Portfolio
I’m a creative type who’s fascinated with art, entrepreneurship, and the unknown.
A filmmaker by trade, I split time between the Los Angeles and Austin scenes. In my part time, I pursue investments to support my creative work including stocks, real estate, and several small businesses.
I’ve been a student of creativity, entrepreneurship, and personal growth for as long as I can remember, and my life has introduced me to a wide range of situations, places, and people to put my thoughts to the test.
We never had much growing up, except for great family and friends. If you dropped by our house, you were sure to find my father in the garage working on one of our used cars that broke down with consistency and untimeliness.
Despite our financial situation, my parents instilled in me a strong sense of self-determinism. When my father told me that I could do anything I set my mind to, I remember taking it literally.
There was a sweepstakes on Capatain Crunch boxes in the 80’s called something like “Find the Captain.” I didn’t even like the cereal but I collected all 3 boxes, solved the clues, and submitted my entry for a $100 drawing that only a few would win.
I was so certain that I would win that I accepted it as reality and moved on. I remember the call from Captain Crunch one afternoon when my parents were entertaining friends. I calmly hung up and reported to my mother that I had won $100. Everyone exploded in excitement and couldn’t believe what they had heard.
They could’t understand why I wasn’t as enthusiastic as they were, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t believe me when I told them I was going to win.
I loved team sports as a kid, and credit the experience for building my confidence, leadership skills, communication skills, positive attitude, motivation, and imagination. I spent a lot of time outdoors with my best friend Deryck in the dirt, on a bike, building forts, or wherever our day led us.
In 6th grade, I read a book called “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” which triggered a talent for art. By 9th grade, the principal of my junior high offered to buy a piece of my art to inaugurate the school’s first art gallery. When I told him that I could do better and showed him another, he bought both.
About the same time, I started to exercise my business muscles. I made up some flyers to advertise my new business, “Green Lawn Care,” in my neighborhood. By high school, I upgraded to an industrial mower and enlisted the help of several friends to handle all of our accounts.
In college, my friend, Chad Kalal, and his soccer coach started a sports T-shirt business named JOXX. Being fascinated with entrepreneurship, I offered my design skills for free. I just wanted to learn as much as I could about running a business. JOXX grew to about 5 retail locations and over 200 wholesale accounts before going out of business, but what a run! I never made more than a few hundred dollars a month, but the skills I learned proved to be invaluable.
I studied Marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I began to devour books on leadership. I found three different leadership programs on campus and became teaching assistant for each.
My junior year, I started my own T-shirt business, Impulse, Inc., this time catering to college organizations. By the end of the year, I was doing most of the event shirts on campus. I was also trying to graduate and still have a little fun in college, so attending class was the least of my worries. I was awful at cash-flow management, so I can’t tell you where the money went. To make a long story short, I graduated with the highest GPA-to-attendance ratio in University history (as if they really keep track), with nothing to show for it but a pile of debt.
Upon graduation, I thought I would try doing what I was supposed to do for once and get a job. I was hired as a manager of telephone interviewers for The Gallup Organization at their satellite polling office in Austin, TX. The job was great, I really loved it; I just had a hard time with the whole “somebody else telling me what to do” thing.
My brother Chad was just starting college, and I convinced him to take a semester off and move to Austin to start a little dot-com with me. Our idea was to take the huge library of art and photography that I had built up and offer it as posters for sale over the internet. The picture on the header of this website was one of our photos. Our customers would be able to choose their favorite design and customize it with their choice of border, quote, and color scheme. I bought a printer that could handle wide paper and thought we were ready to go.
Since we had no idea how to design a website, we had to force ourselves to learn quickly. Our expectations were high, so we spent countless all-nighters trying to get it to work. We ran out of money before we sold our first poster.
In 1999 I learned from a friend that Continental Airlines was looking for French interpreters and they were willing to pay for training. I interviewed on the platform that I had taken three years in high-school and was a fast learner. I was hired and spent six months at a boutique French-as-a-second-language school in Nice, on the French Riviera. Learning a new language was a paradigm-shifting experience for me, plus a lot of fun! I worked for seven years for Continental traveling to Paris, Geneva, and Brussels among others.
Since flying was basically a part-time job, I picked up some work at a restaurant as a server and then moved to bartender. I started to write fiction on my days off. I devoured books on leadership, entrepreneurship, wealth, success, personal finance, creativity, and personal development. I did a little freelance work as a web-designer. I watched with curiosity as the indie-film scene in Austin grew, but I couldn’t commit to a six-week film shoot and fly at the same time. I realized that I had no time freedom beacuse of my debt and as a result I was practicing less and less creativity in my life.
While I was “finding myself” I learned of the concept of passive income. The idea of owning a business that made money with a minimal amount of effort was an amazing concept compared to my experience with labor-intensive businesses. I bought a rental property and started an ultra-low-maintenance bulk candy vending business.
I also realized that even though I was an entrepreneur, I didn’t have any business sense. I had been spending my money collecting “stuff”. I simplified my life, reduced my expenses, and worked hard to eliminate my debt. I wanted the ability to work creatively, even if it didn’t produce immediate income.
In an airline, everything is based on your seniority and every year it gets better and harder to quit; so when I left after seven years to take an unpaid job as a production assistant in a half-million-dollar film, everyone thought I was crazy.
My first job in film was painting walls and building desks for a bunch of UT film-grads who had just graduated, but I did it with a smile and completed everything they asked me to. The locations director noticed that I was competent and asked me to run some errands for him. He liked my work and hired me as his assistant (still unpaid).
A few weeks later, the producers were in a bind because they couldn’t afford a transportation captain to run their fleet of ten trucks and vehicles for the crew of fifty. They trusted me enough to take a chance by offering the job to me. I had no interest in a career in transpo, but I sure wasn’t going to pass up a paid position with responsibility and a credit!
I now alternate between working from home building passive income streams, and pursuing my creative dreams in film. I am having the time of my life and have more freedom than ever before.
Historical links. (these are archived sites and may not be fully functional)