Erich Stauffer

Tag: Life’s Journey

  • A Tale of Two Cities: From Milligan College to Muncie, Indiana

    I’ve recently wrote about my first two years at Kentucky Christian College and my one semester at Milligan College so I thought it would be appropriate to share how I spent the year 2001, the year everything changed.

    Life at Milligan was better than at KCC, but it wasn’t as different as living in Muncie, Indiana. It wasn’t just the location that changed. The world was changing all around me. There was a new President in the White House. People were just getting cell phones for the first time. And then there was September 11th.

    My best friend got married. I moved into an apartment for the first time. I began dating someone who would eventually become my wife and my roommate did the same. We both worked at Old National Bank. It was our first professional job outside of maintenance or factory work. We all went to Ball State, but it didn’t start out that way.

    The Big Move

    I was home from Milligan on Christmas break and I was working at Franklin Power, a factory where Derek’s dad helped me get a temporary job. Derek was living up in Muncie with Jason. During Christmas break Jason and his girlfriend, who had just graduated high school early, announce to their parents that they are getting married in the Spring. That meant Derek would have to find another place to live. When I heard that I decided not to go back to Milligan, but to move to Muncie with Derek instead.

    There was just one problem: all of my stuff was still down at college in Tennessee. I had to drive 8 hours down to college to pick up my stuff, tell the college I wasn’t coming back (they didn’t care), and apologize to my friend, Ben, for not gifting him his own room. You see, he had been my roommate and had he not switched roommates, he would have had a room all to himself. I helped him decorate his new room before I left, but as soon as his roommate got there, he promptly tore it all down.

    I moved to Muncie with $400 I had saved from working at Franklin Power, but I didn’t have another job lined up. Derek and Jason both worked at Chili’s in the kitchen and although Jason got me an interview with the manager, I decided I didn’t want to work there and so I didn’t have that opportunity when I moved there. I worked for a couple of weeks as a vacuum cleaner salesman before landing a job moving furniture for a furniture retail outlet called Stout’s Furniture.

    The Big Changes

    I applied to get into Ball State, but it was too late to get into the Spring semester so for two months I worked 7 days a week moving furniture for $5.25 an hour. It was here that I got my Chauffeur’s License and began driving a 30-foot straight truck 10 hours one-way down to Tupelo, Mississippi to pick up furniture from the manufacturer. Instead of paying me overtime, he would give me $150 in cash for each trip despite getting 2 hours of rest (includes packing) before heading back.

    Eventually mowing season started and I used my experience mowing at camps for both summers to convince a local landscape company to hire me full-time. I was now making $6.50 an hour. I got a second job at Old National in July, but continued to mow until school started in August. Old National paid $7.47 an hour. After school started I started selling books on Half.com until November when I got a second job as a maid at a local hotel making $5.25 an hour.

    I met Suzanne, my wife, on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) the same week I started at Old National and on Thanksgiving I cleaned rooms and made beds at the hotel in the morning before driving out to Tipton to have dinner with her family for the first time (in the house I own now). I also worked Christmas day and New Years day. I didn’t know how to quit the hotel until Old National told us they were closing the Muncie facility, but offered me a job at over $10 an hour if I would work instead in Indianapolis, which I did.

    The Muncie, Indianapolis, Greencastle, and Franklin Connection

    I asked Suzanne (MusicGirl158) to marry me in September and by August of the next year we were married. We’d take trips down to Tennessee to see her grandparents over the weekend. She went to Depauw University and would drive from Greencastle every day two hours one-way to come visit me in Muncie. When I chose to move to Indianapolis I chose to move back in with my parents until a few months before I got married when I moved to Greencastle, where I lived alone for the first time in my life.

    Ben did not return to Milligan after his second semester there and so I helped him get a job at Old National with me. Eventually Derek moved from Muncie to Franklin and also got a job with me. Derek, Ben, and I all worked at Old National in Indianapolis at the same time until Ben got the tip of his finger cut off in a mowing accident and decided to go back to school at Johnson Bible College. I eventually left Old National after I was passed up for the managers position and every other lateral move I had applied to at the organization.

    While Ben was working mornings mowing I was working mornings repairing computers and while the businesses were the hardest to deal with, there were a few homeowners that were equally as hard. I once had a woman scream in my face, “Every other person in the world can print wirelessly!” when I was having trouble setting up her wireless printer. It turned out to be a problem with the Subnet Mask address, which I didn’t understand at the time, but had to figure out that day. She later called to say she didn’t have an icon on her desktop. At least she paid.

    It’s All About the Community

    It’s not all about the money, and it’s not about where you live, it’s about who you know and who you choose to spend your time with. I had a core group of friends from Fair Haven that I ended up going to college with at KCC, Milligan, Ball State, and IUPUI. I went to KCC and Ball State with Derek and Jason and I went to Milligan and IUPUI with Ben. I worked with Jason, Derek, and Ben at Old National. Together we spanned 6 colleges in 3 states over a period of 8 years.

    Jason and Derek graduated from Ball State in Muncie after first attending KCC. I graduated from IUPUI in Indianapolis after first attending KCC, Milligan, and Ball State. Ben graduated from Johnson Bible College after first attending the University of Indianapolis, IUPUI, and Milligan. Jason, Derek, Ben, and I are all now married with children. We are all active in our communities and our churches. We owe a lot to our early mentors and our contemporaries who showed us a path forward and when the world was literally changing around us, we stood strong.

  • From the Garden to the City: The Epic Entrepreneur’s Story

    Every entrepreneur has their own version of the classic “entrepreneur’s journey”. They usually share this story at the beginning of an interview or podcast. I’ve never been interviewed or been on a podcast so I decided to write my own. I’m choosing myself. 🙂

    White Lamborghini Toy Car

    Family Background

    From the time I was born my family moved about every four years. Two of those houses were in Missouri and two were in Indiana. When I lived in Missouri I was young, but I remember I had this white, Lamborghini Hot Wheels car. I remember telling my dad I wanted to start a Lamborghini car dealership when I was older so that I could sell Lamborghini’s to kids like me for a $1. I remember my whole family laughing at me.

