Lazy Way To Success : Fred Gratzon : Soma Press

Fred Gratzon

Fred Gratzon is an entrepreneur raconteur provocateur.

In 1968 Fred graduated sine laude whatsoever from Rutgers University as a Fine Art major. He never held a job for more than two months and is one of only five people in the entire history of the United States Government to have been fired from a civil service job.

In 1979 with no money, no experience, and no knowledge of how to make ice cream, he founded The Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company. In 1984 his ice cream was judged by People magazine to be the best ice cream in America. Playboy made the same declaration in 1986.

In 1989, again with no money and no knowledge or experience of telecommunications Fred founded Telegroup in a spare room in his house. Telegroup became an international long distance carrier and grew to 1100 employees with $400 million in annual sales.

Fred's companies have appeared on Inc magazine's list of the 500 fastest growing companies in America four times. In 1995 Telegroup was the second fastest.

Fred, ever the entrepreneurial pyromaniac, is currently lighting new fires and using The Lazy Way to Success as his invincible formula.

Lawrence Sheaff

Lawrence Sheaff, multi-faceted artiste extraordinaire, stumbled into the world with a paint brush clenched in one fist and a bottle of White-Out in the other.

His formal art education took place during daylight hours in ‘swinging’ London of the early sixties. But when the sun set, it was his stand-up bass – reverberating from the rhythm section of the Mike Westbrook Band – that sizzled the city. His uncharted journey continued as founding member of AMM, the much-celebrated ensemble that defied both musical convention and categorization.

These days Lawrence is older, wiser, but still very much in the vanguard for art and architecture. He focuses on designing buildings in harmony with Natural Law and, in his contemplative moments, he examines fundamental values of fine art in his series of paintings entitled Absolute Image: The Structure of Consciousness in Visual Form. (Look out for his forth-coming book of the same title.)

Apart from his illustrations for The Lazy Way to Success, Lawrence will go down in history for propagating the word-concepts ‘fostering’, ‘wig-wig’, ‘slabbing’ and ‘skwinking’. More on Lawrence.