Backdraft

Wow, have I strayed off the path here. I thought I was blogging about building the business, and here I am bearing my soul… yikes! I suspect I should get back on track before I bore people to death.

My entrepreneurial career has never been easy, and has been fraught with peril at every turn – but I suspect most small business owners could say the same thing. It is clearly not a lifestyle for the “faint of heart”. I tend to want to fill gaps where there is a need and no product or service to satisfy, as opposed to just building a better mouse trap. The idea of being first or unique is what gets my juices flowing, but there is a down side to that.

When you are pushing an idea that did not quite exist before you came up with it, you are subject to needing to do a lot of education. You must first educate the market that your product or service is needed, and then… of course… that you have the solution to satisfy this need. In most cases, that need is in the form of a persistent problem which has been difficult to solve. Find a problem that continues to plague an industry or customer group, create a solution, and the fun begins!

During college, I wanted tennis lessons, and there were few teachers that gave private lessons that I could afford – making an opportunity for me to learn it well enough to teach others. Teaching tennis paid my way through college.

My first company after that was an RV Rental business – I wanted to rent an RV for a golfing trip down south, and demand well outstripped supply in the Pittsburgh area – so not only did I buy one to rent out to others, I convinced others to let me rent their RVs out, for 60% of the profits.

From there, I created golf league software since such an animal did not exist at the time. One important bit of trivia on that endeavor… I did not own a computer at the time. I hired a student from the University of Pittsburgh to write the program based on my scribbles on a yellow pad of paper. When he finished the program (floppy disks were actually floppy back then) I STILL didn’t own a computer. I put a classified ad in the back of Golf Digest magazine, and once I sold enough (he made copies for me), I was able to buy a “portable” computer – it stood 2 feet tall, and weighed a ton – and had a HUGE hard drive of 10 MB (that’s not a typo – it was MEGA bites). I never thought I’d use up all that space ☺

From there we branched into logging all collegiate golf statistics for the NCAA women’s golf program nation wide (business is all about building connections – even if you have none to begin with), and that paid the bills for a few years too.

All of these business efforts were ongoing while I was holding down a real full time job, with 3 kids, and finishing my masters degree at the University of Pittsburgh (on my own nickel). This is why the 80s are a big black hole for me – I literally didn’t listen or follow music or TV for about 10 years while I was on the business building trail.

Once I completed my Masters program, I hung my shingle as a healthcare consultant – this was the long term plan from the first week I was in graduate school. It took me 5 years to finish the school work and the internship (given the other businesses, school and the full time job), but I did finish. It took me a year to land my first consulting gig – which I promptly used to develop the software that would help me in successive engagements – allowing me to then hire others that could use the software, and produce the same results.

This principal would become one of the guiding principals that allowed me to grow – that is, to always develop your business, products or services so that you are not the only one that can do that work. Of course, you must first understand it and validate that the product works, the service is needed, or the method is effective – that’s a given. However, once that is done, as early as possible I would get someone involved to transfer this knowledge, and make sure it was reproducible by someone other than myself. Otherwise, I would limit my growth and earning power to the ability one person – me. This is not to mention the fact that I would have no chance of having “a life” outside of work if I didn’t do that.

In the case of the first software product, this took about a year to complete, and make it ready to sell to others. This consulting firm still exists today - as I sold it to the employees after I developed the software that helped guide the consulting practice. This move into software development though, took me from the service sector, to the product and technology sector.

Next blog… the gold ring finally comes in reach, leading me to present® times…

So… I suppose you would have expected me to run off and start “inventing” or starting businesses after the Tennis Club experience, right? Sorry, but there were a couple of other passions seated deep within me that took the front position in my life. First and foremost was the need for a real “family life”. Having come from an extremely dysfunctional family (two alcoholic parents, with episodes of abuse and wife beating in front of the kids) there was a desire inside me to have a “real” family. Instead of being cynical to all things family oriented, I became obsessed with becoming the father I never had. I can remember having these feelings from around age 9 when I would make teams I was too small or too young for, only to see all my teammates parents on the side lines, but mine conspicuously absent. Consequently, my social life in college was a bit frustrating, since I didn’t just want to date and have a girlfriend, but I was seriously looking for someone to build that family with… the family I never had.

I tend to accomplish my missions once I set out on them, and while I was a dismal failure at finding love at PSU, despite the 32,000 student body (of which at least half were eligible females), I did have more success while working in Pittsburgh between my 4^th and 5^th years of undergraduate work. I met my wife Lorraine at the Racquet Club in Pittsburgh at that time, and she already had a 3 year old son. She was a single mom, doing a great job raising her son on her own. I fell in love not just with Lorraine, but with Michael and this ready made family as well. I returned to school as a married senior with one child and oh yeah… one on the way J.

But wait… I said a “couple” of passions right? The other one was a deep spiritual yearning for truth and to know that which is more than what I can see & touch – the spiritual truth of life, and our existence. During the time I dated Lorraine, I accepted Christ after being hit with a revelation that opened my eyes. To wit, everything I had tried prior to a personal relationship with Him were all attempts to understand and rationalize something that was ultimately infinite (God), with the pathetically finite (my puny brain). Stepping out in faith was the only way I was going to bridge that great divide – so with little understanding, and no guarantees, I prayed for Jesus Christ to enter my heart, forgive me for my sins and shortcomings, and give me a new spiritual life – this I prayed while alone, on a fire escape of an old house in Pittsburgh. It was that simple, and its effects were more than profound – since that time and up until this very day, I have seen the hand of God in ways that He knew would communicate both His reality and His love for me.