    My mom volunteered at church events as a clown. She would come up to me and say, “I’m your mom,” and I’d say, “No you’re not!” and run away in fear. She sold Tupperware on the side. I remember her having Tupperware parties, but mostly I remember how much Tupperware we owned. I still use some of it today in my own house. This was my first view into entrepreneurship, which I sort of later followed when I was in Amway for a year.

    My dad worked at GM during the night and during the day would volunteer at the church doing maintenance work. He would change out light bulbs in the ceiling of the sanctuary using a giant ladder. I remember watching him and wondering if he was going to fall. I’m scared of heights. We did a lot of land sculpting at every church we ever attended. For some reason, my dad just liked moving dirt around. He liked how dirt shaped water’s direction.

    My First Businesses

    One day after moving to Indiana I was walking through a shopping center with my older brother and we went into a Hooks Drugstore. He bought some baseball cards with his allowance and I was hooked. I collected baseball cards, bought Beckett Magazine price guides, and traded with friends. I never made any money, but this was my first experience with buying, collecting, and curating something with the intent of future earnings. I had a trader in my neighborhood in Southport that shared with me his dream of opening up his own baseball card store. This inspired me. I wanted to open up my own baseball card store. One day he setup a professional-looking stand in his garage and operated a neighborhood store for a day. I really looked up to that guy and always wondered how he turned out. I don’t remember his name though.

    I also had small stints in buying candy and gum from the grocery store to sell at school. There was a time when “sour balls” just came out, which weren’t available from vending machines at school. I’d go to the grocery store, buy a bag, and sell them at school for 10 cents a piece. I actually didn’t sell any though. It was a complete failure. By the time I got into the game, I was already too late, the market was already saturated with other sellers. You see, it wasn’t my idea. I stole it from someone else – someone who had greater access to capital (their mom) and more prone to risk (willing to ask for the sale). Not only did my competitors have these things, they had prior experience selling Big Red and other types of gum. This is the same guy who later shot me in the back with his BB gun and gave me a bad haircut.

    His name was Joey. We were both in 5th grade and one day Joey and I were walking home from that same strip mall in Southport. We started to come up with a plan for a new type of business. We both liked going to the local Putt-Putt and playing arcade games so we thought it’d be cool to start a small theme park or game center where you could do things like ride go-carts or fly small aircraft in addition to your standard arcade. We drew out pictures and made grand plans. We were doing it for kids like us who didn’t have a place like that. We were our own customers. We were scratching our own itch. It was “selling Lamborghini’s for a dollar” all over again. It never happened.

    Business Education

    Middle school was pretty much the dark ages of my entrepreneurial journey, but in high school I really ramped up. I started an antique business with a friend, started taking business classes at school, began editing websites on the side, started a band, and subscribed to INC and Entrepreneur magazines. When we had Career Day at school I told a speaker I wanted to “own my own island”. I was rude and full of hot air. I didn’t understand at that time how much value I would have to provide the world in order for me to one day afford my own island. I didn’t learn that until much later.

    I kept studying business in the various colleges I attended. Each one taught me a little something different. At Kentucky Christian College I learned about how much I don’t like accounting. At Milligan I learned that first impressions make a lasting impression. At Ball State I learned about art. And at IUPUI I learned about computer science. I took 3 classes on Microsoft Office, 2 speech classes, and 1 marketing class. I took 2 years of Accounting in high school and 2 years of Accounting in college. I joined every business club I could find and failed 3 out of 4 of my math classes.

    I don’t feel that I learned that much from college, but there were a handful of professors that made an impact on me. Dr. Charlie Starr, a literature professor at KCC, taught me about symbolism in movies, and although I can’t remember all of their names, the most impactful teachers were my literature teachers. Those were the ones I seemed to connect with the most in high school and college. The other most impactful professor was Andy Harris at IUPUI. He taught me about computer science and STAIR, which is an iterative method of problem solving, similar to customer development.

    Business Development

    I made the mistake of thinking that a college education was the key to any sort of financial windfall. In fact it had the opposite effect. I became debt-ridden and after I graduated I was no better off in the job market than the day before I graduated. I even asked my employer at the time, Old National, for a raise, but they said no. It wasn’t until I went back to school at a technical school for a specific skill set that I was able to get a higher paying job. However I later learned that the thing that actually helped get me that job was what I was doing on the side: web design. They wanted someone who could do IT work and help out with their website.

    In my last year of IUPUI, Jason and I worked together to build a computer repair company called Neighborhood Geeks. After I graduated college, instead of going to classes in the morning I started going on IT service calls. I had no formal education as an computer technician, but I knew a lot about how Windows XP worked and had a good idea of how to troubleshoot problems. Google, like now, was our friend. After two years of not getting ahead in my day job at Old National, I started get CompTIA and Microsoft Certified. I still couldn’t find a better job so one day, I just quit.

    A coworker asked me what my boss, Corey, said when I quit. He said, “You filled out the wrong form.” I couldn’t help but laugh. Old National didn’t use to have a formal “2 Weeks Notice” form so years earlier Corey had me make one up for our department. I used the form I had made, but by the time I quit, Old National’s HR department had come up with their own form. I had worked there full time for 6 years. It literally took me an hour 1-way to get to work everyday. I drove through rain storms and snow storms. I made stupid mistakes that will haunt me for the rest of my life. I essentially grew up there, but it was time to move on.

    Career Development

    2 days later I got a job at a call center helping teachers learn how to use web-based software to make tests and quizzes for their students. It was brutal, but even in that environment, I added value. There was a particular problem that no one knew how to fix and people would often call in about it and we’d have to say we didn’t know. One day I decided to dig into the problem and I discovered what was causing it and how to work around it. I was one of the few people who didn’t get laid off during the slowdown, but that’s when I got the opportunity to work at IBM’s call center, so I left after working there 2 months.

    I worked at IBM 3 days before I got the job doing IT full-time. The first job I ever had was washing dishes for $4.25 an hour. I started Old National in Muncie at $7.47 an hour and ended in Indianapolis at over $12 an hour. The call center in Lebanon paid $10 an hour and IBM paid $11 an hour. My new job as an IT professional paid $20 an hour, which was quite a big jump for me at the time, but I stayed at that same rate for 5 years. Despite moving on to a business analyst position at another bank for 3 years and working as an interim manager at a dental office for 9 months, I stayed at that same rate until I went back to being an IT professional for a new rate of $25 an hour.

