I have a wide range of careers that I have served in throughout my life to this point.  At the age of 13 I began working for my parents in their donut shop and by the time I was 17 I could handle any and all aspects of making donuts on a retail basis.  The only part of the business that I was not involved in was in the ordering of supplies or in the financial aspects of the business.  I believe that having worked for my parents developed in me a solid work ethic that has carried over my entire life.  Throughout the time that I worked for my parents I was also involved in Boy Scouts and moved through the ranks and was a member of the Senior Patrol and was mentored as a leader and this began my quest for leadership.

Following high school, I completed an associate degree in electronic engineering.  Shortly after earning that degree I was drafted into the US Army where I was first sent for additional electronics training.  During that training I was asked if I wanted to go to flight school since I already held a private pilot’s license.  I did apply for flight school.  While waiting for flight school, and working for the electronics directorate at the Infantry School at Ft. Benning, GA, I was sent off to NCO academy where I was further groomed in leadership.  Then it was off to The US Army Flight School where over the course of about 12 months I was trained in both leadership and as a helicopter pilot, with my final assignment as an attack helicopter pilot.  I served in that role for just under a year in Vietnam where I logged 786 hours of combat missions and was awarded the Bronze Star along with 23 Air Medals.

Upon completion of my tour in Vietnam I was released from active duty and went of to college to earn a degree in Biblical Studies.  While I was attending college full-time I was also working about 32 hours a week as and electronics engineer, not to mention owning a home and having my first child!  About half way through that program of study, I realized that I would most likely not enter the ministry and since I was already working in the electronics field and doing very well in that career path, I continued working full-time as an electronics engineer.  Eventually I went back to college and pursued a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Management graduating with honors.  I worked for over 10 years as an electronics engineer and then transitioned into software engineering where I worked for the next 35+ years.  Of those 35 years I spent almost 18 years running my own software consulting firm.  Following that I worked on a wide variety of custom software applications, as well as having designed and built websites for the US Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation (FAA) Administration, as well as software for the Office of The President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Late in my career as a software developer I started investigating how to build a business that was Internet based.  Back in 2011 I started making serious time and money investments into building an online internet marketing business.  I tried a number of different approaches to making money online, including affiliate marketing, e-commerce, and other various aspects of running a business online.  My goal has always been to develop multiple streams of income, which is not only quite feasible, but also highly desirable for a number of reasons!

I must say that for me the easy part of getting up and operational centered around the technical side of things.  You can probably imagine that it would be fairly straight forward for me to get websites and blogs, etc up and running fairly easily since I had worked for more than 45 years in the technical field which was virtually all based in computers and computer architecture as well as in web development.  You would be right!  But for me the challenge was figuring out what niche(s) I would be best suited to and where I would be most able to serve and bring the most value to those that I would mentor and serve!