Bette Nesmith Graham was a bad secretary and a great entrepreneur. She was also the inventor of Liquid Paper, an office product that helped millions of administrative professionals.
Bette’s original product was called Mistake Out, which she formed a company around in 1956. The product took a few different forms, but was some variation of small bottle or pen with the signature correction fluid. Over the next twenty five years, Bette and others grew the small start-up through traditional sales to distributors and promotion within the office product industry. Mistake Out became Liquid Paper.
Building a company of this magnitude alone would have been remarkable, but Nesmith shared with me a conversation he had with Bette’s staff after she passed away in 1980. “I remember talking to her accountant, and he looked at me and said, ‘You know, this company should never have existed. She built it out of nothing. Literally nothing,’” Nesmith remembered. “She built the company with no cash, and just supported us with her secretary job for years.
All of this remarkable growth happened without any outside investment. Bette was strongly against “growing fast on other people’s money,” as she said in that same 1977 speech. “I did not believe in outside short term borrowing to grow. It has grown one step at a time and by avoiding short cuts. It has grown by increasing productivity and by stretching capabilities to meet the demand,” she said.
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