PIVOT to Small Business Supercharging

In 1987, I started a new job as the newsletter editor for the American Freestyle Association, and moved to Huntington Beach, California.  I didn't have a car, my life was all about BMX freestyle, and I soon found the place to be was on the pavement below the Huntington Beach Pier on the weekends.  There were a one or two other BMX freestylers there every weekend, and a handful of freestyle skateboarders.  I started hanging out, became a local, and that was my spot every weekend there wasn't a contest to go to.  It was a tall guy named Mike Sarrail, and me on bikes, and Pierre Andre', Don Brown, and Hans Lingren on skateboards most every weekend.  Since it was a well known bike and skate spot, there were lots of riders and skaters stopping by for sessions, as well. 

Freestyle skaters were the dorks of skateboarding then, doing tricks on flat ground with no ramps.  They didn't go big, it wasn't mind blowing, but they did the hard, technical tricks that took longer to learn than other aspects of skating.  The emerging genre of street skating built, almost entirely, upon the standard freestyle skating tricks.

One day Pierre Andre', who was French, said, "Hey, I found a company in France that wants to start making skate shoes."  He'd just come back from a trip home to France, and I didn't think much of it at the time.  Pierre, Don, and Hans were all sponsored by skateboard companies under the Vision umbrella, and Vision's new clothing company, Vision Street Wear, was making skateboard shoes they got free.  The shoes had a couple good ideas, like ollie guards on the side, but were pretty uncomfortable and didn't last all that long.  Since Vision sponsored the AFA contests, that I helped put on, I, too, got free Vision shoes.  Not great, but free was good in those low income days.

There was definitely a need for much better shoes, shoes specifically designed for skateboarding (and maybe even BMX riding).  A lot of BMXers and skaters wore Van's shoes then, which worked well, but they were not designed specifically for skateboarding at that point.  Pierre, the top freestyle skater in France, like all freestyle skaters, had a perfectionist side, and he went to town working with the French shoe company, Etnies.  The shoes they came up with were a huge leap forward in skate shoes.

The big initial blast for Etnies came with this classic skateboard video section, where pioneering street skater Natas Kapas wore some of the first Etnies.  The shoe company was off to the races.  Pierre soon bought them out, headquartered the new company in Costa Mesa, California, blocks from the former Vision main office we all frequented for years. 

He worked his ass off, and built a HUGE, amazing company.  The parent company, Sole Technology has had revenues as high as $200 million a year, before the Great Recession, and they built not only two huge buildings that you see in the video above, but they built one of the best skateparks in Southern Califrnia, for the city of Lake Forest, right down the hill from their HQ. 

We could never pronounce Pierre's last name correctly in the 80's, so he went by Pierre Andre'.  But now, Pierre Andre' Senizergues, my old buddy from years of weekends hanging at the H.B. pier, is a prominent entrepreneur and visionary in the highly entrepreneurial region of Orange County, California.  He's one of dozens of people I hung out with who started small businesses, most of which are still in business, and some of which are huge now, 30-some years later.  These are the people I was surrounded by in my 20's and 30's, all because I started doing tricks on a "little kid's bike" while in high school in Idaho.

My path has been a weird one.  I wanted to start my own business in the 80's, but I was super shy, and just couldn't do the salesman part.  If you don't sell stuff, you don't have a business.  It's as simple as that.  So I spent the last 33 years or so reading hundreds of books, a huge number of them about business and personal development.  I spent a decade as a sidekick to several young entrepreneurs in the actions sports world, working and brainstorming with them day after day.  Along the way, I worked on the crew of several TV shows, a different kind of entrepreneurship.  The whole time, I was also working on my personal issues, and eventually ended up a taxi driver in the early 2000's.  It's not a prestigious job, in fact, taxi driving operates as a small business, not a job at all.  It's in the gray area between a job and a business.  I learned to hustle my ass off, find business in weird places, pay $3600 in overhead a month, and I overcame my Rainman like shyness, as well.

But I didn't pay attention to emerging technology, and the taxi industry got disrupted by new tech, even before Uver and Lyft.  I wound up homeless.  The decade after has been a big struggle, where, among other things, I couldn't get hired for any "real" job anymore.  I started blogging in 2007, and a couple years later began to self-educate on how "this whole internet thing" works, and how it has completely changed the way business happens in the U.S. (and most everywhere else).

In late 2015, I was living with my mom after my dad's death, in a small North Carolina town, still unable to find a "real job." My mom is continually in fannacial crisis, so any money I made, was immediately needed for some "emergency."  Literally without a dime to my name, I started focusing on the Sharpie artwork I did to start earning money.  I've struggled for the three years since as a working artist.  But I did start selling artwork.  I've sold around 100 original drawings in the last three years, starting at about $20 each, and they sell for $150 or more now.  But they take me 35 or more hours to draw.  There's just not enough profit, or enough work to sell, to really get me going again financially, without a $10K loan to set up and really do it right.  So, as I struggled to survive this last winter, homeless and in a city I'd brand new to me, I started looking at my options.

While I haven't made a decent living selling my artwork, I did learn how to promote and use blogging, the internet, and social media well...for free.  When I look around at nearly all of the small businesses, here and elsewhere, hardly any of them are using today's new media and platforms at anywhere near full potential.  And that's what I'm pretty good at now.  Look up my hashtag, #sharpiescribblestyle on Instagram, Google images, or even Facebook.  My Sharpie art has a really solid web and social media presence, better than many mid-sized businesses.  Any business can do that, but most are too busy, with their day to day running of the business, to take the time to learn how to use all these tools more effectively.  So I'm going to start teaching them.

I'm writing a small book right now on how to use the internet and social media effectively for small business, and how to actually get more sales, not just media hype.  Hype is good, but it don't pay your rent or buy you food at the grocery store.

I'm also going to pivot this blog to focus much more on ideas for starting, building, promoting and marketing small businesses.  I'm still going to write and old school BMX story or two each week, and I'll still have my artwork on here when I do new stuff.  But I'm scaling that back.  Looking at my own current skills, drive, and ambition, and the Big Picture of the next decade or two, small businesses will be a huge, possible the deciding factor, in getting the American economy working well for average people again.  There won't be millions of factory jobs paying $32 an hour coming back.  We have to rebuild this economy ourselves, and small business is the best way to do that.

So that's where I'm at.  My book, in a self-published form, will be available soon.  I'll keep you all updated.  I don't know where all this will lead.  But then, I didn't know where it would lead when this guy below told me he found a shoe company in France that wanted to make skateboard shoes 32 years ago.  And that turned out pretty well.