Richard "Dick" Farmer is an American businessman whose fortune is self-made through his development of the Cintas Corporation. The company started out as his grandfather's industrial rag cleaning business but today is the nation's leading corporate uniform provider.
He worked for his father in the family business through childhood, high school, and college where he received a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1956. At Miami, he became a member of Delta Tau Delta fraternity. After graduation, he served briefly in the United States Marines before coming on full-time with the family business in 1957. In 1968 Farmer created a new company, an offshoot of his grandfather's business.
He turned Cintas from a negative net worth of $34,000 into a Fortune 500 company with annual sales of $3.8 billion. Today Cintas works with such clients as Delta Air Lines, DHL, NASCAR, Eli Lilly, and 700,000 other clients. Farmer currently is the Chairman of the Cintas Corporation and has served as a member and chair of the board of directors at Miami University, where the Farmer School of Business is named for him. Forbes Magazine consistently rates Farmer among the richest people in the world.
Farmer was the 15th largest fundraiser for the 2000 election of George W. Bush and has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the Republican Party .
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God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay
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Weak men must fall; for heaven still guards the right.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)