If you couldn’t tell by the photo above I am a little bit different than most people. I like to say I swim upstream but my wife says that I am oppositional defiant. Right now I am a but just a man in Spokane, WA.
The Beginnings
I was born and raised in South Carolina and am the youngest of three children. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and my dad was a business guy in the textile industry. You wouldn’t know I’m from the South by the way I talk, and I like to say it’s cause I was raised by TV, but in reality it’s because my parents are from Philly.
I’ve always had an entrepreneurial drive and can remember my first venture was in grade school with CP Hsia when we made C&E Sticks (C for CP and E for Eric). We took all sorts of random things like Jell-O powder, sugar, and chocolate brownie mix and repackaged them into straws. I had a small notepad ledger that kept track of things and we would go to school and sell the sticks.
It was my best business model – we had free materials, no overhead, skirting food regulations, and our target audience loved sugar! After about one day and only a couple of sticks sold we got tired of it and had a fire sale. The rest of our inventory (about 5 sticks) were sold for a dollar to one buyer. Not a bad deal.
Growth
As I proceeded through South Carolina’s public schools I competed in a few sports and was good at most of them, unfortunately not great at any. Another unfortunate event was that I did not start growing until senior year and my current 6’5″ body never played high school basketball.
I’ve always loved the internet and remember building my first website in 1997 – it was called Slug’s Home after my AOL screen name Slug00015. It was littered with all sorts of GIFs and MIDI music files. I remember bugging the heck out of David Bowman to help me code the site. Remember, this was before Google so finding information was tough.
I graduated from Riverside High School and went to the USC (University of South Carolina) and studied marketing and management with a minor in retail. My management studies were focuses in entrepreneurship. It was after building a website for one of my retail classes that I earned an opportunity to create my first website for pay. It was for a Real Estate agent.
I also used my creative skills to make fake ids, but I was too afraid of getting caught to make them for other people. It was a shame too, because they were offering $50 per id. While studying at USC I became very active with the rowing program and ended up as captain and president of the club. I still row to the day and find it a very rewarding and challenging sport.
Professional Career
With the world as my oyster I set out for new experiences and moved to Austin, TX not knowing anyone. I wanted to move to Australia, but logistically I wasn’t ready for the challenge. Everyone I talked to said Austin was the coolest city in America so I figured why not.
In Austin I worked for Dell (when it was Dell Computers) and Cisco Systems, but love brought me back out to Charlotte and I started working for a commercial printing company. While in Charlotte my wife and I got married and started to settle down. After a few years she got recruited to work out in Spokane so I figured I’d keep her and make the journey.
I’ve started a few ventures in the past and have learned a lot of lessons from those experiences. One is still active (Bingle) and the other is swimming with Davy Jones. A lot of what I am doing now can relate back to my love of technology and desire to create things. I’m on my third venture with hopes that this one becomes the company that allows me to be location independent.
Current
I have started up a new business called Sovrnty Communications and we help organizations develop marketing strategies, implement those strategies, and make their business more efficient. Most of my content on this website will discuss business and sales related topics. On Sovrnty I’ll talk more about marketing strategies. Every once in a while I will touch base on other passions which are: liberty, freedom, technology, travel, design, rowing, automobiles, and my Carolina Gamecocks.
I love talking with readers of my website and feel free to subscribe to the site, or just contact me.
