It goes like this.

I Grow Up, Mostly

I grew up in a small-ish Man­i­toba town (it’s now called a “city” but only because the thresh­old was low­ered so they qual­ify) where I lived about a block and a half from the near­est farmer’s field. This was a com­fort­able place because you didn’t have to go far to see the stars in the sky or the north­ern lights — and I saw a lot of both. My fam­ily spent count­less week­ends on my grand­par­ents’ farm, and I got to love the expanse of a prairie sky. If you don’t get that, it’s because you’ve never seen a thun­der­storm roll in across the prarie. ’nuff said.

I Get Educated

In high school, I took all the busi­ness, mar­ket­ing, law, account­ing, and com­puter courses they offered. In one com­puter course, I was exempted from my final exam by set­ting up a data­base to enable mov­ing the course work (in COBOL) off the time-share main­frame (which would go down from sta­tic on the line) and onto the Com­modore Super­PET. At the time, I could pencil-mark a key­punch card as fast as I could type, so I used to decline my turn on the key­punch machine. In another, I sub­mit­ted a pro­gram writ­ten in BASIC in lieu of the final exam… the pro­gram was large enough (mainly due to the amount of text dis­played) that I exhausted all of the Com­modore PET’s mem­ory, to the point where I was reword­ing some of the out­put sen­tences to save bytes by short­en­ing them. But that was the early ’80′s, when I hung around after school for 2 hours or more to use the com­put­ers. I wouldn’t have my own PC until the late ’80′s. Other than that, I was an under-achiever.

After high school, I worked for a cou­ple of years with my father in the gen­eral insur­ance indus­try; I was the youngest per­son in my class when I took the “Qual­i­fy­ing and Licens­ing” course to get my broker’s license. The class set a new high in the aver­age class mark; I was second-highest, my room­mate was first… but he stud­ied in the evenings.

After a cou­ple of years, I decided I should have gone on with my edu­ca­tion, so I headed off to Prov­i­dence Col­lege, where I com­pleted an under­grad degree. My first year was a bit shaky, so in my final semes­ter I ended up doing a full year’s course work in order to com­plete the pro­gram with­out run­ning into another year. I don’t rec­om­mend this prac­tice, but with my nose to the grind­stone, I man­aged to pull my GPA up in the process. I got involved with a lot of extra-curricular pro­grams and activ­i­ties while there. Met my wife, grad­u­ated, got mar­ried: next chapter.

Mar­riage, Career, Fam­ily:
Check, Check, and Check.

My wife and I took up res­i­dence in down­town Win­nipeg and I returned to the gen­eral insur­ance indus­try, fig­ur­ing I’d make the best money build­ing on past expe­ri­ence rather than start­ing over in some other field. Over the next 11 years I got to be very good at it, and earned the pro­fes­sional des­ig­na­tion of CAIB.  Put my wife through nurses’ train­ing, started a fam­ily, passed the Mensa entrance exam with room to spare — just ’cause I had always won­dered. Now I know.  Did a lot of vol­un­teer effort in my local church, mostly leadership-oriented.

Hey, I’m an Entrepreneur!

Even­tu­ally got bored with gen­eral insur­ance (new vari­a­tions were becom­ing fewer and far­ther between, and I have to keep solv­ing new prob­lems), so I left to become an equal part­ner in Rainy Day Soft­ware Corp.  Rainy Day was a con­sult­ing firm and ISP that my brother had started a cou­ple years prior. Since I had already been get­ting to know the Inter­net and how to pro­gram web­sites and mak­ing my own con­tri­bu­tions to what the web was at the time, and since we’d all freshly sur­vived the “Y2K” non-event, it seemed like a good idea.  We took the com­pany from one guy with a cell phone, a truck, and a server tucked away in a closet (lit­er­ally, a coat-closet) to some­thing in the range of 8–10 staff doing IT con­sult­ing, soft­ware devel­op­ment, tech­ni­cal sup­port, hard­ware sales, and web­site devel­op­ment.  Not to men­tion tak­ing a small dialup ISP with a lit­tle bit of host­ing to a full-service broad­band ISP with a large wire­less net­work in the rural areas sur­round­ing Win­nipeg with a small data cen­ter with vir­tual host­ing and colo­ca­tion ser­vices includ­ing cages.  Of note, I engi­neered the busi­ness model and the high-level net­work topol­ogy and prod­uct selec­tion for our launch into rural broad­band wire­less, which was then writ­ten up for Indus­try Canada as a case study on suc­cess­fully launch­ing rural broad­band Inter­net.  Media inter­views followed.

In 2006, we began a merger process with a com­pany about half our size that included a larger graphic design depart­ment and some tech­ni­cal sup­port ser­vices.  Not quite a year later, I decided that it was time for me to take my leave.  I saw an oppor­tu­nity to exit and try some­thing new, fig­ured I was still young enough to start a third career, and that was that.

Which Brings us to the Present

While eval­u­at­ing what I’d done and out how I might spend my time next, I real­ized that all along I had been doing a lot of writ­ing and pub­lish­ing in var­i­ous forms.  I decided to move up my goal of writ­ing, and am now spend­ing much of my time on that pur­suit.  I now do free­lance arti­cles, copy writ­ing or other sim­i­lar projects.  At the same time, I’m still prone to be pulled into other projects of inter­est… things like mar­ket­ing, busi­ness model eval­u­a­tion and revi­sion, or other short-term analy­sis or project man­age­ment gigs.  These often involve web-related mat­ters and small busi­nesses in par­tic­u­lar, but not exclusively.