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My Story
I opened my first business when I was twelve, a lawnmower shop in my back yard. I’d learned how to fix the family mower by puzzling through a dog-eared Briggs & Stratton manual and realized I could do better fixing the things than I could by pushing them all over south Georgia for a dollar an hour. Besides, it gave me more time to spend with my family and friends at the beach and boating on the rivers and inlets surrounding Jekyll Island, St. Simons Island and the Golden Isles.
Anyway, I cobbled together a shop for my fledgling business and hung out my first sign, which I painted myself. That little shop didn’t make a lot of money, but it kept me in movie money through my high school years – and gave me a feeling of pride that I never forgot.
After high school, I joined the Air Force and learned, among other things, some leadership skills while serving as a crew chief on several types of aircraft. Then, nearing the end of my enlistment, I was offered a promising management job with a leading mobile home retailer. This appealed to me because I knew that the mobile home industry was booming, and I could be on the cutting edge of a retail wave.
So I began a successful 10-year sales career, climbing up the ladder in the mobile home business, then moving on to sell insurance for several years. But while I was progressing steadily, picking up valuable business knowledge and honing my sales skills, there was something missing.
I found myself longing for the freedom I’d enjoyed operating my own shop. So in the early ‘90s, I ventured again into the world of business ownership by opening an electronics shop where I repaired TV’s, VCR’s, Camcorders, and similar items. It worked; and even though the market for repairable electronic gadgets began to shrink after a few years, I knew I never wanted to go back to working for someone else.
Keeping track of what was hot in the electronics field, I decided to shift the focus of my business to the telecommunications industry. Obviously I couldn’t go head to head with the industry giants, so I catered to several niche markets, offering beeper and paging products, along with subscription services, and long-distance calling cards you could order online. (I even developed and produced my own brand of calling cards.) As the business continued to change, I went on to offer wireless phone products and services, hitting that trend at just the right time, and saw my business growing faster than I had ever dreamed, with phone sales topping $3,500,000 a year.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, to show you that I’ve been where you are. And help you see that it’s still possible in this incredible country of ours to find your own opportunities... to build your own little shop, even if it’s in the back yard or spare bedroom… and carve out your own piece of the American dream.
If you have that thing we call the entrepreneurial spirit.
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