Through my involvement with a charitable organization and the good agency of my dear friend Michael Becher, I had a passing acquaintance with David Steiner, the most prominent industrial office park developer in the United States, one of the largest property owners in New Jersey, who was also famous as a very generous philanthropist. Surely, I reasoned, this kind of man would give me a free storeroom in one of his many buildings to house my boxes. Through a close friend of mine who was one of Dave’s codirectors in this organization I was able to secure an appointment with Mr. Steiner.

In life I have found that no good deed goes unrewarded. In my case, this has been so much the case that I actually find it troubling. In fact, the rabbinic sages say that no man has ever become impoverished from giving to charity. Moreover, they state that those who give to charity will reap a tenfold return on what they have given. In my case, this has definitely been true. But how is one to get any satisfaction from acts of self-sacrifice if, as an almost immediate result of these acts, you actually find yourself substantially better off? As evidence, my accountant, who really knows how incompetent I am, says that each year, after reviewing our books and business deals, he can attribute our success to nothing other than the disproportionately large percentage of our income that goes to charity. In other words, an act of G-d.

Dave Steiner, at sixty, was as kind and hospitable as I could have hoped. He didn’t act at all like an important, busy man with many pressing responsibilities who was squeezing in an appointment he wanted to be quickly finished with as a favor to a friend. Rather, he treated me the same way he would have treated a fellow real estate mogul, or Fortune 500 CEO who wanted to discuss a new headquarters building. I was given the royal treatment: coffee, closed door, “no phone calls, please, for the next hour.” I had it made.

Unfortunately for me, however, David Steiner and the IRS had the same policy on charitable donations. It was okay to give all you wanted to nonprofit causes, but business was business. Or, as Dave more succinctly put it, “Young man, I worked my way up from the bottom. Your business ideas sound great to me, and I like you. But there’s nothing for nothing in this world. So tell me what you’ll give me if I give you the space.”

Well, I hadn’t come all this way to pay rent, so I needed another idea. The word “nothing” gave it to me. By moving to New Jersey I would be bringing down our costs to operate my boxes to next to nothing. But the cost of buying hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of boxes was still potentially crippling. A light went on in my head. If I could get Dave to pay for the boxes, I’d really be off to the races. “Tell you what,” I said. “If you give me the space, I’ll let you pay for all my boxes, and I’ll give you ten percent of the profit I make on each one.”