    But I was tired of “trading dollars for hours” like Robert Kiyosaki talks about in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Even for the year in which I ran my own consulting business doing IT and web services I was still trading my time for money. I longed to move beyond the employee or self-employed roles (or the technician role in The E-Myth Revisited) and into the business owner or entrepreneur role, respectively. I needed a product or service I could sell systematically that took my time out of the value equation so that I wasn’t the one holding myself back from earning the income I wanted to fulfil my vision for the future.

    Vision and Mindset

    I’ve spent a lot of time learning about how to start a business. I’ve read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start. I know you need to start with a mantra, make meaning, and have milestones. I read Jim Collin’s Good to Great. I know that you first have to get “the right people on the bus.” Eric Ries’ Lean Startup says to start with the product and ask people if they want it. There are many ways to start a business, but I know some of the worst include choosing a business name, buying business cards, incorporating, and designing a logo. None of those things bring in new customers or revenue. That’s how I developed the theme of #SellFirst, and it’s a tag I own on Twitter.

    “Sell First” is a mindset that says, “before I invest more time, energy, and money into this new business, I am first going to ask someone if they want to buy it.” I believe that sales is essentially “asking someone to buy something.” In high school Jason and I called this “spontaneous asking”. We found that when we asked for something, we were much more likely to get it than we did not ask for it. This seems obvious after the fact, but there is much fear in asking, which may be part of the fear people have of selling. I certainly still have that fear, but it’s something I’m learning to get over as I view it as more important than marketing. Marketing Supports Sales.

    I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts and motivational speaking lately and several reoccurring themes have emerged. The first one is the need for a vision of what you’re future will look like. This sets your mind in the direction it needs to go. The second is the need for mentors and education that gives you the information you’ll need to get to where you’re going. The third thing is hard work and the ability to temporarily discomfort yourself now for a better future later. Extraordinary effort now is greater than the same amount of effort spread out over time. The fourth thing is your product. When given the choice between working on anything else and your product, always choose to improve the product.

    Product Development

    I live in Tipton. I’ve lived there for most of the last 10 years. It’s a small town with little to nothing going on. I have to drive at least a half hour in any direction to see anything other than cornfields and pickup trucks. But it’s from this location that I’ve worked professionally for 10 years, developed and ran side and full-time businesses, and raised a family (I now have 5 kids). It’s out of this desolated place that I’ve come to shape my ideas of place and community. It’s how I came up with the ideas for Seektivity and Outure. I believed that it didn’t matter as much where you were, but who you were hanging out with and what you did with the situation. Even Tipton could be a cool place with the right people, the right knowledge, or the right stuff.

    I had a vision of a mobile app that allowed you to post and activities and things to do around you. If you discovered a tennis court you could add it to the app and tag it with “tennis” and the next person who came there might add “badminton”. In the same way, someone might find a baseball diamond and first tag it with “baseball” while someone else might tag it with “Wiffle ball” or “softball”. If Foursquare is for tagging places to go, Seektivity would be for tagging what there is to do at those places. There may be a hundred different fun things to do in Tipton, but without an informational tool like Seektivity, I would never know about them. In this way, people can transform their communities into more active and happier places to live.

    In late 2012 and early 2013 I started getting interested in physical products and ecommerce. That’s when I got the idea to create products to help Seektivity users get more out of their communities. Outure was developed out of a need to facilitate “activity in your own backyard.” I felt that outdoor adventure companies often glorified exotic places like mountaintops and sunny beaches while most of America lives in mostly flat, mostly dry areas of the country. That doesn’t mean there isn’t fun things they could be doing if they just had the right information, similarly interested people, and the right equipment. By providing the people with the gear to have fun in their own backyards, my mantra in both products is to “facilitate play”.

    Outdoor Adventure with Outure

    The Reality

    The reality is I’m not as great as I thought I was. I never finished making Seektivity. I got a minimally viable product (MVP) and stopped working on it in February of 2013. That same month I stopped being an entrepreneur and went back to work for a company that made me extremely uncomfortable for 7 months. In August of 2013 I switched jobs and began working on Outure and everyday I take a little step forward by posting a picture to Instagram or commenting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter. I hired a VA in November to help write reviews of urban activity equipment sold on Amazon as an affiliate, but hope to one day open my own e-commerce store. That’s my vision and this is my reality.

  • Kentucky Christian College

    Attending Kentucky Christian College is one of my deepest regrets. I wish I could go back in time and convince myself that it would not be fun, that I would not learn what I needed to know, and that I would not find my wife there, but I did go. I went there straight out of high school. The year was 1998 and I was a fool. I didn’t know anything, but I thought I knew everything. This is a story about my two years at KCC.

    It all started back in Franklin, or more specifically, Trafalgar, where we went to church. Our youth minister, Jeff Wise, graduated from KCC and invited us to attend Summer in the Son. It was fun. Really fun. We rocked out to Matthew Sweet, Prayer Chain, and Poor Old Lu in the church van, hung out with girls our age, and attended concerts at night. In the dorm rooms we’d wrestle to Starflyer 59, drink Ale 8 One, and make prank calls. In short, it was awesome.

    When it came time for us to decide what college to attend I considered Indiana University and it’s Computer Science program. I visited the campus and even looked at starting an arcade to make money while I went to school there. But I also visited KCC specifically to review it as a college I might want to go to. I remember Eric Pangburn urging me not to attend. He specifically said, “Don’t come here. It’s terrible,” but I didn’t listen. I decided that I should take out a loan and go.

    Within the first week we were literally told, “This is not Summer in the Son.” That should have been our first clue that things weren’t going to be as fun as we thought they were going to be. Of course, the point of college is not to have fun, but it’s also not to “not have fun”. I fully understand college’s role in helping a young person turn into an adult, learn to manage a schedule, deal with more responsibilities gradually, and ultimately prove themselves with a degree, but fun is one of them.

    I remember the first week we were there when it was already obvious who would be hanging out with who. The good looking people formed the “populars”, the soccer players formed their group, the basketball players formed their group, and that left the rest of us. There were the people in bands, the people who played video games, and the people who played guitar. This was before a time when everyone had cell phones and very few people had a computer in their room. A Playstation was high tech.

