My Story
I was born in the suburbs of Detroit where I still reside today.
My adventure started with 128 bytes RAM, 4 kB ROM on the Atari 2600. I spent many hours playing games on this system, losing myself to that simple 8 bit world.
When I was not playing the Atari 2600, my other prized childhood possessions that helped me explore the electronics world was the “160 in ONE” electronics project kits from Radio Shack.
Then my life was forever changed when I got my first computer, the Tandy TRS-80. My parents had picked it up on clearance at Radio Shack in the mid 80’s and It opened up a whole new world for me of programming and coming up with ideas. I was hooked right from the start.
I did not get into the IBM world of computers until I took a PASCAL computer class in the 10th grade back in 1992 and another computer class in 1993 where I learned some COBOL. These early days of computing had me hooked and launched my career.
I worked at a few small computer companies that mostly did sales and service for the retail market- working the longest for Southgate Computers. I was also selling at the weekend computer trade shows around the Michigan area.
I started as a junior sysadmin for a tier 1 transportation company managing Linux mail servers, AIX, Windows, and database systems.
The company grew rapidly and the head of IT left for personal & medical reasons. I was put in charge of all computer and communication systems. I also managed the team developing new software to build business automation systems. My annual department budget was $1.1 million which covered both the dev team and the costs of all communications including satellite tracking systems and cell phones.
Due to many internal issues with the leadership, the transportation company was broken apart into separate companies. I took that as an opportunity to move from being an employee to launching Lawrence Technology Services that serviced those individual companies.
I bought into an existing company, Suburban Electronics, and rebranded the company to Suburban Electronics and Computers. Expanded the offering from retail electronics repair of TVs, VCRs, high-end audio, to also include computer repair. Then started doing eBay auctions for high-end audio equipment under that same brand.
The partnership did not work out with Suburban Electronics and Computers. I started another retail business. Many clients were still calling for electronics repair so we continued servicing audio equipment and TVs for the first two years then phased it out as flat screen prices made that service impractical. Our first retail location was in Taylor Michigan and we moved the retail operations to a new location in 2017.
Officially this was the launch of the YouTube channel.
But as with many channels I did not have any clear vision of what to put on the channel, the postings were random and inconsistent. I was not really doing anything very serious in regard to YouTube and very little effort was put into it.
We moved to a new building in Southgate Michigan. We did much of the build out ourselves.
One of the big reasons for the move was to build a studio for YouTube and the podcast I was co-hosting. I was starting to come up with more of a vision and execution plan around content creation.
I decided the retail market was not for me and started winding down operations of those services. We continued to take walk-ins throughout 2019 but did not actively engage in any retail services and starting referring people to other retail computer stores.
As the company grew my desire to manage people, processes, contracts etc. was waning, but my love of tech & solutions design is as strong as it ever has been. This led me to approach my friend Jason Slagle with an idea. The goal was to combine the greater operational maturity at CNWR with our consulting leads that came in from both my social media presence and history of consulting on many projects. This was a split merger because Lawrence Technology Services still exists for the media side and we moved all the IT services and consulting contracts over to CNWR in trade for me having an equity position in the company. Also all leads and consulting work related to IT/MSP/Tech are now done under the CNWR company.