He was my best teacher. He taught me everything about gardening. He taught me everything about perfectionism. He taught me everything about doing the very best job you could possibly do.

He also always gave me the advice, “Martha, you can do anything,” which was very positive advice for a young girl at that time because instead of saying, “oh, no you must be a secretary or maybe a teacher,” he would always say, “set your sights high and go for it,” which is the best thing you can tell a kid. The best.

My father-in-law was a stockbroker, and he encouraged me to sort of gamble. I liked that little bit of life too and learned a lot about stocks.

I went to work for a very interesting young firm. No one was over 23 years old in my firm. And we worked very hard. We started every day at zero. I learned how to really be competitive there. It was a tough environment, just a microcosm of Wall Street. The movie Wall Street had nothing on this firm.

I really wanted to know how to deal with family life and so I went home. Oh there was also a little glitch in the in the political scene in America called Watergate.

I remember listening to the hearings on the radio while I painted the entire exterior of my house. I did all the chores around the place, built the gardens, landscaped the property, you know, pretty fearless about all this stuff having never really done it on such a big scale, but I just started doing it.

And I built the most beautiful gardens and I built the most wonderful vegetable gardens and I started small livestock, I joined the Fairfield Organic Gardeners, the only club I think I've ever belonged to, and learned about how to raise a pig, how to raise goats, how to milk goats, how to make cheese, you know, I did the whole thing and had all those animals on my little four acres in Westport.

But then I got bored within a year and really wanted to start a business and that's when I started the catering business.

I could have done it very differently. I could have just left my house and gone to a catering kitchen somewhere and spent all my days there, 12, 15, 20 hours a day somewhere else.

Because I stayed at home, because I still went out and picked the vegetables from my garden and gathered the eggs from my chickens and used all those things and the flowering roses and the lilies and everything from my garden I created a style that I couldn't have done if I hadn't been organically interested in what was going on around me.

And that is what gave me my edge and gave me the opportunity to realize that what I was doing was art, it was a kind of art that I could create a book from, and I wrote that landmark book.

I started with a partner. Why? I decided I think out of just friendship and she was a good cook, but she wasn't a hard worker and I wanted to grow fast and she was happy to be small and she also didn't really like cooking for other people so much.

I built up a clientele and I didn't just stay in Fairfield County. I moved a lot of my business to New York, catering lots of huge events at the Metropolitan Museum, at the Hewitt Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Sotheby's, those were all very big and good clients.

I knew that I had something to say to women like me that really needed and wanted advice on how to make a beautiful home, how to cook delicious meals, how to entertain their friends and family in the nicest possible way, and it was the beginning of the brand.

That book, it was the beginning of the empire of recipes and content creation that we did ultimately and it was a lot of fun.

They were going to start printing 20,000 copies which was a lot of copies in those days. I said, “Oh my gosh, I know 20,000 people that'll buy this book, I think you better print more.”

They did print 35,000 copies it sold out immediately. They had to go back to press it was a $35 book, it was expensive in those days too, and yet it was such an instant hit.

Such an instant gratifying experience for me and I became an expert overnight. That's what a book does. I mean, when you hear all the authors outside it's that first book that makes you an expert, even if it's shlock, but you have to live up to a reputation of excellence.

It was all from the people I call the foodies, and I think this is what it was: I write this beautiful book, and it was a big hit, and I think that that irritated a lot of people—irritated them to death, because they felt that I hadn’t paid my dues.

And I also think that they looked at that book and probably said, “Boy, why didn’t I write this book?” And that’s what irritated me.

All I ever said was, “Just come and try to spend a day with me, and work with me, and outlast me.”

They didn’t have a clue what it took to be the kind of caterer I was, who baked every loaf of bread I served, every croissant.

I didn’t have Balthazar to go and buy my croissants at. I made my own baguettes, from scratch, and they were delicious. They had no idea that I went to bed at three and got up at five.

I could write. I was prolific. I could write a book a year to great advantage. I could get it on the bestseller list, my publisher was very happy, and I just kept writing, writing, writing, writing, working so hard on these books but having the greatest time and gradually becoming very well-known in the country.

And again, what everyone says, you know, she's such a great self-promoter, but it wasn't about self-promotion, it was about filling voids. Every time I wrote a book it was to fill a void that I and my friends had to have filled.

It came about because I was writing books, one a year about, and I went to my publisher, Clarkson Potter, which is a division of Random House which is now a division of Bertelsmann, which was a division formerly of Crown, so very complicated.

I said to them, “You know, I really would like to do a series of beautiful how-to books.”

