ABOUT
Below Is A Brief Overview Of My Story.
Backstory
Growing up, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in life. I hustled around the neighborhood as a kid selling chocolate bars, trading and selling Pokemon cards, as well as action figures and card games. I dog-sat, housesat, mowed lawns, landscaped, sold candy in school, bought and sold shoes, and worked the system on those little school fundraisers where you can earn prizes or money. This didn’t stop by the time I got into high school. At one point, I bought wholesale accessories from Ali-Baba to sell to my friends at school. By the time I was a senior, teachers were starting to get mad at me for having my phone out in class to trade penny stocks. I just felt my time was better spent learning real-world curriculum instead of learning many things I would never use.
But to back up a little bit, when I was 16 years old, some friends and I went through a business class that began to teach us entrepreneurial processes. I came up with a great idea for an athletic shoe company. I figured that if we could make a track & field shoe that had a removable sole, track athletes wouldn’t need to buy and change into different kinds of track shoes. This launched us into a year-long process of R & D, patent research, 3D models, and meeting with engineers and lawyers. We did a couple of pitches to local sharks about the idea (and received a bit of funding) and did everything we could to launch this company. However, when we got to the final prototyping, we needed too much capital to continue our product.
Then, when I was 17 years old, I tried and failed to launch an e-commerce business. I had gotten my DBA and written up a long business plan, but I failed to see some complications in the e-commerce industry. I knew I could make something special, though, so I re-evaluated what I was doing and pivoted. I ended up building a social and personalized shopping platform/service called “Blu-Buy” to make shopping easier by helping consumers save time while purchasing online.
Alternative Education
By this time, I realized that the traditional educational model wasn’t ideal for me, and I struggled with the idea of four years of a college curriculum. Luckily, I happened to be at a Foundation of Economic Education conference in St.Louis, when one of the speakers was promoting a program called Praxis. I started looking very seriously at this option instead of college and kept it in mind. When the time came to figure out my next steps, I applied to Praxis and got accepted.
I was aware that a college degree would be a bit of a waste of time unless I wanted to miraculously change my ambitions to a STEM field. The landscape of education and what a college degree does for an individual in a business related field has changed though. Instead of going into a $50k-$120k in debt for a college degree over the course of 4 years, I decided to bet on myself and work on getting experience. This meant going all in on Praxis.
Through this program, I was able to harness numerous soft & hard skills as well the ability to launch my career inside of a year.
Through praxis and my own volition, I launched the first iteration of my personal website, created and launched a social platform for product creators, did the 30 day blogging challenge which helped me grow my blog to thousands of readers, launched my own shoe company, spoke at a number of speaking engagements, and this was all before I even started my first professional job.
Other Endeavors
I started a job as a marketing coordinator in the DC area. My marketing manager helped lead me in the marketing and advertising arena. Once I had my hands on the reins of learning new software and marketing tactics, I was unstoppable. Processes became simple, documents easy to create, advertising metrics were simple to grow and showed they help’d the business. At one point through my advertising tactics, I helped increase IOS app downloads by %40 in just a little over 2 weeks.
I didn’t know at the time that I would go on to run my company Shoe Theory, Inc. while working near yosemite, and later move to LA.
