Paul Cooley is an enterprising man with 10 successful ventures running simultaneously. Ten! Most of them emanate from Cooley Pumping, a four-generation, 66-year-old family firm he owns. To describe Paul Cooley as very busy understates the situation. Could he, in fact, have too much on his plate?
“Some days I feel that way,” he says. “We’re busy but we just keep on going.”
The going began 24 years ago when Cooley took over the pumping company started by his grandfather, Francis Hopkins, in Grundy Center, a rural north-central Iowa community of 2,600. While his grandfather’s Ford truck carried an 800-gallon tank,
