Doubling down.

• Author: Goldberg, Steve
• Position: Features - Bruton Smith's Business Strategies

Gambler. It's a bad word to Bruton Smith. Ask him if he is one, and he's dismissive. "Somebody sitting on the outside who doesn't know anything about my business might believe that, but they would never win the argument with me. Unless they are here, they do not know what they are talking about."

But try to reconcile that with the risks--don't dare call them gambles--he has taken to build the two public companies he runs, Speedway Motorsports Inc. and Sonic Automotive Inc. Smith, as chairman, CEO and majority shareholder of both, is the only person who controls two companies in Business North Carolina's Top 75 ranking of the state's largest public companies, which was compiled this year by Wachovia Securities. Sonic is No. 21; Speedway, No. 24.

"He's been bold enough to take chances," says his son, Marcus, who is 29 and Speedway Motorsports' vice president for business development. "He has been wise enough to learn from his mistakes and not afraid to know when he's messed up. He builds from that and makes it a success."

In the early '80s, he built condos at what has since become Lowe's Motor Speedway, which Speedway Motorsports owns, when everyone, including his longtime lieutenant, told him he was nuts. In 1995, he started building a $250 million track in Texas with no guarantee he would get even one of the two NASCAR races he thought he needed to make the thing profitable. But perhaps his biggest gamble was one of his earliest. In 1975, little more than a decade after he and a partner had led what was then called Charlotte Motor Speedway into bankruptcy, he bought it back.

To Smith, these were, at worst, calculated risks. If they began in his gut, he backed them up with his brain, gathering facts and doing due diligence. He's a sponge for information, reading three newspapers a day--The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Charlotte Observer--and keeping the TV in his office tuned to CNN. He says he takes chances only when the odds are in his favor. Don't most gamblers say that?

In Smith's mind, even his mistakes were smart decisions when he made them. Such as the time in the '80s when he bought into a Charlotte savings and loan association that ended up being seized by federal regulators. Or just recently, when he started his own dot-com, only to see it crater like so many others. An auction site, SoldUSA.com was supposed to be a market for cars, accessories and auto-racing collectibles. It closed in April. "He doesn't mind risk-taking...