    We were the ones who played video games, guitar, and had a computer in our room. However, there was only dial-up Internet access at that time and you had to pay extra for dial up so the computers in our rooms were only used for word processing. My computer was a 486 that ran Windows 3.1. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was 1998 and Windows 95 had only been out for 3 years at that point. When we needed to print something or get on the Internet we’d have to go to the computer lab.

    I was dating a girl named Jessica at the time, but she was still a senior in high school. She was the first girl I ever kissed, 2 years earlier, while riding The Beast at King’s Island. She had a big impact on my life right up until I started dating my current wife. I learned a lot about her during my freshman year at KCC. We’d talk on the phone (via a landline) and I’d have to pay long-distance phone charges so we’d also write letters as she didn’t have email at the time.

    I spent most of my time hanging out with Derek Eads and Brian Reid. Brian and his wife died in 2008. We’d make movies together for fun. I was the only person on campus with a video camera so people would often look at me with suspicion and there were many stories as to why I was doing what I was doing and what I was filming. I once heard that I spent 8 hours in the bushes recording people coming and going, which I found interesting. It wasn’t even that good of a story.

    There was a hill behind campus filled with dead bodies. Above the graveyard was a point overlooking the Interstate that ran alongside the campus. Slightly below that in the wooded area of the hill I formed a fort. I’d go there after class to get away and have a spot of my own. I even went and bought a shovel and some flower seeds so I could plant a garden. I always wondered what the flowers looked like during the summer while I was gone and I picture the whole hillside covered with flowers today.

    The first summer I worked at Michiana Christian Summer Camp in Niles, Michigan as a maintenance man. I gave my friend, Vineet a ride back in my white, Chevy Caprice Classic. The air conditioning wasn’t working well, but I didn’t think anything of it. By the end of the summer, the car caught on fire on my way to Brian Reid’s house to visit, my car got towed and impounded, and I paid $80 for a cab ride to Brian’s house. It took another $80 to get my car out of the impound lot, but I’m glad I went.

    I’m not sure why I decided to go back to KCC my second year. I was in a band and there was that, but when Derek mentioned he didn’t want to go back, I convinced him to go and for that I am sorry. The school made it clear that they didn’t want us back. Despite telling them we were coming back and paying to come back, they had removed Derek and I from the school’s registrar (along with Eric Pangburn) and so we had to wait hours in line to get re-enrolled in the school. Oh and we had no dorm room.

    By this time Jessica had both broken up with, started attending my school, and dating my best friend. In the meantime, a girl named Sarah started showing interest in me and we started hanging out. Her dad worked as the school’s accountant and so her family lived in town. I’d go over to her house and enjoyed hanging out with her family. She had many brothers and sisters and there was always someone there – except when their wasn’t. I remember watching The Saint with her one day, but I didn’t get it.

    I didn’t understand that when a girl chooses to spend time exclusively with you that she may like you more than you realize. Maybe I was clouded by the fact that her ex-boyfriend still hung around or that we never kissed, but I should have been tipped off when she gave me a mix-tape and a card before I left for Fall break that year. Despite those early warning signs, I went home, kissed someone else, and happily reported to her about it when I got back. She promptly told me we were over, but for me it had never began.

    There were other girls at KCC I both liked and hung out with, but they always (not a metaphor) had boyfriends back home. Jenny was from Michigan near Niles. She never came back after her first year, but I visited her once over the summer. Nikki was from Lexington, Kentucky. I visited her in the summer of 2000 with Ben. Her boyfriend and her dad were both in Amway. I bought her an engagement ring, but Anya, who I also liked and who was from Ukraine convinced me not to ask her to marry me. I didn’t.

    We had chapel every Tuesday and Thursday and most people also went to church on Sundays in town. One day I went out looking for something and stopped at the local radio station for directions. That’s when I met Jim Phillips, who worked at the radio station. He lived on Jim Phillips Blvd and went to First Church of Christ. When the school refused to give our band a spot to practice, Jim helped Shog get a practice location in the basement. He was the a good friend those two years I was on campus at KCC.

    I didn’t always go to class, but when I did it wasn’t really worth it, with a few exceptions. I learned the value of a calendar to free your use of time. This was pre-GTD and it was my first introduction into time management. I learned that just because you teach at a Christian college, doesn’t mean that you’re a Christian. I learned that I liked literature (movies and writing mostly) and disliked accounting. It was a good thing I was a business major, right? Hence my exit.

    I remember doing a Shog show in the last semester of my last year at KCC. We were playing in the parking lot outside of the cafeteria during dinner. The sun was setting and I was singing, “We all want to be free to choose our destiny. I want to get out of this place,” which are lyrics from one of our last and best songs, Thirty-Six Cents. I knew at that moment that I wouldn’t be back and things would never be the same. Derek an our bass player left for Ball State, I went to Milligan College, and the guitar players went home.

    There were two state parks near Grayson, Kentucky where the college was located. Each had a lake. Most of the time we’d go out to Grayson Lake, which had several rock outcroppings that made for great cliff jumping. One was called “Sex Rock”. I took Anya there one day and we had a sort of picnic without the food. It was early in the spring and the sun was shining, but not enough to give you a tan. We sat alone and I was alone. She was not mine to have. She was my friend and I liked her.

    One night in December our first year, Jessica and her friend, Jodi, came down to KCC to visit. They knew they were both going to go to KCC the next year so it was more just to get a taste of what it was like to go to KCC rather than make a decision whether or not to go (don’t go!). We all ended up going out to Grayson lake. We sang, “Lean on Me” in the car and swang on the swings in the playground. I remember it was unusually warm for a December night. It was fun – one of the few times.

    After Just One Week at KCC

    It seems, its always the crazy times you find, you’ll wake up and realize it takes, more than your saline eyes to make things right. -“Crazy Times” by Jars of Clay

    It started off pretty good – college that is. This implies that my week went downhill from there. Not necessarily, but it did get worse from time to time. Let me explain.

    The first day was great. I woke up at 5:00 AM in Franklin, Indiana and was on campus in Grayson, Kentucky by 11:30 AM after only a 45 minute traffic holdup in Louisville. I ate lunch and boy was it good (a hint of what was to come). After that I moved in, but did not get unpacked and registered. I heard from my mom that registration was very nice compared to hers at Central Missouri State University. I wouldn’t know. That was my first.

