The story
A little more about me.
I grew up Downriver, just outside Detroit, and work eventually took me to Colorado. After a move to Florida and jobs in California and Arizona, I found my way back to Florida. Most names are left out on purpose: the parts that belong to other people are theirs to tell.
Growing up in Ecorse and River Rouge.
I was born in Trenton, Michigan, at 8:55 on Christmas night. My mom always did her best to keep Christmas and my birthday separate, so we celebrated Christmas in the morning and my birthday that night. We did it that way every year, and I still do. Having a Christmas birthday has also meant I've never had to work on it. Almost everything is closed.
I grew up mostly in River Rouge and Ecorse, moving from River Rouge to Ecorse when I was little and back again when I was twelve. My first memory, though, is of a locksmith shop's sign on a corner in Detroit: a white lock and key on blue, with a tan surround. I was a baby when I saw it, but I can still picture it. By the time I was old enough to let myself out of the house, I was already trying to get to my grandma and grandpa's. Once I stacked chairs to reach the top lock and got out at night, only to be walked home by a police officer. At least once, I made it all the way to their house.
Most days, I was outside with my friends. We didn't have much money, and my bike wasn't the most expensive one. My wagon had rust on it too, but I will tell you what, I loved what I had. Electronic toys never stayed in one piece for long around me, though. I'd take them apart to see how they worked and never put them back together, sometimes trying to make something else out of the pieces. Those inventions did not always work.
“I deconstructed everyone of them I got, it didn't take me long, I never put them back together either. I liked to see how they worked.”
On our bikes, we'd ride through a wooded section where kids had worn ramps into the dirt, or head over to the ponds to catch crayfish and let them go. We spent time around the train tracks too, grabbing onto trains as they went by and climbing into the ones sitting still. A vacant little building between the tracks, right in front of the steel mill, became our spot. I wasn't much for tricks on the bike, but I'd take the basic ramps for a little air. The farthest I ever rode was Trenton, without realizing I was riding back to the place where I'd been born.
I did manage to knock myself out on that bike twice, though I couldn't tell you which time came first. Once, I was riding circles on the blacktop in front of the fire department in Ecorse, bored out of my mind. I kept making the circles tighter until I got dizzy, then stood the bike up without knowing which way I was facing and rode straight into a pebble-rock wall. When I woke up, my face and knuckles were bleeding, and I had no idea how long I'd been there. There was too much blood to hide it from my mom, so I told her what happened, washed up, and kept going.
The other time was near my grandparents' house. There was a wall that sloped up at about forty-five degrees, and I'd ridden up it plenty of times at an angle, the way you'd go up a mountain. That day I tried going straight up, lost momentum halfway, and went over backwards onto my head. Nobody saw either accident.
When I was thirteen, a race home with my sister ended with me getting hit by a car. She'd taken the sidewalk and I'd taken the alley. As I came out, a car came from the right and hit me hard enough to throw me a few feet. My grandparents happened to be at our house, and once everyone heard what had happened, they came to get me. I hobbled into my grandpa's car and got a ride home, with an ankle that stayed swollen for a few days.
People at the car wash right there had seen the whole thing. I got to know them through it and eventually ended up working there, which is a strange way to get your first job. I stayed from thirteen to eighteen, and at sixteen I also started working at the pizza place across the street.
Moving in with my grandparents.
When I was seventeen, I asked my parents to borrow the car to go out with friends and was told no. I'd gotten my license on my own after finishing near the top of my driver's training class and earning top marks on the road test. As far as I understood it, the answer meant I couldn't use their car, not that I couldn't drive at all. So I called my grandparents.
My grandmother knew how well I could drive before I was even old enough to have a license, and my grandpa saw no problem with lending me his truck. A friend of mine hadn't been able to borrow his dad's truck either, so we went out together in my grandpa's. We didn't have anywhere in particular to go. We just wanted to drive.
