(FORTUNE Small Business) – At first or even third glance, you might not think Elmer Heinrich and Stephen Spoonamore would have much to say to one another. Heinrich is a multimillionaire with gold bathroom fixtures in his yacht and Celine Dion for a neighbor. Spoonamore is a part-time playwright who wears Buddy Holly glasses and shuns TV, driving, and eating in chain restaurants. So disparate are these men's tastes that it's hard to believe they belong to the same small elite: the society of serial entrepreneurs.

You've heard a lot lately about this group: The Internet-age version is a high-tech executive with multiple ventures under his belt, shouting about his success from the flat roof of his office park. They're the kind of guys with the talent, chutzpah, and short attention span necessary to make repeated killings in a fast-moving economy.

But we're talking about a more enduring model--the kind who doesn't need an Internet boom to make it big and who can squeeze a business opportunity out of rocks in a desert. The classic protagonist of American business legend, these are the self-made men (and, usually, they are still men) with the charisma to inspire others and the ability to know exactly what to say to opportunity when opportunity comes knocking. They're hustlers, in the best sense of the word.

"We talk about artists, and we understand that they do what they do because it's just part of who they are," says William Dennis, a research fellow with the National Federation of Independent Business Owners. "Well, serial entrepreneurs are our economic artists--bringing together economic resources rather than putting paint on canvas."

Like the artist, these entrepreneurs are passionate about their work and driven from one creation to the next. If serial entrepreneurs seem to compel magazine writers to search for the perfect metaphor (prepare yourself for an onslaught), it's probably because, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of the rich, they're different from you and me.

Who are these paragons? In brief, they're a bunch of military brats, athletes, and folks who don't sleep. More to the point, they all possess a virtuoso ability to do what Rob Adams, an Austin, Texas, venture capitalist, calls "feel customer pain"--and to ease that pain, which involves more than just coming up with a good idea. ("If you've thought of it, you can figure that eight other guys in their garages have, too," Adams says.) They also know how to think smart but move fast--and to keep their powerful egos in check so that unruly part of the psyche doesn't sabotage their hard work. If the serial entrepreneur sounds like a different breed entirely, don't worry. Their stories are full of lessons for any businessman or woman running even one company in a lifetime. We mere mortals can still enjoy and, hopefully, profit from their tales.

THE BLOODHOUND: ELMER HEINRICH

With his stiff collars, square head, and shrewd eyes, the Elmer Heinrich of 2001 looks like a meatier version of Ross Perot. He wears diamond rings and starched white shirts with monogrammed French cuffs. At his private club in West Palm Beach, he takes in with aplomb the attentiveness of the wait staff, the fresh seafood, and the rose-shaped pats of butter.

But in 1950, Heinrich was an angry teenager living with his family in a boxcar on the edge of a Kansas farm. His father was a bootlegger who had hunted jackrabbits to earn extra bucks from the Works Projects Administration during Heinrich's childhood. In high school, Heinrich's classmates voted him least likely to succeed.

Just a few years later, these skeptics may well have been scratching their heads. After a short stint playing minor league baseball, Heinrich parlayed an $8,000 loan from the local bank and some experience digging farm wells into one of the biggest irrigation companies in the world. When he was 32, and irrigation was becoming standard operating procedure on American farms, Heinrich sold out to his partner for $3.5 million. It was to prove the classic Heinrich model, and, indeed, the classic serial entrepreneur model: Sniff out an untapped market, get in early, zoom up to prominence, and get out at the peak.

Heinrich has followed this path for about 40 years, founding 21 companies and sussing out budding markets in every situation from the dawn of microelectronics to the AIDS epidemic. He has hawked industrial steam-cleaners, electronic golf carts, cleaning products, and condoms.

In the '70s, working on a deal in Emory County, Utah, Heinrich ended up with a piece of land long abandoned by coal miners. Researching the property's potential, Heinrich studied the drilling logs left behind by the mining company and found there was a certain mineral in the land that could be used to make nutritional supplements. Today, one of Heinrich's companies distributes those supplements in 22 countries and sells the raw ingredients to clients such as Estee Lauder. (He currently owns nine companies, with combined annual revenues of about $100 million.)

"This was before health food and vitamins were in every shopping center, remember," Heinrich points out. He revels in his dogged ability to sniff out a new trend and has little sympathy for those who can't: "God made most people as inept as monkeys," he says. Regardless of how God may or may not have made you, keeping a bloodhound's nose to the ground is a habit anyone can cultivate.