    You know the drill. I fixed my room and got scared of the upperclassmen who moved in shortly after us. Although once I realized they were mostly all nice people with a freshman disposition, I was less stressed out. Speaking of stress, classes were about to start.

    My first class was Activity 1, which equals gym class. We went over the syllabus then got out a half-hour early. I’m thinking, “If all my classes are like this, then college going to be great!” My hopes were dashed when I got to Composition 101 and the professor informed us of the many papers we would be doing that semester.

    The next set of classes was not different. They all went over their various syllabi and none actually started class except for History of Civilization. This put that class on my bad side and so far it hasn’t redeemed itself.

    Life in Grayson is great I’m sure, but I don’t know how to squeeze the fun out of it yet so I spend a lot of time in the McKenzie Student Life Center. I checked my Internet email account that I couldn’t check until September 1st, I played wallyball, and I even got to play pool.

    All in all college has been good. The food is good, the people are good, but the homework is not. Hopefully College 101 can help me better adapt to doing the work associated with college. Thank you KCC. -Erich Stauffer, September, 1998

  • The Screen – Milligan Movies

    Ben and Erich Leave for Milligan the First Time

    This is a story about how I ended up leaving Kentucky Christian College and helping Milligan College produce it’s first feature-length film called The Screen.

    I was working at Camp Allendale the summer between Kentucky Christian College and Milligan. My friend, Ben, asked me if I wanted to go on a vacation with him to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. I said yes.

    John Mann and I both happened to, separately, go to Milligan College after first attending Kentucky Christian College.  This is primarily because it offered a degree in Film, but I also knew I could study Computer Science there if I wanted to. I was studying Bible and Business at Kentucky Christian College (KCC), but was mostly ostracized for carrying a video camera around campus making videos. The last year I was there KCC put on a play written by John Mann, who was a former student who at that time was already attending Milligan College (Zac Parsons actually starred in that play). It was through this play, which my girlfriend at the time was producing, that I learned about Milligan’s film school, but I didn’t decide to go to Milligan until I saw a marketing poster for them hanging up at my church. I turned to Ben Fair and said, “Let’s go to Milligan,” and he said, “Okay.” I was a little worried about running into my old boss, the son of the camp director at Michiana Christian Summer Camp where I worked the summer before, but it turned out that he only attended Milligan for one year. By the time I got there I had already attended KCC for two years and I was like a freshman who went in with both eyes open – and I took full advantage. I told everyone my name was Dirk Douglas and made it a point to meet a lot of different people and do a lot of different things. I had a lot of stations there and I was mostly happy.

    Since I was studying film and I auditioned to assist John Mann and Chad Garrison in producing Milligan’s first feature-length film, The Screen, which is a story about Cameron Jarrett who, like Walter Mitty, lives a boring life – some might even call it “pathetic”. Girls would not talk to him and the ones who did would often break up with him. The friends he has he annoys by reminding them how long it’s been since he’s had a date, but that’s all about to change when he meets a strange man from “Eye N Sky Productions” that turns his life into a television show (you know, like the Truman Show that came out two years before and appears in a movie poster in the background during this scene). If he agreed, he would be paid $1 million, but there was only one catch (there’s always a catch): if he told anyone about this, he would forfeit everything. After that initial meeting things started changing for Cameron. All of a sudden girls were asking him out and he was the life of the party, but then things started getting weird. First a friend got an STD, another was a victim of alcohol abuse, and another got his girlfriend pregnant – he even inadvertently dates a 16 year old. “No!!!” All of a sudden The Screen begins to ask if what we are seeing is really real? Then all of a sudden the movie kind of turns into The Matrix (which came out a year prior in 1999) and his life is all of a sudden really worth watching. Chad Garrison currently lives in Las Vegas and runs Faith Road Productions and SGT John Mann is an Emmy-winning, fifteen year veteran of television and film and is currently serving as a broadcast journalist in the United States Army.

    About Milligan College

    At the time Milligan had about twice the number of students as KCC (now called KCU for Kentucky Christian University) at around 1000 students.  The culture was more academic and liberal.  By that I mean that the professors seemed happy making their classes too hard to pass and the student body seemed to be Christian by title only.  Milligan is heavily populated by students from the mega-church in Louisville, Kentucky, Southeast Christian Church.  Most of the students who attend get large scholarships.  When I attended, it cost $8000 a semester, but I believe it is now around $15000 a semester.  The layout of campus is very hilly and is physically challenging to get around.  The post office is at the bottom of the hill next to the creek.  The chapel is at the top of the hill next to the gym.  Just like at KCC, chapel is mandatory twice a week.  When ever the congregation stands or sits, the old squeeky chairs would cry out like a thousand hungry babies.  The dorm rooms had high-speed internet access, but at the time, there was only one dorm hall with air conditioning.

    The college itself is about 20-30 minutes from any sort of shopping center, about 10 minutes from the nearest gas station.  Milligan students are called “Buffs” or “Buffalo’s”, which refers to the mountain that can be seen in the Western horizon (It’s got a hump like a buffalo).  To give you an idea of how rural this college is, my physics professor took us out to his farm to see his tractor.  In 1995 I took a mission trip down to Johnson City/Elizabethton (which are the two cities that straddle Milligan) to help out at a children’s home there. I was still in high school then. The man who ran that home later worked with me in the cafeteria at Milligan where I washed dishes.  It is an extremely poor area and so finding work experience for a future job or to help out during college was hard.  Although Johnson City seems like it would be a place to find jobs, there is already a East Tennessee State University there with lots more students already filling jobs there. On the social side of things, having a secular college near by did offer some opportunities to meet more people (I attended Milligan in the year 2000 and we didn’t have Facebook then, but we did have College Club).

