Bill Conway is one of the wealthiest and most successful men in the entire world.

He co-founded and leads one of the world’s largest and most successful investment firms. The Carlyle Group has $223 billion of assets under management and almost 2,000 professionals working in North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.

But you would never know it when you meet him.

He’s incredibly down-to-earth, humble, polite and normal. He has a big smile and a great sense of humor. He loves people and people love him. And he goes to church every day.

Yes, every day.

Not your typical billionaire.

I got to know Bill when he and his wife Joanne were major donors of the Smile Train. It was actually Joanne that discovered our charity recommended they support us.

The first time I met the Conways was when they came all the way from Washington D. C. to California for a Smile Train major donor dinners at the Jordan Vineyard in Sonoma Valley. I had the good fortune to sit with Bill and Joanne that night. I was happy to get to know them and learn how they heard about Smile Train and what motivated them to help us.

After that dinner, I invited Bill to join our new Board of Governors at the Smile Train and I was grateful when he said yes.

My plan was to, over time, promote people from the Board of Governors to our Smile Train Board of Directors. Our Board really needed new blood, new thinking and some independence.

Our Smile Train Board of Directors had only seven directors and two of them were personal employees of Charles Wang, including his secretary, and his accountant. I wanted to build a more independent, high-powered 12-person board that could take Smile Train to the next level.

I never got that chance.

Soon after we created the Board of Governors, Wang staged a boardroom coup after he put two more of his employees on the Smile Train board. Once he controlled the Smile Train board, Wang forced me and my entire senior management team out of the organization that we had spent the previous 10 years building.

After Wang’s takeover, I met personally with all of Smile Train’s major donors to explain and apologize for what had happened. I flew to D.C. to meet with Bill Conway and he was as shocked as I was.

I told him that my team and I were going to “dust ourselves off” and start a new surgical charity – and I asked him if he would help us. He said yes without any hesitation and that meant the world to me.

Without his initial support, I don’t know if WonderWork would have ever happened.

About a year later, I went to Bill and asked for his help again. Charles Wang was trying to merge Smile Train with a much smaller charity in Virginia. Wang’s merger plan would give Wang personal control over $150 million of Smile Train donations.

All of the independent board members of Smile Train – including me – were against this merger as were thousands of angry donors.

Since he was a member of the Smile Train Board of Governors, I asked Bill to help us save Smile Train. Again, without hesitation, he said yes.

He not only came out against the merger publicly, he agreed to be interviewed by the New York Times. His comments about the merger in a front-page New York Times article (which was extremely critical of the merger) helped us defeat Wang’s plan.

Bill and Joanne gave us a very generous seven-figure gift to help us launch WonderWork.

We get off to a fast start. In fact, we were growing much faster than Smile Train did when it began. I never told Bill this but from the very beginning, I was hoping Bill might consider being my Co-Founder of WonderWork and Chairman of our Board of Directors.

I knew he was close to retirement and might have more time to get involved. I have no idea what Bill would have said. But I do know his leadership and experience would’ve helped us a lot.

Unfortunately, Charles Wang’s lawyers started suing us at WonderWork from the minute we opened our doors. I kept waiting for them to stop suing us so I could ask Bill. But they never did. People often asked me who the other co-founder of WonderWork was. I never told anyone why I called myself a co-founder for 7+ years.

After about 7 years of lawsuits and legal attacks, Wang’s lawyers finally succeeded at forcing WonderWork into bankruptcy, I went to Bill a third time and asked him for help.

In New York State Court, Wang’s lawyers claimed that when we started WonderWork, we tricked four of our biggest donors into sending us $8 million in start-up donations. Wang’s lawyers claimed that these four donors – one of whom was my father – actually intended for their donations to go to another charity, which had hired Wang’s lawyers.

This claim was as bizare and absurd as it sounds. We had known all four donors for many years – including my father!

Since he was one of these four major donors, I asked Bill if he would join the other three who had hired a lawyer to submit a joint statement to the court that completely refuted and rejected Wang’s lawyer’s ridiculous allegation. Without hesitation, Bill said yes.

About a year after this, after Wang’s lawyers forced WonderWork to close its doors, Wonder Work’s trustee asked to meet with me. He told me that if I could raise a few million dollars quickly, he would sell us all of WonderWork’s assets and we could resurrect WonderWork and restart all of our surgery programs. After almost two years of languishing in bankruptcy, this sounded like a dream.

I went to Bill and asked for his help with this opportunity. Without hesitation, he said yes.

Bill immediately made a major commitment which helped me quickly line up other commitments. Including a personal loan I was able to get, I raised around $2.5 million in less than a week and submitted a proposal to the trustee just as he asked.

He never responded. Six months later we got an email saying our proposal was rejected with no explanation.

Time and time again, when we desperately needed help, Bill Conway was there for us.

After we were thrown out of Smile Train, Bill helped us launch WonderWork. He helped us save Smile Train. He helped us try and save WonderWork from Bankruptcy. And when that didn’t work, he helped us try and resurrect it.

Like I said, Bill Conway is not your typical billionaire.

I will always be grateful to Bill and Joanne for their unwavering help and support.

And I’ll always wonder how things might have turned out if Bill Conway had been my co-founder.