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Many businesses are born on the back of an idea that didn't come from the founder, but was executed brilliantly by them. H&R Block is one such business.

The original focus of H&R Block, first called the United Business Company in Kansas City, Missouri, was bookkeeping.  Tax filing assistance was seen as a "nuisance" business by founders Henry (Hank) and Richard Bloch - and at any rate, was not required back in the USA of the nineteen fifties, because back then the IRS provided free assistance to anyone needing it in the form of walk-in help centers.

But John White, a client of the United Business Company's bookeeping service and display ad salesman for the Kansas City Star, saw things differently.  With the IRS changing its policy of providing help due to cost and a lack of difference in error-rate between assisted filings and non-assisted filings, White believed there was a large potential business to be made from stepping in to provide assistance to tax filers.  He told the Bloch brothers they should create a business to focus on it.

The reaction of the brothers was tepid.  They believed that the focus of the business should remain bookkeeping. But White was a strong salesman and a client and eventually talked them into a two date display ad campaign.  The ad was published in the Kansas City Star on January 22nd, 1955.

The rest of the story is, as they say, history.  The day the ad ran, Hank, out visiting a customer, got a call from his brother telling him he'd "better get back to the office."  When Hank asked why, his brother Richard said "because we got a room full of people, that's why!" 

Of course, ideas are 5% of any successful business.  Execution is key, and the Bloch brothers executed so brilliantly on their idea, the H&R Block company went public in 1962 and is now the seventh largest retailer in the United States. 

One of the reasons behind the rapid expansion of retail stores is that the brothers were responsible for pioneering another business concept - franchising.  Several years earlier, they agreed to let two New York bookeepers buy them out for less than the business was worth - on the provision that they continue to pay them royalties for use of the name and agree to training.

Google is one of the more recent examples of a commercial model adopted and executed brilliantly.  In that example, superior search technology invented by Page and Brin was turned into a juggernaut by an advertising model invented by Bill Gross and the team at GoTo.  Page and Brin were hardly ardent supporters of the model when it was first introduced to them, any more than Hank and Richard Bloch were supporters of John White's suggestion that they should focus on tax filing as a business.