Most business books get written by people still climbing. James F. Comley wrote his after reaching the top and living long enough to see the whole view. At 95, the founder of Embree Elevator has published The Ups and Downs of Running a Small Business, and it reads less like a strategy manual than a long afternoon spent listening to a grandfather who happens to have run a company for more than half a century.
Comley did not set out to write a corporate playbook. He never went to college and never formally studied management. He trained as a licensed electrician and learned the elevator trade with his hands, starting at 19 in the summer of 1950. Two earlier companies and two decades later, he and his late wife Virginia, along with a business partner, took over a small firm called Embree Elevator in 1972. He was 42. That company still runs today from a single office in Woburn, Massachusetts, now guided by his daughter Carol and her husband Cliff, with three generations of the family working in it.
The through line of the book is not ambition but restraint. Comley watched competitors chase fast growth, buy shiny new trucks to look the part, hire faster than they could train, and then collapse. He bought their equipment cheap afterward. His own approach was slow and deliberate, and he is honest that this was as much about temperament as strategy. He wanted to make it home for dinner and keep Sundays for his family, and he built a business that let him do both.
What lifts the book above the usual advice is the life packed around the lessons. Comley is a U.S. Navy veteran. He spent more than twenty years on the Massachusetts Board of Elevator Regulations and served four of them as chairman. He helped establish an Elevator Museum to preserve the early mechanics of his trade. He received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and is listed in Marquis Who’s Who. None of this is presented as a trophy case. It surfaces naturally, the way an older person mentions things they did without expecting you to be impressed.
The writing, shaped with co-author Jason R. Rich, is plain and warm, and it does repeat itself. Themes of safety, honesty, and looking after employees come around several times, and readers hoping for sharp financial detail or hard numbers will find broad principles instead. This is a memoir wearing the clothes of a how-to book, and it works best when you accept it as such.
The closing section gathers 25 philosophies Comley credits for his success, from understanding your industry to taking calculated risks rather than reckless ones. Read on their own they can feel like plain common sense. Read as the summary of one man’s long working life, they carry more weight, because he actually lived every one of them.
The Ups and Downs of Running a Small Business will not turn anyone into an overnight success, and it does not pretend to try. What it offers is rarer, the accumulated judgment of someone who built something durable, kept his family close while doing it, and is still here at 95 to tell you what mattered.
The book is available on Amazon here.