HE WHO DOES NOT HESITATE: STEPHEN SPOONAMORE

Stephen Spoonamore hears a bugle call that not all of us can, and he knows to spring out of bed the moment it sounds. "I'm the eldest son from a long line of military men," he says, "all of whom survived combat." Spoonamore, 35, says this between forkfuls of musakka at a small Turkish joint in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant is across the street from a building that Spoonamore owns, which houses the latest of his nine ventures--a TV set-design company that creates newsroom backdrops for Fox Television, among others. Collectively, his businesses bring in $7 million to $10 million annually.

Launching CBT Productions was Spoonamore's response to the latest bugle call. The TV news business was flush with cash and ready to change its style, and Spoonamore used the military smarts he inherited to leap in. That's Spoonamore's expertise: jumping from deal to deal, always thinking but not letting the thought process bog him down. Spoonamore doesn't waste a lot of time in that Hamlet-like state of self-doubt and impotence.

"There's a switch in my head, and I can hear it when it gets triggered," Spoonamore explains. "I understand when to aggressively take risks, when to charge in, and when to absolutely hold still."

It was this drive to action, even 20 years ago, that made Spoonamore captain of the track team, student body council president, and king of the troublemakers in high school. It's what gave him the moxie to start his first venture at age 17, a student-staffed recycling project modestly named Committee to Save the Earth Inc.

Today the same decisiveness comes with him into the room when he negotiates with major-league clients like Bloomberg L.P. He knows when to spring forward with a demand and when to retreat and "make the other guy feel like he's [won] something." Spoonamore can be such a brutal negotiator that new employees have been known to gawk when they first see him in action. "It really is like there's this other, dark Steve out there," he says, almost gleefully. Ruminators, take note: Let your dark side shine.

SHARING THE POWER: STEVE PAPERMASTER

Steve Papermaster is the kind of guy who takes up a room all on his own. But like the best of the serial entrepreneurs, Papermaster excels at finding, attracting, and rewarding other big talents. As Zenas Block, a 28-time entrepreneur and founder of the center for entrepreneurialism at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts it: "Know what you stink at, and compensate accordingly."

When Papermaster built his first enterprise, as a teenager, a concession stand on the beach in his hometown of Galveston, Texas, he brought ten fellow high-schoolers into the business. He's been doing the same thing ever since. "Building the right management team is make or break," he says.

That's an attitude studied by academics and sought after by venture capitalists. It's a matter of knowing that while an entrepreneur may be the axis around which a company rotates, an axis by itself isn't much at all. You have to be sensitive to the needs of employees and able to decipher your own business' potential. "If you listen, you'll hear the company naturally crying out its needs," says Papermaster, 42, who has founded 12 companies.

Startups that can't afford a full panoply of experts have to make careful decisions. A company with a cool new consumer product, for example, may need a branding expert right off the bat. The business that sells to senior-level executives may put a priority on a top-class schmoozer. In his most recent venture, Agillion Inc., which sells Web-based client communications software, Papermaster is building the management team while his partner focuses on the technology; his new CEO was hired especially because he can sell both to small businesses and FORTUNE 500 corporations.

This comfort with sharing the power is especially important in a tight labor market. For one thing, top-caliber people may turn up their nose at a vice-presidency, choosing to wait until their desk plate can read CEO somewhere else. Also, big companies can offer salaries and perks that are hard to match. Giving your new president room to roam may be a dealmaker. "Nobody wants to come into a company run by some control freak entrepreneur," Papermaster says. "If you think you're going to operate as a dictator and recruit top talent, forget about it."

THE TEAM BUILDER: ED MOLDT

Give or take a few, Ed Moldt has founded 200 businesses in his 70 years. Out of an office the size of a small bedroom, lined with files, and as orderly as an operating room, Moldt still runs 90 of those companies. The man hates to let go, but he loves to delegate.

Moldt wasn't always an awe-inspiring entrepreneur. At 39, with $2 million in the bank and two Rolls-Royces in the garage, Moldt quit his lucrative job at Philip Morris Companies Inc. to make it on his own. His first, audacious move was to purchase the Queen Elizabeth I with plans to turn her into a tourist attraction in Fort Lauderdale. The venture's IPO fell through, however, and Moldt and his partners went bankrupt. Still, he refused to go back to the corporate world, becoming instead a shirt salesman at Sears, Roebuck and Co.

