“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” -Mark Twain
We began our journey over 32 years ago when our founder Andrew, bought his first pc – just kidding (well, not really)…
Our founder began his career at the ripe age of 14 as door to door salesman after school. By the time he was 15, he was an evening manager at a duct cleaning company, at 16 he was selling anything from vacuums to gas discounts door-to-door. In his leisure time, he says he read just about every sales and professional development book on the racks at the time.
There were no real “computer classes” which schools taught at the time, yet, being a quick study beside the computer geek at the strip mall started Andy a small side business building up custom PC’s from components and selling them off to folks at 300-500% margins.
I guess it’s understandable why he was able to buy a sweet Mustang 5.0 before he turned 16!
After a year of college, he landed a sales job for one of the worlds largest electronic component distributors at 20, and by 22 he was a Senior Account Executive. This position led him to a placement at one of his customers contract manufacturing firms. His first non commissioned job.
At 23, he held the title of Vice President of Marketing and Operations. At the time, this particular contract manufacturer was producing the electronic internals for Pepsi machine dollar bill validators, and the electronic internals for Whall Clipper Co. Shortly after coming aboard, Andy found the computers and servers at the company in such disarray, that he couldn’t carry on with his daily tasks because the systems were crashing hourly.
He fired the only two Network Administrators there and took on the entire operation himself. The firm did allow him to hire consultants to help him regain control and baton down the system. He once told me that he devoured the contents of Windows 2000 Server, Exchange 2000 Server and Novell in the course of 3 months all in prep for the Y2K fiasco – that’s like reading the bible back to back 3 times over! Sheesh!
In the 7 years that he held the post, he worked hand in hand with graphics artists, product developers, engineers, web developers, writers, printers and production specialists to develop the company’s website and launch a half dozen electronic gadgets which were brought to places like Sears, Ace Hardware, Radio Shack, Home Depot and many others.
After 7 years, with wings ready to spread – he launched his first venture, a men’s hair product line, with his personal barber as a partner. Unfortunately, the company ran into the great recession and general lack of funding availability at the time couldn’t get the product orientated company off and running. Andy was personally whipped out by the failure.
In shutting the company down, he stumbled onto a profitable discovery though – he happened to sell off the office furniture he bought at wholesale for over 3 times his purchase price! So, he dusted himself off from the loss and began looking for ways to market commercial office furniture and installation services…
Over a decade later, Andrew owns one of the largest commercial office furniture store operations based in Chicago with branches across the country providing nationwide delivery and installation, along with any building or interior design and construction modifications his clients require.
In building his operation he outsourced various IT and digital marketing tasks to local and foreign companies. Although he found through many frustrating experiences, he ended up reclaiming every single IT and Website task he had outsourced!
Not because he wanted to do do so, but because the outsourced parties were simply not delivering on their promises (results).
Sadly, this is the same story Andrew heard from numerous other business owners! The frustration, lack of details, lack of plans, lack of any concrete footing that make business sense, and usually momentary positive results – but nothing that stuck long term!
Andrew found that every task he took over, he would master and perform better than what his competitors were able to achieve – even with budgets in the millions, and 100x what he was spending.
He ended up hiring hand picked and motivated talent to build up a marketing team for his growing office furniture business. The more he dove into it, the more he realized he had a passion for what he did, and wanted to build a Digital Marketing company that executed things the right way – one that delivered results, and built long term relationships.
You can imagine rest of the story… Welcome to RankOne Marketing – where we care about your digital marketing results and long term growth!