I started the year “living” in Utah, I put this term in quotes because I live wherever I am, and was only in UT for about 2 months, so most would dispute my resident status, I was living there for a bit, so whatever I tried ice climbing for the first time ever with an old mission buddy Dan. It was awesome, you’ll never feel like more of a man than when you have snow in your beard and an axe in your hand that keeps you from death.

A week later I drove the car home, parked it back at Mom’s and flew me and a suitcase + laptop bag to New York City. I moved into a one bedroom apartment with my good friend Sam right by Washington Square right downtown New York (it’s where NYU is) and worked on Union Square (where Max Brenner chocolate is). Honestly, it was a dream come true for me, I had always wanted to live in NY, never had an excuse to get out there, and had always been a bit scared of the city for some reason. After living there, it is one of my favorite places now, you really do fall in love with the city.

I saw some great stuff though, a few highlights are being the only guy working on Union Square with a red beard and a flannel, being offered drugs at least once a day cause apparently I look like white trash, eating every ethnicity of food I can think of, cambodian sandwich shops, football in central park with Quentin and the Vayner Media boys, snow storms in the city and pushing cabs out of snow drifts while walking home at 3am, the New York public library, meeting up with Uncle Bruce at grand central station, riding to the top of the Rock with my buddy Geoff, jogging and playing basketball along the river, getting caught singing my heart out at 5am at work when i thought I was alone, shake shack, living a block from the Comedy Cellar (where Seinfeld got his start) and just being around that community. I seriously can’t say enough good about that city.

Work was cool too, I was out there with some great people (tisch, cohen, keith and quentin and then all the Techstars companies) we had a great time building a great tech community in NY while building great companies. They blew it out of the water, seriously.

Middle of my New York stint, I had Katya Musienko, who was one of the first people I taught (she and her mother) as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, get married. I got my old missionary companion who is in dental school in Boston drive down to NYC (bolt bus rather) and we hopped a midnight flight out to slc, rented the car, drove the 3 hours and surprised Katya for her wedding. It was great to see her and her mom, couldn’t be more proud of her.

It was a fun trip and great to be with old friends. I saw Schlegelmilch while I was up there and we had fun catching up as well. Old droogs warm the soul.

So the end of April I finished up my New York stay, we did our Techstars demo day, was seen on TV in the Techstars TV series on bloomberg (for better or worse) closed up shop, and I gave Sam his house back, rolled up the air mattress, and hit the road.

I had been working on a conversation management tool called Rumzi that was at this point morphing into a social media aggregator / api. I started putting more and more time into that until August when we realized we were building an API, which we weren’t particularly excited about building, so in August we shut it down and moved on. One of the more educational ventures I’ve forayed into. But I get ahead of myself.

I moved home in April where I have good family and the quilt shop, and Missouri, all of which I love. The quilt shop has been growing like crazy, we are up to 20+ employees there now, and are a major part of our community, which is fun to be involved with. I’m a part of the county business association, and the city business association, etc. It’s fun to work on.

I went to Minnesota to support the SIFE team I helped get started while I was at school out in HI, they are doing amazing stuff (like really amazing stuff) and it was an honor to still be a part of their success and watch them continue to raise the bar for what is possible while you’re in college.

I spent the 4th of July back home, and went down to the Lake with the family, first time I’d been down there in probably 10 years. We played cards and went swimming for a solid 4 days, it was magical. I’m serious, going down there with all the kids was like rediscovering everything I loved about Missouri as a kid, it was pure unadulterated joy.

About a week later my old friend Justin flew out to Missouri and we road tripped to Chicago for the Pitch Fork Music Fest which was fun, not completely my style of music, but it was fun to be a hippy for a weekend and just love sweet jams. Then we flew out to Myrtle Beach and played in a condo there. Fun fact about Myrtle Beach, it is the trailer park of beaches, cigarettes and coors light were the main stay at this hill country resort. It was fun though, met up with a good friend, Geoff, and had 3/4′s of the Magicians Alliance (cruise troupe from last Christmas) back together. We went exploring (read antiquing) through the coastal towns of North Carolina as we meandered back to Washington DC. We stopped at Kings Dominion for my 3 year fix of amusement parks and had a total blast.

We topped the trip off with my first domestic train ride ever and trained it up to Boston from DC. It was actually really cool. Train stations are all on the backsides of towns anymore, so it was thick woods and coast until I got into a town then you saw the dusty old school part of the town. Loved it. Saw old friends in Boston, walked the freedom trail again, ate some canoles and real italian food, then flew home. Not a bad blip in the radar of the summer.

