I know you likely have no idea who I am so I wanted to start by giving you more context about my business history and experience.  

I know this seems like a bit of a long message, but it’ll only take about 5 minutes to read the whole thing. I promise it’s worth your time as I share some of my business and personal experience that got me to where I’m at today. 

You’re going to learn about my past successes – and failures – in business.  I’ve been self-employed my entire adult life. 

I bet you didn’t know I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Music. It’s true! Although I always loved playing music, I never wanted to be a high school music teacher or play the club circuit all my life. 

The life of a full-time professional musician was not at all appealing to me. Very few are financially successful.  The phrase “poor starving musician” was coined for a reason.

Sure I was pretty good back in the day (drums, guitar, and piano). But so were millions of other musicians. Very few can make a decent living in music despite having talent and skill. 

So when I was 23, after earning money through my teens and early 20s as a musician, I started a small promotional ad company called Advertising Specialists.

After a couple of years, one of my promotions, a cash discount card, distributed 20,000 membership cards in a county with a 50,000 population. It was a great success!

Before long, that discount card was in use up and down the primary metro area in Utah, about a 150-mile long and 20-mile wide corridor with Salt Lake City at the center. 

By the time I was 29, I had a tiger by the tail! The original service morphed into a full-fledged buying service (think “Mail-Order Costco”).  

We had 2 warehouses, each one about 100,000 square feet in size, a main office with 25,000 square feet, a Sperry-Univac mainframe computer system, 435 employees, and our own fleet of semi-trucks. 

We even had our own Cessna Citation corporate jet for traveling to and from sales and training sessions with our team and for other business meetings. 

The year was 1982, before PCs and the Internet. We did about $2.5 million in monthly sales at the time. That’s $30 million a year. For perspective, $30 million in 1982 dollars is about $92.5 million in today’s dollars.

I was 29 years old at that time. That year, I bought one of the first PCs ever sold, at a time when very few Americans had a computer.  

Yep.  I had a genuine, Kaypro II personal computer, with TWO, 64K floppy drives.  Depending on your age, you may not even know what a “floppy drive” was.  Ha!  (You can look it up – Google knows.) 

I was hooked on all things PC from the time I bought that first PC – and I still am!

That same year, I sold the business – for way less than its value. I was young and inexperienced or I would have demanded more. But  I was overly confident.  

I thought I could start up another enterprise and make a fast success. After all, just look what I had already built. I thought I had some great ideas. How could I miss?

I was wrong. That money from the sale of the business disappeared in a hurry – without producing any profits. This was awful, especially for a guy in his first year of marriage. 

My new wife and I moved from Utah to Arizona where her relatives let us live rent-free on a farm property until we got on our feet financially.

That was a humbling experience.

After about a year, I discovered my next big “thing”.  I became a “Factor”. This is a business I learned about in my late 20s. It enabled me to build that first company from a $700 original investment to the monster I described above. 

A Factor is one who buys accounts receivable. Companies that sell their goods and services on open credit terms, like “Net 30”, often have cash flow issues. They need their money NOW, but their customers often pay late.

If banks won’t provide a working capital line of credit, odds are a Factor will. So I raised cash from private investors and started a factoring business. 

It provided stability and wealth. In fact, it was more profitable than the first company and grew to a larger size. So about two years after moving to Arizona, I had a business doing $1.5 million a month.