I had a pager then, and while we were out, I needed to call home. We pulled over at a car wash, where I got about one sentence into the call before I was told to get right home. I dropped my friend off and returned the truck to my grandparents, who wanted to know why I was back so soon. I told them, "I don't know what I'm going home to, but I know something is gonna happen. I may see you in a little bit." My parents' house wasn't far away, so I walked over.
When I got there, they wanted me to hand over my license. To them, refusing to lend me the car had meant I wasn't supposed to drive at all. "That's not what you said." I explained that I'd gotten the license on my own and wasn't willing to give it up. The argument ended with me being put out of the house, so I walked back to my grandparents and told them what had happened. My grandmother got on the phone about it, and I stayed with them from then on. I went to school from their house, ate dinner with them, and went out with friends. My grandpa kept letting me use the truck without making anything of it.
I was still trying to get through school, which hadn't gone especially well. I hated my senior-year English class and skipped so much of it that I came up short on credits for graduation. When the school gave me a list of classes that could count toward English, I spotted TV Productions. I'd already taken it, and the credit wasn't being used for anything else, so we applied it toward English and I graduated in 2001. What I'd enjoyed most at school was running wires and handling the sound and lights in the theater booth. That was the funnest part for me.
That summer, my grandpa gave me his truck as a graduation present. About two weeks after he signed over the title, I did a neutral drop on gravel and drove it through the corner of a garage. The whole city knew who I was after that. My grandpa paid for the repair, and I helped with the work. Within two weeks, we had it back on the road.
My grandmother died that September. The week before, she and my grandpa had taken their RV to North Carolina to see family. The last time I saw her, she was sitting up front, looking out the window. After she died, I couldn't stay in the house, and at eighteen I began staying with different friends.
Getting into computers.
Staying with friends was also when I started spending time on computers. We'd had one at home growing up, but I was almost always grounded from it. I'd get ungrounded and end up grounded again before I had much chance to use it. At eighteen, I finally had time to get into it, and online gaming gave me a way to meet people who shared that interest.
I built a website where gamers could talk to each other and started doing IT work on the side for anybody and everybody, just for fun. Meanwhile, I was making a living managing the car wash, working in pizza parlors, and eventually filing records at a bankruptcy law office. Whenever I left a job, I was looking for a chance to grow, but computers were what I wanted to work with. When a friend from the gaming community told me about an IT opening at an engineering firm in Colorado, I thought he was joking. By the following April, I was moving out there to take the job.
Before the move, my girlfriend and I had been sharing a studio apartment in Michigan, and we had a son on the way. Money was tight, and we were trying to figure out how we would support a family. I took a few months to decide about the Colorado job, and we each moved back in with our parents while I got ready to go.
I went ahead to get a place ready for us. The plan was that they would follow me out. They did not. At first I stayed in a long-term hotel, where the cost of phone calls back to Michigan was eating into my money. The friend who'd helped me get the job took me into his family's house until I could get on my feet. Eventually, I moved into the apartment I'd been working toward, on my own. Seven months to the day after I'd started the job, the 2008 crash hit and I was the first one let go.
I spent almost two years out of work before getting a job on a register at a hardware store. They told me I was overqualified and asked why I'd applied, but by then I just needed a job. A temp agency later placed me as an EMC test technician in northern Colorado, where I was back to working with hardware, testing it on a bench.
During those years, I was also building a life in Colorado. I'd started seeing someone in late 2008, and we married in 2011. We chose our dating anniversary for the wedding because she thought I wouldn't remember two separate dates. Since then, I've made a habit of choosing dates that already mean something to me. In 2012 we bought a house in Frederick, and our daughter was born in January 2014. Our son came during the summer of the following year, and I was in the room for both births. Michigan had become somewhere I went back to visit. I've only been back three times since leaving.
My friend Eddie.
