to those kids to Uncle Ricky, whom he introduced me to early on.

  An interesting side note: Ricky and his wife made a hobby of importing antiques from Europe. They turned their little backyard into an absolute oasis full of old metal and wooden architectural pieces that he built into the landscape, and every time we went over there the backyard had some new feature added to it. It was like walking from an ordinary Texas front porch into an exotic vacation every time you walked out the back door. I remember thinking, even back then, I would love to do something like that someday.

  So when Chip asked me to help him out that first summer we were dating, as he repainted and generally got his properties fixed up before the new Baylor students arrived in the fall, I was happy to do it. I didn’t know anything about interior design or construction—I’d been a communications major, for heaven’s sake—but I was more than content being his gofer.

  To be honest, I didn’t know any more about interior design or construction than Jo did. I learned it all on the fly. If I needed to put a fence in—or anything else, for that matter—I would just get my hands dirty and figure it out. Everything I did was that way. Story of my life!

  I was still working at my dad’s shop, too, but it was fun for me to see Chip’s collection of little houses get all cleaned up. I liked thinking about the students who would soon be living in them and remembering what it had felt like to move into my first apartment. I wanted to make sure everything was right for those kids.

  Most of the houses weren’t much bigger than eight hundred square feet, so there wasn’t a lot to work with, but I quickly saw how new carpet or a fresh paint color could change the whole atmosphere in a house that small. I liked the feeling of getting these jobs done and then watching the way those kids and their parents would go nuts as they were moving in.

  There was something rewarding about that kind of work. Even if it was something as simple as painting one room, each project had a beginning, middle, and end. You could stand back and actually see what you’d accomplished at the end of the day, and there was something very satisfying in that for me—on top of how much fun it was just to watch Chip do his thing and try to imagine what he might do next.

  It was more than just business. With Chip, it was everything. He was wild at heart, really. If you tried to give him a rule, he would break it. If you gave Chip a boundary, he would cross it.

  Chip was just Chip. There was no box for this guy.

  There’s this movie, Legends of the Fall, where the character named Tristan goes off into these wild places. I’ve always thought of myself as kind of like that.

  And (case in point) the things that would come out of his mouth were unlike anything anyone else would ever think to say. Sometimes it would take me a second to figure out whether he was joking around or drop-dead serious. He kept me on my toes—and I liked it.

  Chip was also extremely kind and giving. I swear every time we’d see a homeless guy, Chip would stop and talk to him. Sometimes he’d give him money. Sometimes he’d give him a job for the day. Heck, if the weather was bad, he’d even put him up in a hotel.

  We’d be walking downtown, and I’d hear, “Chip. Hey, Chip!” and I’d turn to see a person approaching us who, frankly, might have scared me if I was walking downtown by myself. Chip wouldn’t be scared. He’d know the guy by name: “James! How’s it going, brother?” It seemed as if every homeless guy in Waco knew Chip Gaines.

  On the flip side, every banker in Waco knew Chip too. And he talked to those two very different groups of people exactly the same way. There was never any difference in Chip’s demeanor. His enthusiasm for life and work and people was just infectious, and he surprised me with it again and again. At least once a day I caught myself thinking, Wow, this guy!

  Best of all, as happy as Chip Gaines was, he seemed happiest around me.

  I’m a generally happy person. My mom says I was a happy baby. But it’s a fact—I was always happiest around Jo. And I still am.

  One pretty amazing thing we learned early on was that the more time we spent together, the better our relationship was. I think a lot of couples feel the need to get away from each other now and then, to take little breaks, and they come back after a girls’ weekend or a guys’ fishing trip or something all refreshed and happy to reconnect because they missed each other.

  We were just the opposite, and still are. We seem to give each other energy. We function better together than we do apart, and I don’t think either one of us has ever felt the urge to say, “I need a break from you.”

  Don’t get me wrong; we’ve certainly had our share of disappointment and arguments, but we just always wanted to tackle our issues together.

  The two of us never talked about marriage during that first year we were together, but I knew pretty quickly that we were in this for the long haul, and I almost had to convince myself that it was okay to be in love with this man. I kept reminding myself, “With Chip, my life isn’t gonna look like what I thought it was gonna look like—but there will be adventure, and there will be some fun.”

  My parents were the type of people who locked their doors and had an alarm system. For my whole life they encouraged me to go after what I wanted, to get a good education, even to go to New York for that internship. But they also encouraged me to use caution—and I did.

  Chip was the polar opposite. For example, whenever we went out shopping or to restaurants, he would leave his keys in the car. Who leaves their keys in the car in today’s world? It was a real problem for us for a while, because my first instinct when I got out of the car was to lock the doors. So we’d come back after dinner and realize I’d locked Chip’s keys in the car again.

  I remember that! In college, I would not only leave my keys in the car, but half the time I would forget and leave it running.

  What’s ironic about Jo and my parents is Jo’s parents were pretty much hippies in their younger years. Her dad served in Vietnam, and he was this tall, quiet, lanky guy with glasses, and her mom was this vivacious Korean woman who just loved life. They both have the best stories. When I first saw pictures of the two of them from before Jo was born, they looked like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. They were right in the thick of all that went on during the sixties. But despite that youthful “rebellion,” they turned out to be the kind of cautious parents who were concerned with traditions and playing it safe.

  My parents both grew up in a little bitty town called Archer City, Texas, and they were straight as an arrow, but they left the garage door open all day, even when they were out. They wouldn’t even think about locking the doors. My mom saw an upside to everything, and I think that’s part of what made me so optimistic and adventurous.

  I have to say, I’m very thankful that Jo’s parents were all right with us being together. They could have said, “This guy is not gonna work, and you need to move
in a different direction.” And honestly, Jo was so obedient that, just for the sake of responsibility or obligation or whatever you want to call it, she might have broken it off. But her parents, even early on, were supportive and encouraging. And my parents were of course supportive of her. They still say to this day she is the best thing that ever happened to me.

  Despite all the differences between my dad and Chip, Dad knew that he had a good heart, and he saw something in Chip that he knew was right for me.

  People say opposites attract, and I think the fact that Chip and I were together for anything beyond a first date proves that point pretty well. But the fact that we stayed together goes to something a little deeper. The fact that we were opposites on the surface didn’t negate the fact that we were both raised by loving parents, in loving families, and that we both love our families dearly. Our roots were important to both of us, and that one common bond, to me, plays a big role in what has kept us together.

  Not that we’re perfect or anything. Don’t get the wrong idea. There were times when we would fight like cats and dogs. And Jo’s tough. But there was just something about her. We’d work through it. Whatever stupid mistake I made—and there was plenty of stuff that set her off—we’d find a way to get through it, and we’d wind up being even closer to each other in the end. Every time.

  Jo was more perfect for me than I ever could have imagined. After we’d been dating about a year, I honestly couldn’t imagine my life without her. So I decided to do the traditional thing and went and asked Jo’s dad for her hand in marriage. Honestly, that was one of the best days of my life. I couldn’t have been more nervous, and he was just so supportive. Both of our families were supportive. And as soon as I was over that hurdle, I started planning a way to surprise her and ask her to marry me in a way that she’d never forget.