[imagesource: Lyndon French / The New York Times]

Diane Hendricks, who owns 100% of American roofing company ABC in addition to a real estate development firm and a holding company with stakes in 18 businesses, is worth just north of $12 billion.

That’s according to Forbes, which this week anointed Hendricks “the most successful female entrepreneur in American history”.

Unlike the Walton children, for example, who are worth around $56 billion each due to inheriting the Walmart empire, Hendricks really did have to work hard for everything she has.

She had a child at age 17, worked as a Playboy Bunny to pay her bills, and beat cancer twice en route to racking up her riches:

The fourth of nine girls, Hendricks wasn’t allowed to milk cows or ride a tractor (“men’s work,” according to her father), but she had plenty of chores, including taking care of her younger sisters.

In 1964, she got pregnant at 17 and was forced to leave school. She married the father and moved nearly 200 miles away to Janesville, Wisconsin; the couple divorced three years later. The newly single mom got a job as a Bunny at the local Playboy Club. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” Hendricks says of that time.

It wasn’t long before she found some success selling real estate across southern Wisconsin and then met a roofing contractor named Ken Hendricks.

Together, they co-founded ABC Supply in 1982 and turned it into America’s largest wholesale distributor of roofing. In 2007, tragedy struck:

On December 21, Ken returned home from a business dinner and went to check on a new roof above the garage. He fell through and died in surgery later that night.

A rival company offered to snap up ABC Supply, assuming she would want to sell and move on. Instead, she named herself chairwoman and took the company from strength to strength.

The full Forbes article is worth a read and Hendricks also sat down for a video interview with Maggie McGrath:

[source:forbes]