Epiphanies are confounding. You never know you’re going to have one, right up until the moment you do. They can’t be summoned, predicted, or carefully constructed from the sturdy building blocks of logic, reason, or common sense. The sprites of true inspiration are mercurial, and they hit you at the time and place of their choosing. For Mike Stewart, that moment came in the middle of a Mississippi farm pasture sometime in the early 1990s, standing next to a guy dressed like Colonel Sanders.

Back then, Stewart wasn’t the owner of one of the most famous gun-dog kennels in the nation, with three different training facilities, a six-figure revenue stream, a year-long waiting list for one of his dogs, a slew of endorsement deals with groups like Ducks Unlimited, a training book, DVDs, a long list of millionaire clients, and profiles in magazines like Forbes. He was just a guy who had some radical ideas about training dogs and loved applying those ideas in a small side business to his day job as the police chief of the nearby University of Mississippi. And that’s exactly what he was doing when an epiphany walloped him.