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Tulsa, 1954. It’s the only green spot in otherwise dusty Oklahoma, a landlocked patch of Midwestern country. The only child in his family, David Childers was driven to succeed by his father, who preached the values of hard work and self-discipline. He often told his lone son that in life, the harder you work the luckier you become. Putting his father’s words to the test, David showed just how “lucky” he could be, when in 2008 he was named one of the world’s most influential people in finance. 

 “When your parents are first-generation-off-the-farm, they’re just thrilled you’re going to college.”

A product of conservative, middle America parents David attended Oral Roberts University, where he earned a degree in history.  This is not where you would expect a man named one of the “most influential” to come from.  Degree in hand, he wanted to go to law school but decided to join a management program that would provide hands-on experience and immediate income, a tempting offer he couldn’t refuse. Management skills came naturally from the beginning; he was soon put in charge of IT departments, trucking, retail stores and warehousing as various organizations. He worked his way to the top and was promoted to vice president and operational officer of a 100-year-old retail chain in Oklahoma.

When his wife, an energy attorney, was offered a job in the Pacific Northwest, David saw it as an opportunity to make a career change and expand his entrepreneurial expertise. Soon after the move, he began working for Oregon Scientific, the world leader in designing and developing technologies to improve objects like thermometers, barometers and clocks. Again, he rose to the top, using his vision and innovation to take the company from selling to small boutiques and stores to mega-corporations like Wal-Mart. He became the company president and CEO, a oregon chain saw sharpener position he held for over seven years. Looking back, he takes pride in the work he did for Oregon Scientific. “We really were a transformational company. We never invented anything groundbreaking; we took popular devices that were analog-based and turned them into products equipped for the digital world.”

But this success did not ultimately satisfy him. After nearly 10 years with Oregon Scientific, David became restless and searched for work that he could find exciting again, something that would challenge his abilities and fill a need in the marketplace. He discovered this upon co-founding EthicsPoint in 2002 after coming across the company during a casual golf match. His experience at Oregon Scientific equipped him with skills to identify a significant market opportunity; the idea was that companies had inefficient strategies and faced multiple bottlenecks in dealing with both hotlines and reporting internal issues and event management relating to ethics and compliance. “I looked at that with a couple of other people and said, ‘Wow, we can really change this.’ We needed to modernize and equip companies with a better way to handle these risk-management issues by offering an on-demand, SaaS (software as a service) model so companies could access the hotlines anywhere in the world in an extremely secure environment that carried high data integrity.”

Unsurprisingly, that’s just what happened. Many businesses would have days go by without getting crucial information to their employees. But with the streamlining strategies created by the team at EthicsPoint, such transactions took less than an hour. “There’s a certain degree of luck that has to come your way,“ David says when looking back at how quickly his company achieved prominence. Part of the immediate success during EthicsPoint’s early stages was due to stricter regulations on documentation of internal incidents and operations put on businesses by Congress through Sarbanes-Oxley. Because of the changing environment, EthicsPoint was able to “go out and attack to own the marketplace.” David attributes the timing of starting EthicsPoint when he did to the “grace of God.”

But the life of this self-titled serial entrepreneur was not always an easy one, and he often had to forgo his personal life to triumph professionally. “The first thing you sacrifice is family time. And, you may not get a new refrigerator because you need a new copier at work.“ All the time spent on airplanes instead of at soccer games became a tough price to pay. Spending days away from his family, with only business associates to talk with, often presented the problem that almost everyone at the top feels: loneliness.

Regardless, David fought through the personal and professional challenges. “I said to everyone in our business, ‘What got us here won’t get us to the next level.’”  Despite enviable business metrics, he continues to push through boundaries aggressively. The difficult economy? Another opportunity. He now makes it his goal to create strategies for companies that allow them to be more cost-effective. “We’re enhancing our technologies to give them an opportunity to do more with less.”

Fast forward four years later, to nearly $20 million in revenue, more than 2000 clients that include Hyatt Hotels, Yahoo!, Associated Press, Comcast, Indiana University, Deloitte, KPMG… Despite such tangible success, David cannot shake his serial-entrepreneur blood and states firmly, “When my time is up here at EthicsPoint, I have a team that can run the company and take it to the next level. The minute I start shuffling papers it is time to start another one.”

Other start-up companies should be so lucky.