End of August I packed the car and drove to Boulder for another Techstars demo day (ten more companies launched) then continued on to SLC. Got an apartment, settled in with friends, got office space for Justin and I to work out of, then headed to the slot canyons of southern Utah. 127 Hours type of stuff, but I got to hike some of America’s treasures.

Beautiful area, everyone should go see this place, not even kidding.

Continuing the saga, I moved out of the apartment and into my car, went to Copenhagen to work with Alex Farcet and Startup Bootcamp. I have never made it up to Scandinavia in my travels, so it was fun to go see the land of my heritage and work with startups that I love so much. Saw the original Christus, ate some amazing food, tried to order a “danish” and made some great friends. Oh, and watching Denmark vs Portugal soccer match at a bar downtown Copenhagen was also a surprise highlight of the trip. Good times all around.

Justin and I taught ourselves Ruby on Rails (a rapid prototyping programming language) and I’ve been working out in office space in Utah since then. Moved into a new place right in Sugar House (south side of SLC) and have been living the high life of a true blue rent payer. Had Quilt Market in Houston where me, Dave (missionary buddy / business partner), Mom and Sarah had a weekend only us old women could appreciate, needless to say it was a blast. I flew home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but besides that have spent the rest of my time indoors in Utah. Girl troubles continue, but all in all, nothing really to complain about. In fact, after writing it all out, I’ve had a great year. My criteria for a good year is did I learn new stuff, make new friends, and see new places (as a single man that’s all I have see) so by that criteria, things went pretty dang well this year. To all my friends and family that were a part of my experiences this year, I thank you, you are what makes life meaningful. To those who are still friends but we didn’t get to connect this year, I’ll try to do better next year. Thanks for all the fun, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas, and here’s to a great new year.

Love you ma, happy mothers day.

I took some time and went a traveling a bit, then came back, packed my car up, and moved up to Toronto with my ole boy Dave Mifsud. An old mission buddy of mine and we decided to start up the businesses we’d been meaning to do for a while.

Blood shot eyes and cheesy grins

We did, we started EnviropureSolutions.ca with friends Ken and Robin, which is a great little venture that cleans and deodorizes using ozone. It’s an easy product to get behind because it takes care of mold, mildew, etc, and it’s quick and painless. Simultaneously we did Steadfastwealth.ca around Dave’s end goal of doing finance full time. We also started some database projects that are still in the works, and then lastly we did a quilt shop.

What’s that you ask? A quilt shop? Why of course, and when you look at me the first thought you have is “this man’s a quilter” I mean at 6’7” and an IT extraordinaire what else would I be? Actually, no, I’m no quilter, but this has been a fun project to do and I’ll tell you why real quick.

I started it for a good reason.

Dad works for the newpaper industry and the writing can’t get much bigger on the wall, they’re running scared and his job ain’t safe. So me and my sister went in on a building on the main drag of our small town of Hamilton, MO. Which reminds me of another reason I’m doing what I am; this town is dying slowly, and it’s obvious as you walk the streets, people are leaving in a vintage French flee-the-farm-for-the-city fashion, so that’s the other benefit – our community is excited to see something created…. and have that something working out. It’s encouraging to see that not everything is failing.

The shop a year ago

That was one year ago we bought the building and opened up this little shop.

MSQC 1 year later

So while in Canada, Dave and I decided to help juice up the Missouri Star Quilt Co and built the site Missouri Quilt Co using some work from a Ukrainian (those language skills are so handy sometimes) developer we sourced with, then the rest was me and Dave, 20 hour days, and 24” monitors.

This is my favorite because it’s an industry I knew nothing about, not a clue, and a demographic I was not necessarily in tune with, and in the course of about 7 months we have really been able to close that gap. Our first iteration of the site was a flop, no sales after 1000 page views, so we did a revisiting of the design, and it got better, then again, and again, and again. As we work with my sisters and mom on understanding the culture/demographic/preferences of the industry, we continue to customize, SEO, innovate, and implement, and the best part is the results are instant. We can see what the effect is if we change a header in a matter of hours. Also we’ve found that a lot of the tribal knowledge from other industries has an application in every niche, it’s just a matter of learning to apply it. So now the shop employs about 7 women in our community and our post office ladies, Christy and Betty, are in love with us (more-so when we started printing our own postage)

office walls

and now I’m in Canada for a week, then a week in PA and a week in NH then home again.  Fun things are underway work wise, so that’s good, dating life is lose, so that’s lame.  But all in all, plenty to smile about.  Tomorrow is Dave’s little brothers wedding, so I’ll throw up a few pics from that.

