Brightpoint: it's not a household name but the global distributor touches one of every five wireless devices in U.S. and 42 million worldwide.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Cover story

LOOK AT ROBERT LAIKIN'S resume and you might conclude that he's a serial entrepreneur. Though he's now settled in as CEO of Brightpoint Inc., one of the biggest players in the wireless business, back in his Indiana University days he was so occupied with starting new businesses that his education became an afterthought.

While in Bloomington in the early 1980s, he rented out bunk beds, brokered tickets and put video games into restaurants to share the revenue. "My grades kept going down and down but I was making more and more money," he recalls. Laikin left Bloomington only partway through his undergraduate studies, picked up some classes at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis but mostly kept at the business of business. He became involved in renovating historic properties, then contracting, then painting. The ticket brokerage he helped launch in college continued to grow and branched into travel.

By the middle of the 1980s, the high-flying young entrepreneur's life changed forever when a salesman named Arnie Goldberg walked into his office and sold him an expensive new gadget. "It was a briefcase phone--I think I paid $4,000 of $5,000 for it," Laikin recalls. Besides being pricey, the phone's coverage was poor and its signal was often full of static. "He came back a month later and said, 'How do you like the phone?' and I said, 'I love this phone!'"

Laikin gave Goldberg a list of 100 referrals he thought would be good candidates to buy one of the new mobile phones. Within three weeks, Goldberg bad sold phones to half of the people on the list and came back for more names. "I said, 'I want to go into business with you,'" Laikin says. An Indianapolis company named Century Car Phones emerged, and Laikin's attention finally became focused on just one industry: wireless communications.

As the young company quickly grew, Laikin watched as his out-of-town wholesale supplier made a small fortune as a middleman. With a few other investors, Laikin in 1989 launched Wholesale Cellular USA, which today is known as Plainfield-based Brightpoint. As the cell-phone business grew, so did Brightpoint. The company went public in 1994, and today is a $2.1 billion organization operating in 14 countries. In 2005, Brightpoint handled 42 million wireless devices, says president Mark Howell.

"In the U.S., we touch one out of every five wireless devices, and our customers area who's who," Howell says. "We send out 15,000 to 20,000 orders a day"...