    I knew and met people from ETSU because of Wednesday night worship at a Johnson City Church.  I actually went to one church Wednesday night (because it was the cool thing to do and the drummer was awesome), another church on Sunday morning (because I liked the preacher’s daughter who processed our meal cards at the cafeteria door), and went to another church on Sunday night (because they had swing dancing on Sunday nights and cool worship). She made me a mix CD that I still have today, but we only really went on a group date in which she tried to hook me up with her friend.  I did hook up with a girl who was working backstage at a concert in Johnson City.  I met her on ChristianFriendFinder.com, but had never seen her in person.  She was friends with all the bands so was backstage eating with them.  I just found the door, walked in, got some food, and sat down next to her. Everyone was looking at me like “Who is this guy? He seems to know what he’s doing, but I don’t know why he is here.”  Eventually I found out that I had sat down next to the one I had came to meet and by the end of the night we were dating (if this interests you, read Everything I Know About Women).

    I ran a radio show at night at the college radio station with Ben Fair, but I quit after three episodes.  I studied in the library at night with Jen from New York.  On the first day of school it started raining during orientation and I asked if I could walk under her umbrella with her.  She was very elegant, but only dated guys named Steve. I called her Elegant Jen. She was friends with Jennifer, who I once walked to the “college on a hill” across the street from Milligan.  Its a seminary.  When we got to the top of the hill we were all alone and should have kissed, but I didn’t want to.  We walked back down, sealing our fate as friends for the rest of the semester.  One night, we went with a group of people to a lake.  It was already dark when we left and I asked if we could play the new Third Eye Blind album, their second release.  When we got there, the driver (a guy from Southeast Christian Church) drove down into the lake, right on the edge of the cliff. I was scared and so was Jennifer.  We squeezed each other’s hands so tight, but we didn’t tip over.  We survived.

    There were groups of people that hung together and ate together just like at KCC, just like everywhere, but I tried to buck that trend and specifically tried to sit with people who hadn’t asked me to sit with them – especially during lunch.  This, for some reason, allowed me to be more than myself.  Because I was new, they hung on my every word. They anticipated my responses. I became a hero, a comedian, a real riot.  It was not my intention at all, but my signature move was to find one girl at the table to “thank” for letting me sit with them and kiss her on the cheek on the way out.  There’s nothing like the sound of a table full of people erupting in hysterical laughter.  I only went to Milligan for one semester.  It was enough.  I have no desire to go back, even to visit.  I do not recommend Milligan for Milligan’s sake. What I do recommend is that you squeeze every last ounce out of college that you can and go into it with clearly defined goals.  If you wants to go to a Christian college in Tennesee, I recommend Johnson Bible College.  If she wants to go to Kentucky, I recommend Asbury.  If you wants to go to Indiana, I recommend Taylor, Huntington, or Anderson.  You’ll probably make up your mind based on a friend’s suggestion and a marketing poster, but you’re a good person for reading this far.

  • Joss Whedon and Getting Things Done

    This is a Google+ Hangout with Jason Cobb about a Fast Company article about how Joss Whedon gets stuff done. This intrigued me because I’m a David Allen/GTD follower and I used to make movies (not like these movies). This movie talks a little about that and how life’s journey has a way of taking you were you were going to go anyway, even if you take another path to get there.

  • Building Time

    My son is 4 years old. He was born the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. He collects things to build with in hopes that one day I’ll take the time to do that with him. Right now he’s asleep, right outside my door, on the floor, next to his red bucket of things to build with me.

    One day I took him out to a junkyard I used to drive by when my wife and I each ran a paper route. We were trying to keep from losing the house and were behind on our mortgage. The bank made us a deal. They said we could stop paying for a while, and then make a big balloon payment at the end. I didn’t see how that was much better, but I signed the papers anyway.

    Kevin wanted to build a rocket. (That is my son’s name.) But what he really wanted was to fly in a rocket. We’d go in the closet and I’d simulate a launch sequence. He never bought into it. I kept saying, “You just want to fly up in the air, but how are you going to get down?” (Safely, I meant.) He wasn’t concerned with that. He just wanted to fly. And I was going to help him build a rocket.

    Kevin Spotted a TrainWhen we got to the junkyard, there was no longer any rocket parts laying around. We saw a train. I stopped. We raced to get out of the car. He pointed at the train. It was exciting. When we got home I found some parts in my shop and we built a small rocket model, about three feet high. It wasn’t much and he didn’t care for it. He wanted something he could climb in, something he could fly.

    One day I came home and he had built an airplane out of scraps of wood he had found and some tape. I thought it was pretty cool so I gave him some more wood to see what he could do. We even made a video of it. He seemed to be more creative with less. There isn’t much in his bucket – just some wood, a marble, a miniature cardboard cutout of Superman, and some string. He wants to fly, but most of all he wants time with his dad.

    We were able to make that balloon payment and keep the house. Shortly thereafter I went full-time in my own IT/web consulting business. I helped a lot of people, but somewhere along the line I forgot what I was doing, and who I was doing it for. I stopped asking how I could help other people and was only focused on myself and what I could do. I had to get back to my core values, but i didn’t know what they were. I seemed lost. My son doesn’t know what he’s going to build, but he knows that if he collects enough of the parts he wants to see in the finished product, the end result will be something he can be proud of. That’s what I started to do, too.

    My first value was more of a mantra: help people. If I wasn’t helping someone, I didn’t want to do it. While this seems simple at first, there are a lot of things you can do that are not helpful to people. Some are annoying, some are exploitative, and others are just downright harmful. I wanted to help make the world a better place by helping people. My second value was: add value. In every transaction, interaction, and blog post I wanted to be adding value. I don’t want to be noise, I want to be a part of a community where my clients and I look forward to seeing each other.

    Kevin Building a RocketOne of my favorite scenes in any movie is in Apollo 13 when the engineer at NASA dumps all the parts on a table and says they have to make ‘this air filter fit in this air system’. That is like a dream come true for me. I would love to have that challenge. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t have made two different air filter systems for the same ship, but there’s something about the puzzle element that fascinates me. I wonder if that’s what my son feels when he’s building. I hope I’ll soon find out when he wakes up and I make time to build.

  • My First eCommerce Company

    While I didn’t think of it as an e-commerce company at the time, I was buying books in real life and selling them on Half.com – something I’ve wanted to get back into for the last year. This is a story of my first e-commerce company, Blu Bukx.

