One Career, Five Industries
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 to 10 minutes to read the whole thing. If you want to know something about me, it’ll worth your time. Here, I share the highlights 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.
1st Industry:
Advertising
The first industry I conquered was specialty advertising. 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.
2nd Industry:
Warehouse Membership Club
By the time I was 29, I had a tiger by the tail! The Cache Card and Gold Card services morphed into a full-fledged buying service. It was literally like a mail-order version of Costco and pre-dated the founding of the iconic Costco brand.
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. Yes, it’s true, my first computer was a mainframe!
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. Check out some images of that era . . .
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.
My First PC Is Where My Love of Tech Was Born
I was 29 years old at that time. That same year, I bought one of the first PCs ever sold. At a time very few Americans had a computer and the battle was on between Apple and IBM (what we now call PCs).
Yep. That’s a photo of my first PC. 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! The computer you see pictured above is the device that got me hooked on computers; and later that developed into an obsession with Internet Technology.
Eventually, I sold Nova’s General Store (Nova, Inc.) – for way less than its value. I was young and inexperienced or I would have demanded more when I sold it. But I just didn’t have the experience I have now, so I practically gave it away.
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 back on our feet financially.
That was a humbling experience.
3rd Industry:
Commercial Finance and Factoring
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, because I used this form of commercial finance to support the growth of Nova’s General Store. It enabled me to build that first company from a $700 original investment to the monster-sized enterprise 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 after the first year in Arizona, I decided to raise money 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.
And I was running it out of my garage! I used to joke that I have the only house on the block generating more than a million a month in business. Ha! (But it was true!)
This business ultimately did more cash flow and lasted much longer than the first one. Expenses were smaller and profits higher. And yes, I “did” move out of the garage shortly after I hit that $1.5 million milestone.
4th Industry:
Warehouse Distributor of Light Bulbs and Other Consumer Products
One of the interesting things about spending a lifetime starting and running my own companies is that sometimes, a surprise disaster turns into a whopping success.
This is the case with the story of how I got into this industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, an industry developed in the USA which employed handicapped people who sold lightbulbs, plastic trash bags and first-aid kits directly to the public through telemarketing.
While running the Commercial Finance business, one of my largest clients was a seller of long-life lightbulbs, trashbags and first-aid kits. By providing capital for this client, we helped them grow from about $25,000 a month to about $1.5 million a month in sales. What I didn’t know was that their spending was out of control. After only about 2 years with that client, they declared bankruptcy.
This was devastating for my Factoring company and I wasn’t going to take it lying down. By the time they bankrupted, we had protected our investment by making sure we had control of every aspect of their company except the actual sales process (they ran 26 small call centers).
Since I did not want to operate direct-sales call centers, I figured out a way to use a fledgling industry at that time to automatically make sales. That industry is now known as “autodialing” or “robocalling” and is universally despised by the consumer public as a sales and marketing method. But remember, this was in the initial development days of using automated equipment to place phone calls, there were no laws or regulations, and the public didn’t have the kind of distaste for it they have now. In terms of robocalls, that time period was the “wild west.”
It took me about 2-3 months to develop the methods and tactics, conduc test-marketing, perfect the marketing script, and acquire the equipment to do it. And then we were off to the races.
During the years that I ran that business, we made more than $100 million in sales. But it was not without some controversey at the end of the enterprise. You can get more info on our About page.
The company you see pictured above and below was taking an average of 2,000 to 4,000 orders daily, was the 2nd largest customer for UPS and the 3rd largest customer for MCI in Arizona during this time frame, which was the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Despite the issues and difficulties in this company, we had a very positive impact on the community, our investors and of course . . . me and my family. It provided meaningful employment to about 50 permanently disabled people for a long period of time. This is truly one of my proudest accomplishments. At the time the article below appeared in the Mesa, Arizona newspaper, this company starting its 2nd year of operations.
My Sabatical
After about 12 years of operating that company, I was confident that I was “set for life” as they say. Little did I know disaster lurked right around the corner.
After 14 years in Arizona, I found myself broke again and moving my family back to Utah. There had been a terrible dispute with the government. I lost the legal battle.
That cost me everything and then some.
The litigation and legal problems took about 13 years from start to finish. In the midst of those problems, I experienced divorce, homelessness, and a 2-year term in federal prison.
I had hit rock bottom. You’ll find more details on this event on our About page. This experience, from start to finish, was a lengthy and difficult part of my life. It started in 1997 and finally ended in 2010. But, as I look back, I realize that I grew tremendously from this hard experience. I came out stronger mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.
In fact, that experience led directly to my current industry. I’m very sure I’ll never get into a different industry. What I’m doing now is more robust, exciting and has more upside potential than any other business I have operated.