I was very interested in the way things were done in and around the home especially and they said, “Oh we don't really want books on how-to.”

So then I thought what format would be appropriate for the how-to that I loved so much, the step-by-step, the do-it-yourself, and I thought well a magazine would be and there was no real only-lifestyle magazine.

There were magazines like Good Housekeeping which was more a service magazine. There was House & Garden which was really a beautiful magazine with lots of pictures about other people's houses and gardens.

So I made an outline. I went to S.I. Newhouse and I gave him my outline and he thought, “Oh this is a very interesting concept.” He gave me an art director and the money to create what we called at that time a prototype and it was kind of a pilot of a magazine and I loved it and I wanted the name Living.

I had a little conference with my neighbors on Turkey Hill in Westport Connecticut and we all sat in one Sunday morning at around a breakfast table and tried to think of what would be the good name for this magazine and everyone everyone finally agreed on Martha Stewart Living and I took that name to S.I. and he said, “Sorry, this is Condé Nast, and it would be Condé Nest Living.”

That wasn't for me. I would have gone with it if he had shown a little bit more interest, but he didn't… so I took it to Rupert Murdoch, and I loved Rupert. I thought he was fantastic, but at the time, unfortunately, he was just about to close many of his media properties in the magazine world and he said, “Take it to Time, maybe they'd be interested in it.”

So I took it to Time and they of course were interested in it and the rest is kind of history, but I remember the first lunch I had with the editors. They sat around and I was presenting a prototype, July issue with July 4th in it and all kinds of good stuff. They said, “Well, this is so full of information what would you do next July?”

I was shocked that they couldn't understand that there was a limitless quantity of information, so this is a magazine that really devotes the pages to living a good life, inspiration, information, how-to, good trusted recipes, good trusted content that's not only inspirational but also really goes to two kinds of people, doers and dreamers, and that's really what it is.

In 1990, Time Warner financed the start-up, and Stewart was merely an employee of the media behemoth, which had no interest in giving her capital to expand her magazine franchise into what she envisioned as an “omnimedia”—she says she chose the term—enterprise with books, network TV, cable TV, radio, Internet, and a high-end merchandising unit to go along with an existing consulting deal she had with Kmart (since 1987).

“I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Time Warner if they weren’t interested in funding anything else,” Stewart says. “So they let me slip through their fingers. Like, the very first time I walked into Time Warner to talk to them, they said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to synergize.’ That was part of my plan from the very beginning.

If you’re going to do all that research for a magazine article, the same research can be used in a different way for television, radio, books, and so on—and that would lead to products that would lead to creating desire, to fulfilling desire, with merchandising, all in one company. In 1990 ‘synergy’ was the word, but Time Warner couldn’t synergize.”

1993 we started a weekly half-hour, which grew to a daily half-hour, which grew to a daily one hour, and that's what I'm on, that island, it's one hour a day scheduled programming which is considered quite valuable by many people. It is now visible 21 times a week on national television.

Basically they said, “Why don’t you just go away?” Because at one point the then chairman took umbrage at something I did: I called on a weekend, and you’re not allowed to call on the weekends.

He took umbrage and drove himself to my house to say that I sort of skipped the line of command. He said, “You know, maybe you should just buy the company back.” I said, “How much?” I should have said yes. It was $9 million! But I didn’t have $9 million!

Then, a second time, they said, “The only solution is you should buy the company back.” And Sharon Patrick said, “Well, how much?” And the guy wrote it on a piece of paper. I won’t give you names, because it doesn’t matter anymore. They’re not there anymore. But he wrote it on a piece of paper and we kept that piece of paper. It wasn’t exactly that price. We paid more than that, but I got my company back.”

The book gave me the idea for the magazine [Martha Stewart Living] which grew to encompass a media brand [Martha Stewart Omnimedia] and then, because you could whet the appetites of many people—and those people want the same product you’re using—I started making products as well. That’s when the business really took off.

“Martha’s approach to business is almost on an intuitive, creative basis,” says Allen Grubman, the powerful attorney who represents Stewart and many other stars in business and entertainment, including Madonna and David Geffen.

“In other words, if she wants to get from A to B, she will not be hindered or limited by what people tell her is the traditional way, or the traditional business approach, to getting there. She knows where she wants to go and she figures out how to get there—very often in an unorthodox fashion.”

The MSO business model, as diagrammed on page 2 of the company’s 1999 annual report, says it all. It is a solar system; at the center is the sun, symbolizing Martha Stewart. The corporate divisions and business partnerships are symbolized by planets; their orbits are MSO’s “distribution platforms.”

