Fill'er up! Using the corner gas station as a model, CEO Dirk Kettlewell has InkStop fueled for...

Dirk Kettlewell has never been afraid of movement.

He is famous for his trapezelike mentality, fearlessly jumping from one job to another with no safety net or cushion. As a young married man with a newborn, he left a stable, full-time gig as a sales associate at Sears to take a seasonal sales position at Circuit City because the company offered him management training.

"I just figured there was room for growth there, and there wasn't at Sears," he explains. "I knew I could

Then in 1992, Kettlewell quit his full-time management position at Circuit City, sold his house and moved his family to Chicago to become a strategic planner for Montgomery Ward after company executives suggested to him that the Midwest was a better place for management opportunities. Five years later, OfficeMax offered him a job as senior category manager in its Cleveland office, and Kettlewell immediately agreed to the move.

"In life, I've always just constantly thought: What's next for me? Where do I need to go next?" he says.

But when OfficeMax announced in June 2003 that it was selling the corporation to paper giant Boise Cascade, Kettlewell surprised himself. In 2000, he had become an OfficeMax vice president and knew that Boise likely would not keep the company's top execs.

Still, he decided to stay in town. For the first time in his life, Kettlewell felt settled. He loved Cleveland, "except for the winters," he says. His three boys were happily ensconced in Aurora schools, and it seemed cruel to move them again.

But looking around the business scene in Cleveland, Kettlewell felt frustrated and dismayed. "There weren't a lot of openings out here," he says. The few networking calls he made didn't go anywhere. Eventually, Kettlewell realized that the only way he could stay in Cleveland was if he started his own company.

Today, InkStop, a cartridge and digital electronics supply company that Kettlewell founded in 2005, has sprouted 140 stores in 44 states. And in a time of economic downturn, InkStop's staff is actually growing--the company moved to a larger, 14,000-square-foot headquarters in Warrensville Heights in September.

One might expect, then, that Kettlewell, secure in his position, would speak with the bravado of Terrell Owens. Not so. As Kettlewell sits at a round table in an office so new it still smells of paint, he admits, "If I really knew everything that goes into starting a new company, I probably wouldn't have done it."