I started gaming with Eddie in 2005, while I was still in Michigan. He lived in Chicago, and we talked almost every day, often for hours while we played. It was everything and anything: work, relationships, whatever was happening in our lives. Those conversations kept going as I moved and my life changed. He became one of the most important people in my life, and someone I looked to as a mentor.
During the stretch when I was out of work in Colorado, Eddie kept after me about finding a job. We were gaming together most nights, and at one point he sent me a video of a woman walking in on her boyfriend and smashing his game console with a hammer. He joked that my computer would be next if I didn't get back to work. That finally got me moving. I took the cashier job at the hardware store, and the test technician job came after that.
When I got married in 2011, Eddie came to Colorado to be my best man. By then, he'd been part of my everyday life for years, even though most of our time together had been spent talking from different states. Later, when we were considering leaving Colorado, he helped me explore a work opportunity through a friend of his in Texas. That was the move I'd hoped to make before we ended up in Florida.
Eddie was a huge part of my life from those early gaming days all the way through my divorce. We shared a lot of life in those conversations, even when we were thousands of miles apart.
How I ended up working for myself.
In 2014, another friend helped me get a job as the IT manager for a manufacturer in Colorado. Over time, I took on operations management and became the NetSuite administrator too. That was where my NetSuite work began in 2014. Gathering the requirements meant learning how the business worked and what people needed from the software.
Around 2015, the company hit a rough patch and was sold. I was let go before the sale was finalized, but the new owners still needed someone to explain how everything worked. They kept asking around and getting my name. My friend told me about it before I heard anything official, and eventually the buyer called me: "It sounds like you're the only one who knows how to do anything in the company, and you're no longer employed there." They brought me back as a contractor to scrape the data, hand it over, and help them understand how it fit together.
At the time, I was making most of my money driving Uber. That contract gave me a reason to start Syrcle Marketing, offering website and social media marketing alongside the contract work. The friend who'd helped me get into the manufacturer brought me another client, and those two became my biggest accounts.
I kept that work going until we moved to Florida in December 2018. I'd wanted to go to Texas, where Eddie had helped me find a work opportunity, but we ended up in Florida instead. I lost both clients in the move, and for a while we lived on the money from selling our house in Colorado.
Finding my way back to Florida.
Toward the end of 2019, I found a job in San Diego. A few months later, the company moved me to Arizona, where I rented a four-bedroom house with rooms for my kids, an office, and space for all of us. My wife and kids never moved in, and my marriage ended in 2021.
My mom and sisters did come to stay with me in Arizona. Mom needed surgery, so I gave her the master bedroom on the main floor. She and I are close, and I still call her a lot, though it took me time to understand some things about our family. For years, I barely knew my father and blamed her for his absence. I'd eventually realized I was wrong and apologized to her, long before he died in 2016.
While I was living in Arizona, a friend asked on Facebook where we saw ourselves in five years. It was September 2021, and I sat down to answer, starting with a warning that I could be long-winded. I wrote about wanting to be a few years into consulting on business systems, working with a few clients and getting ready to hire my first employee. I'd already run a marketing company, and I wanted to get back to having work of my own. I also wanted someone to share my life with. I set a reminder to read the answer again on September 28, 2026. The first employee hasn't happened yet.
“I like helping small to medium-sized businesses become more efficient in their processes, giving them back time so they can focus on what they like to do or be more efficient in delivering their story to the world.”
For a while, seeing my kids meant driving from Arizona to Florida once a month for two nights together. I was traveling for work too, and within six months of starting that work, I was going pretty much anywhere south of and west of Michigan. Between the work trips and the distance from my kids, I was tired of being on the road. After six months back in Colorado, I returned to Florida in the middle of 2023. I've been here since, close enough to drive to see them.
The part about having someone to share my life with began to change in September 2024. A woman who'd lived directly behind me when we were twelve posted on Facebook, asking for one word that defined her. I typed her name. A year to the day after that post, we were married.
There's more to come. We're still making those memories.