I had lunch Friday with one of the principals of one of my private clients (those that aren’t in Solutions Forum, for what ever reason), John Principale of Express Digital, and after brainstoming some email and social media ideas for our new online business school, Easy Online Business School, we got off into entrepreneuring, because John and his partner, John Longobardo, are getting ready to sell off part of their company, the part they started with, software file management solutions (they’re keeping their scanning business).
I refer to these two as the ‘Boys from Brooklyn’, because I got them their first Phoenix public relations exposure under this tag about nine years ago when the two of them started their file management business in a one-room office. They were way ahead of their customers in designing file and document management systems, so p.r. was hard to come by.
The two of them have known each other since age five or so in Brooklyn, and both took early retirements (JP from Motorola and JL from Xerox) to start Express Digital. Both got decent payouts from their big companies, but not enough to actuallly retire on, so they hitched up again in Phoenix and combined JL’s sales experience with JP’s computer knowledge.
What’s interesting about their story is that they started a business in their early fifties in a new field….I helped them do their first market research, which was positive, even though we found out that their target market didn’t really understand what they did, which was a serious paradigm shift.
But, they did it. How many of you all out there are reading this blog and saying ‘I’ve got this idea….’ but not doing anything about it?
If you’ve been downsized out of your job, and aren’t ready to (or didn’t get enough money to) retire, there’s no time like the present.
Get off the couch, stop watching football (or whatever) and do it. We’ve still got our $99 special on our top four startup courses (no senior discount, our prices are already too low).