American author Bruce Barton believed, "When you are through changing, you are through."

Thomas Stephen Monaghan demonstrated time and again how being resourceful is a critical component of being able to change in order to achieve a dream.

Monaghan's father died when he was four and his mother found it difficult to care for him and his brother alone so she placed them in an orphanage for several years until she was able to raise them. Upon graduating last in his high school class he attended college for one quarter but had to drop out since he didn't have any money.

After high school Monaghan then enrolled in the United States Marine Corps. While in the Marine Corps for three years, Monaghan saved half his money but lost it to a con artist on an oil-drilling scheme. He then started a New York Times home delivery route and bought a newsstand on the main corner in downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. On two separate occasions he enrolled at the University of Michigan, but had to drop out since he could not afford tuition.

In 1960, his brother James asked him if he wanted to buy a pizza shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan called DomiNick's. With $500 down and another $900 borrowed, they opened the store. Within the first year James decided he did not want to leave his full-time job as a mailman so Tom bought him out by giving him the Volkswagen they used for deliveries.

Tom eventually purchased a total of three pizza shops and wanted them under the same name. Unable to use DomiNick's he got the name Domino's from one of his workers. Tom's initial thinking was to use the domino symbol with three dots and each time he added another store he could add another dot.

During the first year, Monaghan worked all the time and made no money. He had tremendous debt and couldn't pay his bills. Tom said his "life was going down the tubes." To make matters worse most of his employees failed to show up for work. During these early days he offered six sizes of pizzas. To help increase his profit margin Monaghan reduced his pizza sizes to three and "learned then that keeping things simple could be more profitable."

Over time Monaghan purchased a few more shops throughout Michigan. He worked from open to close and dedicated himself to learning what makes pizza taste good. After attending a franchise seminar he had the idea of taking Domino's national and in 1969 went from 12 stores to 44 in ten months.

Unfortunately he opened too many shops too quickly and did not know what was going on in many of them. Many stores made no money and could not afford the ingredients Monaghan was selling them or pay their royalties. Eventually he lost 51% of the company to the bank, "which brought in a so-called expert and made things even worse." The expert ran the business into the ground and within ten months the franchisees hired an attorney and threatened to sue.

At this time the company was in such bad shape that the bank actually handed it back to Monaghan. His initial one pizza shop was now on life support. The franchisees eventually sued and that devastated Monaghan. As a true testament to his resourcefulness, Monaghan started to win back one franchisee at a time. Over time he won them all back and they eventually parted company and changed their store names.

With the franchisee lawsuit over, he still had $1.5 million dollars of debt. For two years he lived day to day and dealt with 1,000 creditors and 150 lawsuits from them. He relied on his resourcefulness again and called each one and said, "All I can do is pay for my food and pay my rent so I can stay open so I can get caught up and pay you." The resourceful Monahan could not afford a lawyer so he defended himself. He was living in a house with no furniture and driving old pizza delivery cars. Over the course of a year he worked hard and started to pay creditors a few dollars at a time and eventually paid down his debts.

After the franchisee lawsuit, Monaghan once again demonstrated his resourcefulness when he built a different franchise model. Anyone that wanted to have a franchise had to spend a year as a manager of another store. He even set-up a company to help finance them. With his new model in place, Domino's grew to 1,100 stores by the end of 1983.