    The Beginning of Blu Bukx Company

    Blu Bukx CompanyLike a lot of companies, this one started as a result of what my friend, Jason, was doing. He had visited a local library with his new wife and discovered they were selling off their old books by the bag. He looked up how much he could sell them online and quickly discovered he could turn a profit. He already had an eye for this type of thing as he was already actively selling antiques on eBay for his dad, a retired antique dealer. For those following along, this is the same dad that allowed Jason and I to have a booth in a closet in his antique store (hence the name Closet Collectibles Company).

    Not one to let this newly found arbitrage go unexploited, I soon found myself visiting every library in town, buying up as many books as I could find and posting them to Half.com. I found that children’s books and non-fiction books sold the best and although I was selling at least one book a day, the books were piling up in my bedroom. I was still in college at the time and during this process had just recently met the woman who would later become my wife and had recently just started working at a bank doing items processing. I would go to class in the morning, come home in the afternoon, package up books to ship, then take them to the post office on the way to work.

    It was a big process to enter in the ISBN codes for every book purchased into Half.com. My future wife would stay up late at night in her dorm room to help me out. I remember one time she entered in hundreds of books on the site and I did something to delete all of her work. I think she cried. As part of the process you would have to price your book. Half.com would let you see what other people were selling it at and you could price it accordingly. One book stuck out. It was a book about the mafia’s role in the oil business and someone had it posted for $150. My soon to be wife thought it would be a “great deal” at $120 off. It sold. She told people about that book sale for years. She was so happy.

    When the libraries ran out of books to sell I had to find another source to keep up my inventory. That’s when I discovered the clearance section at the local Barnes and Noble, Borders, and Half Price Books stores. I could buy a book there that nobody locally wanted to buy for say $3 and sell it online for $15. This was in 2001 when a lot of local booksellers hadn’t really caught on to the whole Internet thing. It wasn’t that there weren’t any websites selling books online: at the time, Amazon.com was still the biggest (and I even experimented with selling some of my books through them as a reseller), but there was also efollet.com and textbooks.com, which is part of one of the funnest nights of my life.

    One of the Funnest Nights of My Life

    The fall semester was about to begin and as was the tradition, Jason and I would walk around campus figuring out where all of our classes were before the first day of school. The campus was mostly empty at this point, but all of the building doors were open. One of the buildings we went into had a large dumpster in the hallway where professors had been dumping old papers and whatever else they didn’t want. As book resellers there was one thing Jason and I both noticed right away: a trunk-load of textbooks. They were the kind of books that textbook publishers would send professors to get them to buy their books, but if the teacher didn’t want to use them, they were of no value to them.

    We loaded all of the books into Jason’s car and drove them back to his house. After getting them all inside his office we began systematically looking them up on efollet.com and the total value quickly got into the hundreds of dollars. Needless to say we were getting giddy, but the real fun started when we “got serious” and started to cross-reference the different textbook buying sites on a per-ISBN basis to create the highest payout possible. Now that was fun. We ended up splitting the money which I no doubt put into food, rent, my computer payment, or more books.

    One of the Changiest Years of My Life

    2001 was the year I moved to Muncie, Indiana, changed colleges, worked four different jobs, dated two different girls, got engaged to one of them, bought my first cell phone, my first apartment, started my first ecommerce business, and watched our country go through September 11th. I was mowing that morning as there was a period of time when I would mow in the mornings, go to school in the middle of the day, and then go to work at the bank in the evening. The first thing I heard when I got back into the truck and turned on the radio was, “It’s an act of war!” My first thought was, “What was?” As I listened to the radio my first inclination was to call Jason and ask him what was going on. He filled me in and said he was recording the news in case I missed any of it. My next call was to my soon-to-be wife. I told her I loved her then called my parents and did the same. It was a weird year and one with a lot of changes, but things didn’t stop changing. They keep changing every year.

    The End of Blu Bukx Company

    Eventually local book sellers did catch on to the whole “Internet thing” and started competing against me directly. The market inefficiencies were gone and it became increasingly harder and harder for me to turn a profit as my margins continued to shrink. I tried to sell the business and it’s inventory to my mom, but she didn’t want to do the work involved. I had got laid off from my bank job in Muncie and got transferred to the same job in Indianapolis. I was engaged, but was now living back at home with my parents. I ended up picking out some books to keep for any future kids I might have, giving away some to friends and family members, and taking the rest to Half Price Books to sell. I still have two of the book shelves (I made one), but the others got sold to a guy at the bank I worked with. My kids do read some of the books I kept from Blu Bukx company, but mostly they just sit there.

    Although I walk by these books every day I almost forgot that I even had this company. Looking back I can see how much time it took (for both me and my wife) and how much it influenced a small part of my life. The one thing I find odd is that because of the way Yahoo! stores it’s mail and because of me switching computers over time I have no digital record of this company ever existing. I can’t find anything in any of my emails, on my hard drive, or on the Internet (via Google search). If I didn’t write this post, no one would have ever known it ever existed. And that would have been okay. I just wanted to write this for my own sake as it touched on a lot of different parts of my life that helped shape where I am today. Maybe I’ll start up another e-commerce company again – and maybe my wife will help me input product descriptions and pack up orders – and maybe we’ll be happy.

  • The Stauffer Kids

    I didn’t ever want to write about my children in order to protect their privacy, but thought that if I were ever to die, which I will, they might be interested in how I thought about them in this time of their lives.

    Stauffer KidsI’ve written about them before in The Apple Tree and how I lost them in The Candy Aisle, but that was more about my interaction with them and less about what I thought of them as people.

    Magdalena is very scared to break the rules and doesn’t like it when other people do. This is in part due to us being so strict on her as a baby. She wasn’t allowed to do anything wrong. She doesn’t have a very good sense of humor, but she does read a lot and is starting to make connections between things, which tells me she’s really smart. She scares easily.

    Carmina is very funny and caring. She says she can’t decide whether she wants to be a nurse to poke people or a doctor to cut babies out. She cares for baby dolls all day long and is very good at doing her chores. I think she’s better at math than Magdalena even though she’s two years younger. She loves watching cartoons and is excellent at memorizing Bible verses.

    Kevin is very energetic and loud. He loves to run, jump, and play. He has recently started making up songs to sing and learning how to play baseball. Like Carmina, Kevin loves to watch cartoons. He learns a lot from them and often gets up in the middle of the night to watch them. He is very funny and fun to be around. He loves dinosaurs and playing outside.