Enjoy

But yeah, so about a month ago Symantec Corp, whom I had worked for since college moved me from my sunny home in Orange County to the place I would soon call home in Boston. That lasted 4 days before I got a call from the bosses who informed me that I was a casualty of the latest 5% RIF (Reduction In Force) and that today was my last day. Needless to say I was a bit blindsided by it as we were a very strategic group that was heavily involved in the success of the company vision, particularly with the consulting partners, if not consulting delivery as a whole. But alas, corporate life is prone to such frustrations. So in a matter of 15 minutes life went from peachy to turmoil.

I spent the next several hours in a personal strategy session, as being so new to the partner and consulting realms I don’t feel like this was my given career and I needed to find a new senior partner manager position. I decided this was going to be the perfect storm for me. I have enough in the bank to last me a few months, and have determined I am going to try and make a go of being an entrepreneur. I flew home from Toronto and got back to my home office, ordered a personal laptop and have gone to work.

I am now working on 3-4 projects looking to expand to 5-6 projects and hoping to have revenue to pay the bills within the next 3 months. My overhead is 700 bones, (I love being a single schmuck in these situations) and if I can cover that I’m in great shape and will keep doing this till I die. I love the work, I love working on startup ideas, I love the creativity process, and I love boot strapping. So my 12-14 hour days that were so long with Symantec have turned into 18 hour days of pure joy. It’s a nice change, and will be nicer still when I make some of these stick.

So I will be moving from Boston in January to Toronto to live in my buddies basement while we grow two of the projects and plan to be back in Missouri sometime towards the fall with some new projects for the states as well.

So if any of you guys have great business ideas you’ve been meaning to start, give me a call. Lets rock and roll.

Lessons learned though, there have been many.

First, it can’t happen to me is a stupid mentality and needs to be done away with immediately. A company is in the mix to make money, and despite what logic would dictate, you have no idea what they’re thinking. Prepare yourself, pay down debts, keep some savings. It goes without saying, but had I known a month ago how things were going to go, I would have saved a bit more aggressively, and now I just wish I would have been smarter.

Second, the how could this have happened to me is a stupid mentality and should be done away with immediately. My initial response was to be incredulous but that was very quickly replaced with ‘strategize and adapt’. The latter served me much more. You have to ask yourself what doors of opportunity are open, and they may not be what you are thinking. For me, I don’t plan on finding a job that is going to pay me as much as I was making in this recession, so I had to think, if not a job then what. Arrive at a position that allows you to keep progressing.

Third, loyalty is lost in today’s world, don’t bemoan that, use it. A company will never think ‘don’t fire bill, we promised him a job for a few years’ so why do we think ‘I should stay here for x years, that’s the good thing to do, they’ve invested in me’? A company does what makes it money, for employees, they should treat their career like a chess match, with each move being strategic, but the key there is they are moving. You have no business riding down a sinking ship cause it’s the ‘right thing to do’. Don’t get me wrong, you be ethical, if you commit to a time frame, keep it, but commit cautiously, and move where opportunities open to you.

Anyway, good luck to all of you who are meeting similar fates, but on the bright side, adventures are back and I’m waking up smiling again.

You gotta love this girl and I am constantly amazed at what she is able to accomplish. Let me give you a brief run down of what it’s taken to get here, and keep in mind, this is all done with 5 crazy kids and a champion of a husband, who all have karate, some have soccer, football, music and other commitments. A house of their own that needs attention from time to time, church commitments, and various other time sapping factors in play. So with all that going on, she has managed to find and negotiate a price on a building, close on the building, handle taxes and lawyers, work out loan needs with the bank, incorporate her company, remodel almost entirely a good chunk of the purchased building, get the multiple insurances necessary, come up with alternative financing for the quilt machine, get all the permits and tax id’s necessary to run a business, and the list goes on.

We talk every morning before I start work and we reset what needs to be done that day, and almost without fail, we do a call at the end of the day where she confirms that everything is taken care of. An absolute joy to see everything come together, and I just love working with miss Sarah. My family spoils me, what can I say?

Sarah Beth blogged some pics of the day -

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Life is good though, I was reminded of why I chose the desk job as I went to bed Monday night aching, but it is a feeling I love. It really is so good to be home, love my family, though today I’m jumping on a plane back to Provo, back to Logan tomorrow, back to LA on Tuesday, I’ll touch base with you guys again in a few days. Life is crazy, work is good. On the work note, I’ve found my dream company to work for…. the X Prize foundation. If anyone knows anyone associated with them, drop me a line, I am dead serious, I want to work with those guys. I’ll be looking to change jobs in about 2 years, so we got time, but you know.

Mahalo