And Rockwell, tell me about your invasion.
I wasn't really planning to do what I do now.
It was never really in my, in the cards,
if you want to say it that way, from the beginning.
I studied chemical engineering,
but I did like computers quite a bit.
I enjoyed working with computers.
And my ex-wife told me I should get into
electrical engineering or computer science
or something like that.
And I was like, nah, I'm gonna stick with
chemical engineering because I know it's good.
It's an excellent field.
And I could work at computers at any time.
There's really no need to have that as a,
on my resume saying, I graduated such and such school
with this degree with BS in computer science and like that.
I knew I didn't want, I didn't need that.
So, but what I did was over time was as I began to
gravitate from more of the engineering
and gravitating more into doing something
that was more technically related to computers
and stuff like that, doing test desktop support
and from desktop support, getting into something more like
a implementation and software management validation,
things like that.
I started getting more of a feel for what the,
how varied the industry is with respect to computers.
Now, of course, it's just like, it's everywhere.
This is back in the mid 90s and around the turn
of the millennium, the century.
And Y2K was obviously a big deal, a big concern for people.
So I said, well, this is actually looking pretty good.
I thought I had some possibilities.
And so what I would do is I slowly,
as I was working in computers and learning
about system validation and implementation,
doing some project management and things like that.
Then I landed a role working as a implementer,
software implementer with the company called Infor.
They're the third largest software development company
in the world, only behind SAP and Oracle,
but they've all, basically they got so big requisitions.
So they acquired a bunch of other companies
and bought their products and be able to work
with their products.
And so I started working with product lifecycle management.
I had no idea what product lifecycle management was.
So as I became more knowledgeable about what that was
and learning that it was really around the life cycle
or the design or what a product would be from basic,
from concept when somebody actually thinks of something
and says, you know, this would be a really cool product
to the point where you actually ramp it up
into an actual product that is actually being used
in the marketplace, industry-wide
or whatever the situation might be.
At some point, that product will usually get to the point
where it's not quite so viable either
because there's an upgrade or because the market shifts
from one perspective to another,
and then that product will decline
and then it will usually fade away.
So what most customers do or what most companies do
that are then creating products is
they're continually reinventing their products, obviously,
because they want to improve them.
They want to make them better.
They want to follow what the market's trying to do
or they're trying to achieve some new innovative idea
that the world has never seen before
and bring that out into the marketplace as a new thing.
Obviously, we know very well that when Apple came out
with the iPhone at the time, it wasn't the best,
maybe the best designed product in the world, no,
but it would never exist.
And so people looked at it and were like, this is amazing.
This, I have to have one and built this desire,
this demand for this new product.
So what I've done, of course, in the past,
since the day that I was pretty much hired on with Infor
in 2008 to 2014 was I worked for Infor
doing this implementation of software,
learning how it was implemented,
what it was supposed to do,
learning more about the concept of PLM and stuff like that.
And in 2014, I basically got fired from my job
and here I was out in the street again with no job.
And thanks to one of my customers that I had with Infor,
they said they wanted me to work with them
as a direct consultant.
And that was the toe hole that I needed.
So I started my own business.
And because I really enjoyed what I did,
I really enjoyed the ability to work with my hands,
to work with software, with customers.
I really enjoyed doing that.
And because I really liked building things with my hands,
one of the greatest things that I do in my spare time
is to build bikes.
That's just something that I enjoy to do.
I love getting my hands dirty with that.
Obviously computers, I can't get my hands dirty with them,
but I can at least do something with my hands
and be able to construct something,
either through coding, through configuration,
through building computers themselves.
I have three servers sitting next to me
that I built myself.
And so this whole concept of building things
and innovation and being able to use your mind to grow
and to make the world a better place
through products that you've created
is something that I just, I thrive on.
I enjoy that so much.
So now 10 years in the future, obviously,
now I'm in my ear, now 10 years in my business.
And I've been doing this all this time
and I thoroughly enjoy it.