Before Henry Ford could put America on wheels, first he had to learn how to produce automobiles at a profit. With the 1903 Model A, he found his formula for success.

In the spring of 1903, Henry Ford was still struggling to find his way. His first two attempts in the automobile business had been personal failures: His Detroit Automobile Company was founded in August of 1899 and folded in January 1901 without going into production. And in his second attempt, the Henry Ford Company, he was pushed aside by his investors in March of 1902. He was replaced by manufacturing expert Henry Leland, who reorganized the enterprise as the Cadillac Automobile Company.

But if Ford, now 40 years old, was troubled by these early stumbles, he didn’t show it. He gathered up a new flock of investors, led by an ambitious Detroit coal dealer named Alexander Malcomson, who brought with him his accountant, James Couzens, and his wealthy and experienced uncle, banker John Gray. Malcomson arranged for a simple but roomy factory building on Mack Avenue at the Michigan Central rail line, right across the street from one of his coal yards, to launch a new enterprise that would be called the Ford Motor Company. (See our feature on the Mack Avenue plant here.)

Ford’s Mack Avenue plant had no serious manufacturing facilities; it was basically an assembly shed. Ford and his design team, which included Edward “Spider” Huff and C.H. Wills, had developed a crackerjack car that boasted a two-cylinder, 8 hp engine and other advanced features, but they lacked manufacturing experience and production tools. To produce the vehicle’s major components, including the engine and chassis, Ford and his investors turned to a Detroit machine shop that already had considerable expertise in auto production for Oldsmobile and others: the Dodge Brothers Company, operated by John and Horace Dodge.

The Dodge brothers’ relationship with Henry Ford has been characterized in various ways, from employees to vendors, but the truth is they were partners. It’s not clear who conceived the arrangement—Ford, Gray, Couzens, or some combination of the three—but the Dodges were persuaded to take a 10 percent share in the Ford Motor Company. In return, the Dodges would receive the company’s manufacturing business and a line of credit that allowed them to acquire all the tools and materials they required. The arrangement proved to be a stroke of organizational genius, for it would soon make all of them fabulously wealthy.

With Ford’s latest car, soon to be known as the Model A, the investors believed they had a winner. The trick was to get it into production with their limited capital and resources. The business plan as detailed by Couzens in the summer of 1903 broke down the unit costs as follows: $250 to the Dodge brothers for each Ford-designed engine and chassis; $52 for the body; $26 for wheels; $40 for tires; $16 for upholstery. All these pieces would be gathered up from the suppliers and bolted together at the Mack Avenue plant at an assembly cost of $20, with an additional $150 figured in for cost of sale and $46 in incidentals. While Ford’s car was a totally original design, in every other sense it was essentially an assembled car—a stone soup recipe. All the components were manufactured outside the company, which had no real production capability of its own.

With a retail price of $750, that left a profit of $150 per car. (An optional $100 rear tonneau seat generated an additional $50 in profit.) If the new Ford Motor Company could manage to build and sell 650 cars—which required every cent the company had at that point—under this cautious yet audacious plan, Ford and his investors would net close to $100,000, a sizable fortune in those days. Not bad for an automobile that was produced virtually from thin air.

And long story short, that’ is exactly what they did. Sales of the Model A quickly took off, though the finances were shaky at first. At one point in July, Couzens recorded that the company’s cash balance had slipped to $223.65. Then the first order came: $850 for a Model A with tonneau from Dr. E. Fenning, a Chicago dentist. With its 72-inch wheelbase, two-cylinder engine based on Ford’s Sweepstakes racer, and 1250-lb curb weight, the Ford Model A cost $100 more than a Curved Dash Olds, but it was seen as the better car. Early Ford ads described the Model A as “the most reliable car in the world.”

When the first shrewdly planned production run of 650 cars was sold out, another 1000-plus were assembled, followed quickly by the improved Model AC, Model B, and Model C. In April of 1904, barely nine months after the Model A launched, the company began construction of a big new plant on Piquette Avenue, and Ford, who started from almost nothing less than one year earlier, was now on the map as one of the nation’s major auto producers. Ford and the Dodge brothers would eventually part ways a decade later, but not before all three men had become rich beyond their wildest dreams.