My father-in-law, Michael T. Frederics, was the one who explained the deal to me.

He started out working in mines in Tennessee, was in the military for a short time, and by the time he was 30 and living in Denver, he and his two brothers were millionaires. But that didn't involve the deal. It involved being in the right place at the right time. And it involved seeing a financial opportunity, picking it up, and running with it.

The opportunity had two parts. One, he was the top salesman for Franklin Lane Burns. Burns was the builder of what was then referred to as the Burns Better-Built Bungalows while customers shortened their name to Burns Bungalows. Burns claimed to have developed 13,000 residential sites, homes, apartments, and commercial projects during his career. You'll still find many of the bungalows in Lakewood, situated behind the Federal and Alameda shopping center.

The whole bungalow was built on a slab around the size of today's double car garage and sold for a thousand or two per house.

Frederics' second opportunity was the end of World War II and the returning veterans with families looking for cheap housing. So he split with Burns and within months, using Burns formula, he was selling 500 unbuilt houses at a clip off of one model that doubled as an office. He once said that the first million was the hardest to make. He could have added that it was also the hardest to watch go.

The deal is not making the money or the method you use to make it. The deal is the challenge of making the money. And Metro Denver is short on the challenge, which is why we've seen so many millionaires leave Denver for fertile markets where the challenge to double or triple your millions still exists.

Those of us out of a dependable job are, as the headline on today's Denver Post says, "short on cash." Below, the article notes that Denver "has fewer corporate headquarters than past host cities [or cities hosting political conventions]." They could have added that most of the corporate headquarters that once existed have long since evaporated.

Final note. Those millionaires who are addicted to the deal often travel the country offering to show the deal to others so anyone can use the deal to make money. Whether the wannabe believers make any money or not is unimportant. It's the guy with the deal who won't go to sleep until he figures out a way to use it to multiply his millions, even if it involves selling it to others.