Lest you think blog entry #1 got us caught up to date… we are not quite there yet. This might feel a little like those annoying TV series that go forward for one or two episodes, only to then drag you backwards to show you a character’s past, then forward, then back again – I’ve always had mixed feelings about that whole see-saw feeling I’d get from those. Well, now I’m doing the same thing, and I just wasted two sentences getting there. Well, if you’re still reading, you either have too much time on your hands, or well maybe you are truly interested. I’m not a writer, but I probably just broke one the writer’s rules – don’t insult your audience right… sorry about that.

So stepping back a bit, my career has always been as an entrepreneur. Even while I was still in college, I had my own business teaching tennis to not just other students, but predominantly to local towns people – it is how I stayed in State College (PSU Happy Valley) through the summers, and how I paid my way through most of my college years. In fact, this led to me spending 1.5 years working on a business plan to build a private tennis club in State College, where at the time, there wasn’t any outside of the University’s 4 courts. I was not a business major, and didn’t realize how completely unprepared I was to take on an idea that big. In hind sight, my ignorance probably helped me think more boldly, even if it was also a bit more blindly at the same time. 

By the end of that process, I still wasn’t graduated, but I convinced a local bank to lend me $800,000 – which in the early 1980’s was a huge sum of money (actually, I still think that’s a huge sum of money). However, I had to get $300,000 upfront from local investors to back me. I managed to get $200,000 committed, and before I could get the final 100K, an outside firm came to town with their own funding and built an alternate club, in nearly the same location as I had identified. 

It was 18 months of continual work, in between work and school, only to end with someone snatching it right out from under me. I should have been devastated, but I wasn’t even angry – in fact, I was both relieved and satisfied at the same time. More than anything, it validated that I was right, and that while the timing wasn’t right for me, I just got my REAL education while at Penn State – it just didn’t happen in the classroom. Every step of that process; working with realtors, architects, market researchers, town council, local business people, etc was invigorating. I was putting a puzzle together piece by piece, seeing a concept become a clear idea, and then the idea growing up to become a real vision, and seeing the vision take on skin and bones in the people and places that contributed to the final proposal I submitted to the bank. It was the most exciting thing I had ever done. I was hooked… I knew at that point my ultimate goal in life was going to be entrepreneurship.

Wow, where to start. I want to start from the beginning, so my journey has an appropriate context. But I’ll do the “Readers Digest” version - for those of you like me, with short attention spans.  In 2006 I took up Spinning at the suggestion of my physical therapist. Being an avid cyclist, and one of the dedicated variety that would ride outside even to 32 deg. F, I had never considered cycling indoors prior to that. I was quickly humbled in my first class. I remember not being able to keep up for the first few classes, as my ass was being duly kicked. Naturally, this was all I needed to keep me coming back. After doing these classes 3 times per week during the winter, when the Spring rolled around i naturally headed back outdoors, only to find myself in Mid-Season Form! I was amazed at how I was able to start the riding season. This was incredible. In prior years, I had ridden outside, mountain biked in the snow and ice, and played tennis indoors, but nothing got me prepared to ride like Spinning did.  I was inspired to become an instructor and share my new knowledge with my riding buddies. That’s when I found out what Spinning was SUPPOSED to be. My instructor, Raquel Schmidt was also a cyclist, and a time trial champion from New York. After an intense day on and off the Spinning Bike, my eyes were opened - the proper techniques, especially from a cyclists point of view, could make this 10 times better than I had already experienced, and I was still in love with it. Then the gears started really turning. What if this was not only taught right, but what if it also was done in a facility built specifically for Spinning, and not just whatever room was left over that could fit some bikes in. You know the type, with no ventelation, one old fan in the corner of the room, a stereo system that still played cassette tapes, and a mixture of bikes from every era since they brought 2 wheels indoors.  But the idea of a dedicated Spinning facility was coupled by a long standing idea I had while pedalling many hours indoors, that being how cool it would be if we could fill the room with images of riding outdoors. Maybe I could get the sensation of an outdoor ride, even if I was still indoors. These two ideas came together to create a vision of an indoor Spinning facility that would show 1st person perspective (that is if you were the rider) videos of great places to cycle while taking a Spinning class.  I called the business Life Cycle Fitness, and the video business GlobalSpin. Unfortunately, after the lawyers from the Spinning company came after me with fangs dripping, I had to change my video business name to Global Ride, and decided to put the entire company under that name. Now our Spinning, Yoga, & Pilates studio is called Global Ride.  In our first year, we have introduced well over a 300 people to Spinning who have never done it before, or had only done it once and said they would never do it again. We have taught about 20 people from this initial indoor crowd to ride safely outside on the road, with road bikes. But our real challenge remained the cyclists already committed to riding outside. I discovered something that both surprised me, and perplexed me - there was an incredible bias against group indoor cycling and Spinning in particular among the more serious cyclists. I also researched it on line and found our area was not alone in this dilema. So it became a sort of personal mission to at least get my riding buddies to see the positive results they could get if they gave it a chance. To date, we have exposed about a dozen outdoor cyclists to Spinning, and all have seen dramatic improvements in their race performance for 2008, and some of them have even become instructors for me.  Well, I think this is probably enough for my first post - it almost gets us up to date - at least it hits the highlites of this journey, and I’ll fill in the rest of the pieces as I go along.