Hi, I’m Don…
They say that what you want to grow up to be when you’re about 12 years old is what you should do as an adult. When I was that age, I wanted to
Run a business – one year I actually asked my parents for office equipment for Christmas!
Go to space
Be an author and public speaker
Be an actor
Use computers – hey, computers were new at the time, cost million$, and people only saw them on television! That was the future!
Mostly, I’ve been involved with technology. I’m a rare person in one aspect, I’ve been using Unix systems since 1977, before they were a commercially released product, mean that I’m oldexperienced. I trained and worked for a long time as a systems engineer, basically writing the software that made the hardware actually do something instead of just sit there going hmmm-hmmm-hmmm.
Later I moved into application development. A lot more opportunities, though not always as interesting as the systems stuff.
No matter what I was doing, I always wanted to be a better version of me, so I would read books and go to seminars and events by people like Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy.
I knew that if you wanted to learn something, learn from the BEST.
(If you don’t know about Brian Tracy, I really recommend checking him out. Now he’s a very successful person, but he had a poor start in life and made a deliberate effort to become successful. One reason that is important to those of us who aren’t Brian Tracy is that he not only talks about what he did to change, but he talks about what he was thinking that caused him to make those changes.)
Fast-forward to now…
I’m still working in tech, and I never really got the business thing done (not well anyway).
But I have a problem, my family!
No, my family isn’t a problem. I’m married and we have two kids, and everyone loves everyone. That part is great
The problem is that they are much younger than I am. By the time my youngest finishes college, I’ll be in my seventies. I really don’t think I’ll be able to continue working at a job that pays enough to keep our lifestyle (comfortable, we’re certainly not excessive).
So I’m returning to and concentrating on building a true business.
Unlike a job, which is controlled by someone else, a business is an asset with a life of it’s one. It could be sold to provide financial support or my family could even keep it running and growing.
One of the businesses that always had my interest was Direct Mail marketing. This is where catalog sales and infomercial fall. I consider today’s Online Marketing the direct decedent of direct marketing. It’s the same basic marketing directly to individual but using today’s technology instead of packages and stamps.
In order to do that, I joined up with someone I consider a top talent in that area, John Thornhill.
Not only do I think he’s an expert in the area, he also shares one of my basic tenets, you succeed by helping people and delivering quality, valuable, helpful material. I believe every exchange should be profitable for both sides.
Zig Ziglar said it many years ago, “You can get anything you want out of life if you help enough people get what they want”.
You have to keep growing if you want to keep going!
Thanks for reading. Please feel free to contact me if there is anything you think I might be able to help in any way!