When opportunity did come around again, it was in a radically different form--Moldt took over a home for the mentally retarded, from a group of Baptist ministers. It proved to be a good bet, spawning at least nine other businesses. Moldt still owns that seed company, which now operates 185 homes around the country.

In fact, Moldt is loath to lose a single business, whether it has sales of $100 million or is barely profitable. He doesn't cling if it's time to let go, but he says you never know which venture will be the next big one. With that attitude, Moldt spends most of the time he's not founding businesses looking for the folks to run them. In fact, he has spent as much as a week with a contender for a top position. Moldt once chose not to hire a man after a waitress spilled a beverage on him and the man became, in Moldt's eyes, unreasonably irate. "That told me more than a week of discussions," Moldt says. "That told me what kind of respect he would have had for the people working under him."

Once he has hired someone, though, Moldt requires only four pieces of information per day from each head. He just changes the variables depending on the business. For his chain of homes for the mentally retarded, for example, he wants to know how many new clients came in and if there were any runaways; for one of his leasing businesses, he wants to know how many leases were signed, how many expired, and how much of the company's assets aren't earning. Unless he sees a pattern that disturbs him, he leaves well enough alone.

While delegating is hard for many entrepreneurs, it's no problem for Moldt. "See, I don't like doing the work myself," he says. "If I'm going to be doing that, I don't need to be paying all these people."

DON'T WORRY, FAIL HAPPY: KAMRAN ELAHIAN

My ego was as big as the Titanic. And we all know what happened to that ship," Kamran Elahian, 47, likes to say. By the age of 30, Elahian, an Iranian immigrant, had co-founded a company heralded as one of the more important of the 20th century--a semiconductor company named Cirrus Logic. That's a nice confidence builder, but there were troubles ahead for the young Elahian. "Success is really just the management of failure," Elahian says now, from a hotel room in Bangladesh, where he's on business for his tenth company, a venture capital fund called Global Catalyst Partners.

It's the ugly truth: For every company started, there are hundreds of reasons it can fail. "What are you going to do, commit suicide?" Elahian says. "You have to learn to just crack a joke and keep moving forward."

Elahian, who has a smile that must have rivaled the size of his ego even at its peak, experienced the failure that changed his life in 1992, when he was fired from his job as chairman of Momenta Corp., the pen-based computer company he'd co-founded just a few years before. The company had sprung up on the hype of Elahian's wunderkind status and the industry's high hopes for the portable computer. But after hemorrhaging $40 million, the company collapsed.

In hindsight, it's easy to pick apart what went wrong. The public wasn't ready for the product, too much money was spent on marketing, and there were software problems, among other things. But at the time, Elahian says, he was too sure of his own infallibility to see these problems clearly. "I had come to believe my own PR," Elahian says now, "and that's never good."

The advantage of already being a multimillionaire when you first experience defeat is that you can travel around the world and study philosophy while you lick your wounds. When Elahian came back from his self-imposed exile, he founded NeoMagic Corp., a multimedia company that went public in 1997 with a valuation of $400 million.

Although he's been on a roll ever since, Elahian never tries to obscure his big flop. In fact, he keeps a reminder around so that he can't forget--and because it amuses him. The license plate of his fire-engine-red Ferrari spells it out: Momenta.

THE FINAL WORD

Make a friend of failure. Yawn, yawn. We've all heard it before. That's the problem with good business advice. There have been so many books written, lectures delivered, and seminars taught that it all begins to sound the same. The problem is that good advice is easier to deliver than to follow. If it were really so simple, wouldn't we all be sailing about in yachts with gold bathroom fixtures?

Unfortunately, the question How do they do it? is unanswerable in any field. How did Van Gogh know that that particular shade of yellow was just right for his sunflowers? "These guys are treasures," says William Dennis of the National Federation of Independent Business Owners, alluding to the age-old question of whether the Picassos, Shakespeares, Beethovens--and even successful serial entrepreneurs--are born or made.

This, however, does not mean that the strategies of the serial entrepreneur are out of your reach. After all, the art student still studies Starry Night even knowing he's no Van Gogh. "The thing to remember is, you're not going to be 100 percent successful," Dennis says. "But [the serial entrepreneur] just goes ahead anyway. That's the lesson."

Zenas Block, of New York University, comes to a similar conclusion while ruminating on the group's affinity for sports. (Block himself rowed competitively until he reached age 74.) "I'm not surprised so many of us are athletes," Block says. "We love competition, but at the same time losing doesn't kill us, because we know we'll win another time."