Lynda Rae Harris was in her 20s and the owner of a Los Angeles–based ad agency when she met her second husband, Stewart Resnick. He was an entrepreneur who had built a successful janitorial business from scratch after his father won an industrial floor scrubber in a contest. Together, the couple made their first joint acquisition—of the floral wire service company Teleflora—in 1979. They followed it with acquisitions of agricultural land in California, and of the Franklin Mint, all chosen because of Stewart’s penchant for service businesses with repeat customers.
