Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt believed that "The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people."

Paul Orfalea is one person that knows how to build relationships.

Suffering from undiagnosed attention deficit hyper disorder and dyslexia throughout his childhood, Orfalea was a "C" student in college. He graduated from college with a degree in finance in 1971. It was difficult for him to hold a job so he decided to start his own company to make money.

He asked his father to co-sign a long for $5,000 and leased an 80-square-foot former hamburger stand in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and rented a small Xerox copier, charging customers four cents a page. He got the idea for a photocopy store from watching students make copies in the school library. His goal was to offer college students with products and services they needed at a competitive price.

He named the store Kinko's after his curly red hair. The store also sold notebooks and pens so he had to wheel the copier out on the sidewalk when the premises became too crowded. To supplement his income Orfalea also went from one dormitory room to another in the evenings, hawking his wares from a knapsack.

When his first Kinko's proved a success, Orfalea decided to open stores on other college campuses. Lacking funds to finance them and having no desire to franchise, Orfalea opened new Kinko's on his ability to build relationships with others and formed partnerships with owner-operators, retaining a controlling interest in each. "These partners were other students who scouted locations along the West Coast, sleeping in their Volkswagen buses or fraternity houses. Publicity consisted of flyers stuffed in mailboxes; orders were taken and delivered personally."

Due to his inability to read and write, he realized early on that to get through school he was going to need help from a lot of people. This dependence taught him how to ask for help. In turn it also taught Orfalea how to provide what help he could to others. He "learned to appreciate people's strengths and forgive their weaknesses, as he hoped they would forgive his."

In a recent study examining dyslexics who ventured into entrepreneurship it was suggested that "strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses and gives them a significant advantage over nondyslexic entrepreneurs, who tend to like to be in total control."

Orfalea turned his entrepreneurial vision into a $2 billion-a-year company with more than 1,500 branches and 21,000 co-workers worldwide. In 2004, Kinko's was acquired by the FedEx Corporation.