"What life is about." - Arkansas Reseash Medical Testing Center's W. Jennings Bryan Osborne - Company Profile

Nation's Business, Dec, 1994 by Michael Barrier

William Jennings Bryan Osborne Jr., a small-business owner in Little Rock, Ark., has a 19th-century sort of name and a 19th-century sort of girth (he stands 6 foot 2 and weighs 275 pounds). It would be tempting to say that he celebrates Christmas in a Dickensian kind of way, except that Christmas celebrations in Charles Dickens' time were actually rather modest. There is nothing modest about Jennings Osborne's celebrations.

Osborne owns a large home in western Little Rock. Last year, he bought the two houses on either side of his--to have more room for his Christmas lights. He is putting out more than 3 million of them this year. Red, twinkling lights will cover his own house--and everything in his yard--and there will be two lighted Nativity scenes and animated displays, too.

Osborne's lights regularly tie up traffic on Cantrell Road, a main east-west artery. Last year, some of his neighbors sued to keep the lights turned off. A court ruling finally limited the lights to 15 days. His opponents "have no conception of what life is about," Osborne says.

Osborne, 51, is not a spendthrift playboy. He started his own company in 1968, he says, so he could "work all I want to." Now he spends almost all of his time at his business, sleeping there every night. He rises at 5 a.m., is at work by 6:30, and continues straight through until 1 a.m. or so. "To run a business," he says, "you've got to be involved." He takes some weekends off now, at his wife's insistence, but he may not see his showplace Cantrell Road home for a month at a time.

Osborne's company, Arkansas Research Medical Testing Center, tests new drugs for major pharmaceutical companies. The volunteers who test drugs for Osborne must remain on his premises (where he has 200 beds). Some volunteers have to stay in the building for as little as 24 hours, but other groups have been confined there for six or eight weeks.

Osborne interviews all the volunteers himself, so he can cull potential dropouts. "I like the hands-on aspect of it," he says. "I draw every drop of blood that's drawn in this building; and we draw blood about 5,000 times a month." Osborne has 12 employees, including one physician.

He was a microbiologist at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock, he recalls, when he learned about drug companies' clinical trials, and realized there was a business opportunity for someone who was willing to do the legwork required to provide the patients and doctors needed for the trials.

The field is very demanding, Osborne says, because the drug companies themselves are under severe scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration. The companies pay very well for studies, he says--although he won't talk figures--"but the first time you let them down, they'll drop you like a hot potato, and they'll never come back."

Osborne bears down as hard as he does, then, because he knows that his highly profitable business could evaporate very quickly if he let up. "And with my bills," he says, "I don't call in sick."

He is the classic American small-business person, writ large: working extremely hard and reveling in the fruits of his labors.

Cars, for instance. Osborne doesn't know how many cars he owns, but it's around three dozen. He also has a large room in his home "to tie fishing flies in," he says. "I have everything available to tie 50 billion flies. Do you know how many I've tied? None. One of these days I'm going to go in there and lock myself in."

He also has a collection of 75 bullwhips. "I'm a fanatic on bullwhips," he says. "I love to pop 'em." And he has "maybe 30" ventriloquist's dummies, all custom-made for him. He is having dummies made in the likeness of himself and his daughter, Breezy.

When he dies, Osborne says, and his possessions are inventoried, "they're going to say, 'This guy was weird.'"

Not that he worries about that. "Every morning when I wake up," he says, "I thank the good Lord. I really enjoy life. We have our ups and downs, but it's really been a fantasy world for me."