Editor’s Note: Mark Chapin Johnson rose from a troubling childhood to create Chapin Medical, which he ran for 33 years until selling it in 2005 to AmerisourceBergen. Johnson is also known for his long-time involvement in Orange County Republican politics, including co-founding the New Majority in 1998. What follows are excerpts from his book, “The Luckiest Man in the World; an autobiography,” which was published last year.
My biological father, Clement Conrad Johnson, was the world’s greatest salesman. Think I’m exaggerating? He became the No. 1 salesman in the U.S. for Chevrolet. He started a trucking firm that prospered.
When I was five years old, my dad dropped dead on a golf course in 1951.
My mother, a two pack-a-day alcoholic, remarried. I was in the third or fourth grade in San Marino when my mother and new stepdad thought it would be entertaining to send me on an errand to get “elbow grease.” I went to the store and couldn’t find it. I came home.
“Mom, I couldn’t find a jar of elbow grease anywhere.”
“Did you ask? No? Go back and ask somebody.”
So, I went back, and I asked for a jar of elbow grease. Only then did I learn what elbow grease meant. I’d no idea until the amused shopkeeper told me. I went home.
Only a short walk, but it drilled right down inside of me, confusion, worry that I wasn’t doing what she wanted, that disorientation kids always feel when they don’t understand what’s happening.
I went back into the house for the second time. My mother was incapable of empathy, so to her it was a joke. It’s a textbook example of why my mother should never have been a mother. Even 70 years later, it’s a story that hurts.
She messed me up; she broke many things in me. But in making me the insecure, desperate, hyperactive, self-starting, recovering genius narcissist that I am, she exquisitely equipped me for the life of the entrepreneur. With an upbringing like that, I could face just about anything. Thanks, Mom.
From a Kid into a Man
At 11 or 12, I started working odd jobs here or there for my own money. I worked at a little TV store on the corner for around 25 cents an hour, cleaning up and putting things away.
I also liked to hang out at the Army surplus store and buy electronic surplus. I was really into radios and telephones and electronic things and had to find out how they worked.
I had a paper route where I’d wake up every morning at 4:40 a.m. At age 12, I started pumping gas, which turned out to be my main job for the next eight years.
When I was 17 in 1963, I thought I knew everything.
I enlisted in the Army, where basic training and a First Sergeant Rodriguez turned me in four months from a kid who thought he knew everything into a man. It also made me a medic, a choice that would eventually make me millions.
After a year of service, I left the Army and went into the Reserves. At the age of 20, I married Dianne. I became a file clerk at Allstate where I learned how policies and sales worked.
While I didn’t like this starter job, I learned to keep my eyes open and learn how the business works.
When I got my first paycheck, $95, I tossed it on the table and like a jerk told Dianne, “I cannot live on this salary. I’m going to be a millionaire by the time I’m 35,” which was particularly ironic in that I had already accumulated huge debt.
Recognizing my stupidity, I took a second full-time job on the nightshift at a hospital for a year to pay off my debt that had grown to $3,500, or about $25,000 in today’s dollars. I would never go in debt again.
I took a new job at a securities company, where I would research publicly traded firms. I loved the job — it was where I learned about money. I then started my own firm, Eastland Securities Corp. I was 21.
Then the stock market tanked; we kept our company going, but I took another job at Cutter Laboratories, a division of Bayer; I learned all about plasma and IV solutions.
It was the ultimate in people-oriented work. All the folks I dealt with were directors in a hospital setting, the folks who ran the pharmacies inside the hospital.
I talked to the head nurses: after all, they do most of the direct patient service in a hospital. I also spoke to a fair number of doctors, and to the folks who ran emergency rooms and operating suites. And I absolutely loved the eyeball-to-eyeball personal contact.
My taxable income for 1970 was a modest $6,478; by 1974 my income jumped 13-fold to $79,483, which was $506,269 in 2025 dollars.
I developed a sales technique: create a friendship with your customers. If you create friendships and ask for a sale, a friend will help you and a stranger will not.
At the age of 24, I started my own business on the side. But first, I’d stay at Cutter for three more years, learning the industry inside and out. When I left to officially for what became Chapin Medical, Cutter made my Anaheim-based company an authorized dealer.
At that time the most a distributor in my territory had done in sales for Cutter was $200,000 a year. For my first year, I was aiming for $500,000. In the first year, I had $1.5 million in sales.
I made my fortune by understanding these three principles:
1.) Supply was variable;
2.) Prices were also therefore variable; and
3.) Expensive products + absolutely rigid sell-by dates = everybody’s trying to keep their inventories down.
All this meant opportunity if you could only seize it.
Competitors Out of the Woodworks
When I started Chapin, I focused on therapeutic plasma products and IV solutions. We handled, at most, 200 line items as opposed to 60,000 at drug wholesaler warehouses.
Chapin was designed to provide very expensive products that we could inventory in depth and hedge against market volatility. Chapin had been the first and only such specialty distributor for several years.
When other people saw that, imitators came out of the woodwork. By the 1990s, no matter what I did to grow my business, the pie wasn’t growing quickly, while the number of companies taking slices was exploding.
In 30 years, I had gone from zero competitors to hundreds. My growth prospects became profoundly limited.
Chapin had millions of dollars in receivables at any one time, on products with profit margins of only 2% or less, all with dialysis centers or MD owner groups that were getting squeezed to contain costs. I was increasingly concerned these groups might not be able to pay me.
If a single big client like a dialysis group owed me $20 million and it went bankrupt, Chapin itself would have gone bankrupt in a month.
I realized one customer could put me out of business. I intentionally started to jettison a lot of that business, going from $75 million in annual sales down to $20 million, but even so I didn’t have an appreciable drop in profits.
By the time I sold the company in 2005, it was for $3 million; I could have gotten about 10 times that if I had sold a decade earlier.
Still, my timing was great. Within weeks of that sale, a variety of federal and state legislative changes went into effect, such that my business would have been unsellable a couple of months later.
Hundreds of similar companies did go under. AmerisourceBergen was hardly despondent; its Chapin division prospers to this day.
I loved running that business. I loved building it, loved the income and loved the personal relationships. It was dynamic and absorbing and fun, one of the wonderful blessings of my life. But I don’t miss it at all. I never wished I hadn’t sold it. I don’t look back. It was a wonderful, long chapter in my life.
Postscript: After completing several years as chairman of the Segerstrom Center and selling Chapin, I began my university journey, completing my bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. at 65. I’m now a trustee and professor of political science at two universities, Chapman and Claremont Graduate University.
