01My story
Leaping into the unknown, succeeding just long enough to fail in a new way, and rebuilding from scratch.
I didn’t grow up dreaming about becoming an entrepreneur. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, the son of two exhausted parents who ran a small printing shop. I wasn’t inspired by entrepreneurship. I was shaped by survival. Here is the route, stop by stop.
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Dayton, Ohio · Childhood
Shaped by survival
Son of two exhausted parents who ran a small printing shop after heart trouble ended my father’s career at NCR at 25. They worked all day, came home at nine, and repeated the cycle. I wasn’t inspired by entrepreneurship. I was shaped by survival.
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Age 18 · U.S. Navy · nuclear submarine
The Navy, noise, and the birth of a skill
A captain handed me a job I had never heard of: vibration analysis. Find the machines that could give away our position. I wrote handwritten letters to American manufacturers; one shipped me a $15,000 analyzer on a “try it and keep it” basis. I earned a letter of commendation — and learned that unusual initiative gets noticed.
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Age 25 · Columbus & Worthington, Ohio
Vibranalysis — the first company, the first failure
No degree, no mentor, no roadmap. My grandmother — a church organist for forty years — handed me $10,000 as a gift. It bought my first analyzer. The company failed quietly, like a machine losing power. It didn’t discourage me. It clarified me: I was an entrepreneur.
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The 1970s · Worthington → Latham, New York
Partners, an airplane, and an expensive lesson
A $150,000 “investment” that was really a loan they could call in. When I tried to buy a Cessna Centurion, they wanted every dollar back. I returned it all, sold the business to MTI Technologies and spent two years as their youngest, highest-paid non-degreed team leader. I never took outside money again.
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Entrepreneurship is not a personality trait. It is a condition. It behaves like something living inside you. It keeps you awake at night. It whispers ideas you didn’t ask for. It refuses to let you settle.
Failure Is Always an Option -
Louisiana · Sulphur, Louisiana
BMR Associates, the RV lab and the suitcase kid
We packed a newborn and a set of analyzers into an RV and drove to the Gulf Coast. The RV was our first mobile laboratory; our daughter slept in a suitcase in the loft. Half a million dollars a year, preventative maintenance programs modeled on the submarine — and a second daughter named Linde, after Linde Gas.
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Atlanta · Atlanta · Trinidad · the Rockies at night
Taking to the skies
We bought a condo in a weekend. I hired an MIT engineer smarter than me, and upgraded to a twin-engine Piper Navajo. Show up on the tarmac at dawn with your own aircraft and diagnose their compressor trains before lunch. This wasn’t luxury. This was logistics.
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The Mac era · Georgia → California → New York
CatTrax — reinventing catalogs one pixel at a time
One $2,500 Mac, one $4,000 scanner, and a $60,000 check handed to me in church for a 500-page catalog I had no idea how to make. “Absolutely.” We cut Harbor Freight’s art department from 40 to 12 and paid back their investment in under a year. Eighty percent of my people moved to California with us.
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September 2001 · Times Square, New York
The day the world stopped — and so did my businesses
I was reading the newspaper in my apartment when Terri called from Atlanta. “Are you watching the TV?” Within weeks, both CatTrax and BMR Associates were gone. Thirty years of relationships, momentum and reputation — in one blow. The hardest part wasn’t the money. It was waking up without a mission.
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An entrepreneur without a purpose is like a submarine without sonar — a vessel moving blindly through dark water.
Failure Is Always an Option -
The rebuild · A basement in Atlanta
VideoPhotoBuzz — a business that was a ministry
A tiny newspaper ad. Families bringing 8mm film, VHS tapes and slides. We made cinematic tributes for funerals, anniversaries and reunions — including one for Joe, a retired Delta pilot fighting cancer, shown to hundreds of pilots without a dry eye in the room. The 2008 crash took it away. It remains the only business that gave me more emotionally than financially.
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Six years · An 18-wheeler, forty-eight states
The road, the fall, and clarity
A friend said: “Why don’t you drive a truck?” CDL school in Virginia, then six years of sunrises in Wyoming and blizzards in Montana. No employees, no emergencies, predictable income — one of the best decisions of my life. It ended when I slipped unloading a trailer and shattered my wrist. Eight seconds of bad luck, and two years in assisted living.
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Now · Pacific Northwest
The SuperVan, and a seat for a foster kid
I ordered a Ford Transit and waited three years for COVID-era Ford to deliver it, then built it into an RV, rented it on Turo, and watched my daughter give up a cross-country camping drive at Yellowstone. The insight: people want adventure, not logistics. SuperVan Adventures, Camp Easy and the Supper Clubs grew out of that — and out of a promise: fill that extra seat.
Where it stands
Success is temporary. Failure is inevitable. Reinvention is a choice.
I have lived enough cycles to know that “Is this the end, or the beginning of something else?” always has the same answer: it’s both. Part One is written. Part Two — winter operations, ski trips, Forest Service partnerships, foster-family adventures, the evolution of the SuperVan model — is being recorded in real time.