5th Industry:
Internet Technology
I never gave up hope and never quit trying to improve, even during those most difficult years when the government destroyed my personal and financial life. As you know from this blog article, I’ve always been fascinated by computers and all-things-tech. I used the lastest and most current technology heavily in every industry you’ve read about in this article.
When the legal issues settled down, I found myself sitting on top of my next major project – and that’s what I do now.
How I Got Into the IT Industry
In the early days of the PC revolution, I learned some coding. After all, software wasn’t readily available. We had to write our own. So I did.
And I also got in on the very first wave when the Internet was established.
My first website was published in 1996 and I was building websites in HTML before 2005. I switched to WordPress in 2010 and have been in this industry ever since.
My current company has several divisions. We developed commercial telecom apps and marketing apps. We’ve done website development and SEO. We’ve done digital marketing. And we’ve taught others how to do SEO, website design and online marketing (“E-Learning”). At one point, we even built and sold our own telecom systems.
Our Current Brands
We currently operate several brands under one corporate unbrella. In other words, each brand performs a different service or function, and is a separate wholly owned and/or controlled subsidiary of the corporation. I usually just refer to them as divisions of the company. Those brands are:
My Own Proprietary Software: ARAS
In addition to the above divisions, I personally designed a software application that improves, enhances and automates two very common and very large IT niche industries: The Affiliate industry and the Freemium industry. I believe the biggest and most lucrative aspect of what we’re doing now is software application development. We currently have two apps under development and hope to launch each of them in 2024 and/or early 2025.
In the final Quarter of 2023, I filed for patent protection on a specialized form of digital marketing. This technology is called ARAS, which is an acronym that means Automated Referral Assignment Software. It’s currently in the patent-pending stage.
Patent-Pending Software Designed to Disrupt Affiliate and Freemium Business Models
ARAS is designed to automate and revolutionize the most powerful form of marketing known to mankind: Word of Mouth Marketing (“WOMM”).
You’ll realize its power by thinking of just one of countless ways WOMM manifests itself every week in our modern lives. Think of the terms “VIRAL,” “GONE VIRAL,” and “GO VIRAL”. As you know, this is the process of sharing information about almost anything: News stories, new products, entertainment, etc. You name it and SOMETHING “goes viral” almost daily.
This “going viral” phenomenon is the essence of WOMM, which happens primarily through social channels like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Telegram, Signal, friend-to-friend email and countless other channels.
What I did is devise a system that can be built into numerous mobile and desktop software applications (‘apps’). The software leverages and automates this WOMM process. In the marketing business, this process is also known as Leveraged Word of Mouth Marketing or LWOMM.
At the time of this writing, February 2024, we’re launching a Crowdfunding campaign and other efforts to enable development of the first two applications to use our patent-pending software.
An explanation of exactly how ARAS works and will benefit anyone who uses it is detailed in the crowdfunding section of this website. In short, it helps companies increase revenue and provides a new income channel for anyone who wants it, with no learning curve.
We’re currently on track to outperform my biggest success of the past!
That’s really saying something, given the success of my past enterprises. I expect we’ll eclipse the revenue and profits from my previous success stories within five to seven years of the date of this article.
At this stage of life, I’m giving back so to speak.
My life has been wonderful and difficult at the same time. It’s been filled with more freedom and liberty than most ever people experience. Despite my 2-year sabbatical, I would not choose any other path for my career.
Just so you know, I call my 2-year prison term, my “sabatical.” In the federal prison, I spent most of my time as a bus driver for inmates and staff. In my free time, I was in the on-site law library crafting the company that I’ve now been running since 2006.
After all my experience, I wanted to share the knowledge I’ve gained from a lifetime of the best and worst in business from my lengthy career as an entrepreneur.
But especially, I want to show you and others the miraculous opportunity you have, right now, and may not even know it.
I lived through the technical revolution which took us from a non-tech society to a global population using computers and the internet every single day.
I know firsthand the miracle that awaits you. All you need to improve financially is a little knowledge and a willingness to apply that knowledge with your own effort. And I’m here to provide what you need to know.
You truly can improve your financial condition regardless of your current financial or personal circumstances. I’m living proof of it. The business success I’ve had – including this 4th industry – Internet Technology – all started when I had nothing.
Odds are, you’re doing okay but want to do better. If you’re not doing as well as you want, my courses can help you reach your financial goals.
ARAS can also help you reach whatever financial goals you have.
What I do know is regardless of your personal circumstance right now, I can help you make it better – a lot better.
I’m excited to show you the things I have learned about building wealth online.
Let’s do this!
– Richard