    Samuel is very good at sports and loves to play with balls and trucks. He seems to be smart too and has started saying more words now such as “Why?”, “Mine”, and “No.” He loves going on walks and on stroller rides. He loves being outside and doing anything his older brother does. He’s very funny, possibly more funny than Carmina and already catches better than Kevin.

    Before Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, I posted pictures like this to my blog, but now posts like that just don’t make sense so I combined them all into this one post. In case you’re reading this after I’m dead, please know that I’m sorry I yelled at you when you were interrupting me and I’m sorry I didn’t come right away like I said I would. I liked hearing you play even though sometimes made it hard to work. I tried to play with you as much as I could. I love you all.

    Sugar cookies and lemonade for breakfast at Barnes and Nobles – 2007/02/27

    New McDonalds have free game kiosks instead of playgrounds – 2007/01/29

    Missing you at mile 100,750 – 2006/10/15

    Down by the riverside in Noblesville – 2006/05/19

    My Baby – She really likes Daddy to pick her up! – 2/18/2006

    October Beach – 10/10/2005

    I like the beach on Lake Michigan. My baby and me walked on the sand in Michigan City, IN last month. You can see Mt. Baldy and the Chicago skyline from there. When we were leaving, two surfers got into the water. They must have been cold. The wind was blowing hard and sand would sting us as it hit. The birds were flying forward, but remained stationary in the wind. Magdalena loved watching them and so did I.

    Daisies – 11/9/2005

    This is my baby and me, hanging out in the dining room. She is almost two and may be two and a half when she becomes a big sister. We asked her if she wanted a little brother and she said, “uhn uh”. So then we asked if she wanted a little sister and again she said, “uhn uh.” We thought she might have just been on a roll so we began asking her more yes and no questions which all resulted in the same answer so it is hard to say how she really feels about a sibling or if she even understands. I like her innocence.

  • The Candy Aisle

    In August of 2009 I wrote about how I couldn’t afford to let my child choose whatever candy they wanted from the gas station because I literally only had less than $2. All of our credit cards were maxed out and we could barely make the minimum payments. It forced us to become used to living within our means after living outside of them for so long, but our troubles were far from over. In fact they were only just beginning.

    “I went to bed [that] night thinking about my experience earlier in the day with my daughter at the gas station. We walked there to get my wife a coke, but had some ‘extra’ money to get her some candy. When we walked through the candy aisle, she started looking at the bags of candy on the left and I looked at the money I had. I had to bend down and tell her that she could only look on the other side of the aisle, in a section in which I could afford to buy her something. In bed that night I started thinking how much more awful it would be to do similar things in the future to clothes she’ll want to buy, trips she’ll want to go on with friends, etc..

    In 3 months I’d be living at a friend’s house in a spare bedroom, and I’d be a month away from losing my house. The tires on my car were so bad no one would change them unless I bought all four at once, which I couldn’t afford. Since they didn’t think my car was safe I didn’t feel comfortable picking my kids up to go anywhere. I ended up selling my wedding ring to fix my car because I didn’t know if my wife would give me any of my money from the paycheck deposited in the bank account she controlled. She blamed me for the state of our marriage, for the mortgage going unpaid, and for her inability to get a job. And she was right. A lot of it was my fault. I chose to go to college, incur huge amounts of debt, get married, have children, buy a car and home I couldn’t afford, and take whatever job came my way. I didn’t have a plan and I wasn’t being a leader. I was a loser and I had lost.

    James Altucher wrote in How to Have Great Ideas that, “I lost the first home I bought. I lost all my money. Fifteen million cash. I went to zero. I was literally crying on the floor while my baby was crawling over to me to get to her toys. I couldn’t get a loan of a few hundred dollars just to ensure I could provide diapers and food for the weekend. From my own parents! Nobody trusted me.” And in his book, I Was Blind But Now I See, he wrote, “I would pace at three in the morning. ‘I’m going to lose this house. My kids are going to switch schools. I have three months to live. I’m going to lose this house. I’m going to this and that and this/that.’ The chatter doesn’t stop and it’s nightmarish at three in the morning. And at four, and at five, and it doesn’t stop when the kids wake up and they don’t know anything is different but I cry then because everything is different.”

    Paper RouteIn Everything I Know About Cars I wrote, “Our first son was born the day Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008 and soon after all of our credit cards were unusable. The banks decided to lower our credit limit to our current balance, rendering them useless. We had foolishly been relying on credit each month to pay our daily expenses, but suddenly we were forced to pay for everything with cash, check, or debit card. We didn’t make enough money at the time to pay our monthly expenses as we had been living outside of our means since before we were married. For the next year I did odd jobs on the side and we cut expenses, but the time came when we couldn’t reduce our expenses any more and we had to raise our income. In the fall of 2009 my wife decided to get a paper route. After running the paper route four months, another route opened up and I applied. I started running the paper route Feb 1 and ran it every morning until November 30. For ten months my wife and I would get up at 3 AM, be at ‘The Shed’ by 3:30 and be done delivering papers by 7:00 in order for me to be at work at my day job by 8:00. I’d get home, change my clothes, and jump back in the car.”

    In How to Work a Life of Purpose I reference this period in my life as one of only two times I’ve worked hard to overcome something, “[I] wanted to get caught up on back-mortgage to keep from losing the house so I got up every morning at 3AM for 10 months straight to raise the money. I went through 2 flat tires, 2 visits to the brake shop, and got stuck in the snow twice, but we kept our home,” but I also worked hard to repair our marriage, which has remained strong since.

    Working a day job was starting to wear on me and 2 years after writing about the candy aisle I quit my job to run my own business, which I had been building on the side for 4 years. I ran it successfully for another year and a half before calling it quits and going back to a day job. One of my biggest clients hired me on full-time to continue doing what I do best: IT consulting. We are still not using credit cards and I still drive the same car I drove in 2003. I now have four children and another one on the way. I have strong opinions on management and believe that there are big ideas “no one claim yet”. I’m continually looking to the future and am happy to report that even though I can now afford to let my children buy candy from either side of the aisle, that they still only get candy from the right side and the thing that always mattered most was the time we spent together and the love we had for each other.