There are 15 planets orbiting Martha, including her magazines—Martha Stewart Living and Martha Stewart Weddings, plus such special issues as Martha Stewart Baby and Martha Stewart Kids—with a combined readership of more than 10 million; two TV shows, Martha Stewart Living, airing six days a week on CBS (1.6 million viewers daily), and From Martha’s Kitchen; two syndicated newspaper columns (233 papers); and a syndicated radio program (227 stations).

The Website, marthastewart.com, has 1.7 million registered users and receives more than one million hits a month.

For merchandising there is Martha by Mail, the high-end mail-order/Internet catalogue (3,000 products to choose from); marthasflowers and marthascards, online; two lines of paint, the Martha Stewart Everyday Colors line with Sherwin-Williams ($17 to $20 a gallon) and the high-end Martha’s Fine Paints (about $90 a gallon); a home-decorating line available at such specialty stores as Calico Corners; and the Martha Stewart Everyday line for Kmart, which is the chain’s No. 1 brand, with more than 5,000 products and an estimated $1.6 billion in sales this year. (Jaclyn Smith, Kmart’s next-most-popular celebrity brand, posts $300 million in sales a year.)

In March, MSO bought The Wedding List, a British-American wedding registry with stores in New York, London, and Boston.

Advertisers were fleeing her flagship magazine, revenues were tanking companywide, profits were gone, and MSLO stock was trading at $11 a share. (Four years earlier it had been as high as $34).

She'd been ridiculed on the front page of the New York Post two days before in a cut-and-paste picture of her in prison stripes.

Her flagship magazine, Martha Stewart Living, has seen ad pages jump 48%; her new advice book, The Martha Rules, is on the New York Times bestseller list.

She's landed a syndicated daytime TV show, a $30 million satellite radio deal with Sirius, a DVD deal with Warner Home Video, a music deal with Sony BMG, even a partnership with KB Home to build Martha Stewart--branded residential communities.

After plunging from a peak of $295.6 million in 2001 to $187.4 million last year, revenues at her company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSLO), are rebounding to an expected $208 million this year; after the company's seven consecutive quarters of losses, Wall Street projects a return to profitability in 2006.

I’m very interested in what is new and what is happening. Like, I have an electric car. I have a Tesla. I adopted the computer before most of my friends — in 1982, I bought my first IBM. I’m an early adopter of a lot of things. That keeps you very on your toes, it keeps you extremely avant-garde, it keeps you current. I want to be current.

Our audience is very diverse because I have spread out the demographic a lot by doing something so surprising as a show with Snoop Dogg.

You see that means that has broadened our demographics so much, not only ethnically, but also age-wise and so that's why your daughter's like me and your wife likes me and hopefully you like me…

I always believed that people want to learn and as a teaching business, I think that if you ever for one moment don't believe that your reader, your customer, doesn't want to learn then you're a lost soul.

I went out on the road and I lectured. I did fantastic fundraising for numbers of charities and groups like The Young Women's Clubs, Junior Leagues, everywhere, and that kept that library of books totally alive for me and my publisher so that the ten years after I published Entertaining I sold more copies that year than the first year.

So it kept going like that, snowballing, every single book was a big bestseller, the library is still alive and well and I have twenty-seven books now and they sell tremendous numbers and it's exciting that the voice is found, the brand is built.

The information is evergreen. It’s terribly important to me never to write anything that isn't evergreen and fits into an asset library for me and my company now. That's very valuable.

I like having a balanced company. I think it is really great to have every kind of person working for you because then you get an insight into what everybody needs.

And the center is my real life. It is really getting up and cleaning out the kitty litter, you know, feeding the cats, taking the dogs for a walk, calling my friends, doing all of that before my work day starts.

It keeps me centered. If I didn't do that, I mean, people say, “Oh, you don't have to take care of the chickens.” Well, yes, I do have to take care of the chickens because I have to know all those different breeds of chickens if I'm going to do an article about chickens, or use the colored eggs to make a paint, the organic colors that have become so popular.

If I don't do that myself… you know, I have to be the expert.

Focus is extremely important and when I was unfocused is when… that's when you start to veer in the wrong direction… that was building a daily television show.

I did many thousands of hours of daily television that are on CBS on NBC and on the Hallmark Channel, many thousands of hours of television that took me away from the day in and day out of the company. Not completely, and I try to know what's going on in every aspect, but it took away the laser focus that I had had before that.

Fantasy, dreams, aspirations. Those are things that I think life is really made of. And if you don't have that, what are you going to do? Just get up and do your old thing every single day, the same old thing. With a dream, you can make a lot of other things happen in your life.