As I say in “The Book,” I was born at a very young age to a poor North Carolina farmer and a baker’s daughter. When it came time for me to be educated, I was sent to a rural four-room schoolhouse sitting in the middle of the proverbial Southern cotton field. Nothing about that beginning particularly suggested radio, television, restaurants, accounting, commercial finance, internet businesses, patents, a new sport, a book about innovation, or this website. Nevertheless, one thing kept leading to another, which turns out to be rather important to the story.
After high school and a short stint in the Army, I headed west toward California and the entertainment business. I had already worked as a small-town disc jockey for George Beasley at WPYB in Benson, North Carolina. In California, I found work at KRLA in Pasadena during the wonderful insanity of 1960s radio, where I worked around people such as Casey Kasem and Bob Eubanks and participated in promotional appearances with performers including the Righteous Brothers and Jan and Dean. A succession of broadcasting jobs eventually took me to NBC in Burbank.
From Show Business to Tacos
Somewhere along the way, I left the entertainment business and became involved with Glen Bell, who was building the little taco-stand operation that became Taco Bell. Glen financed me into an operation in Central Texas, and over the next few years I built four taco stands in Corsicana, Killeen, Belton and Waco. They did well enough that I encountered a new problem: I knew considerably more about operating and promoting restaurants than I knew about understanding all the numbers appearing on my financial statements.
I solved that problem in a somewhat extreme fashion. I sold the restaurants and enrolled in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University to earn a BBA in accounting. My intention was perfectly sensible. I would learn accounting, then return to the restaurant business as an older and wiser entrepreneur. Instead, after graduation, a recruiter introduced me to commercial finance and asset-based loan auditing, and my life wandered off in another direction.
Asset-based lending turned out to be an education in business that I could never have received entirely in a classroom. The work was a form of financial detective work involving contract compliance, collateral and fraud prevention. More importantly, it took me inside hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses, where I saw an enormous variety of management styles, operating systems, good decisions, bad decisions and business models. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was accumulating an extraordinary inventory of examples of how people turn ideas into working enterprises—and sometimes fail to do so.
Accounting, Writing and a Return to Restaurants
Eventually, constant travel became less attractive after I married and we had a baby, so I settled down and opened an accounting practice. Over the following years I opened offices in Georgia and North Carolina and became an IRS Enrolled Agent. I also wrote a review course for people preparing for the IRS Special Enrollment Examination. The course was published by MicroMash, an early computer-based training company that later became part of Thomson Reuters.
Then the entertainment and restaurant itch returned. In 1997 I sold my accounting-office interests and opened a fast-food restaurant in Jacksonville, North Carolina. My timing was magnificent: much of the nearby Marine population was preparing to leave for the war in Bosnia. That business failed, and a follow-up attempt in Wilmington failed as well. It was an expensive way to learn that success achieved under one set of circumstances does not necessarily repeat itself years later under another.
I returned to commercial finance and eventually retired from that work in the North Georgia mountains. About that time I began exploring what was still, to me, the relatively new world of the Internet. I discovered that small accounting practices needed practical information about how to find clients and build their businesses. Since I knew something about both accounting and promotion, I began building websites and training materials to fill that need. Those businesses eventually served accountants across the United States and in other English-speaking countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom.
Then Came NimBall
Years later, a conversation over dinner with an old friend wandered through the entertainment business, the various things I had built, and some of the “bright ideas” I had accumulated along the way. He encouraged me to take one of those ideas seriously: a concept for an entirely new spectator sport.
That conversation eventually led to NimBall, a patented sport that I have spent years developing as far more than a game on paper. Developing it required thinking about the rules of play, specialized equipment, player safety, spectators, event operations, media presentation and the business structure required to turn an invented game into something people could actually play and watch.
And Then I Tried to Write a Book
Eventually I began writing about some of these experiences. The project became Where the Hell Did That Idea Come From? — The Remarkable Adventures of an Old Git. I originally thought the stories themselves would be the important part. Instead, while going back through radio, television, restaurants, accounting, finance, promotion, inventions, successes and failures, I began noticing something about the ideas that had appeared throughout my life.
For most of that life, I had treated an idea as something that simply showed up. Looking backward made that explanation increasingly unsatisfactory. New experiences had repeatedly encountered things I had seen, learned, attempted or remembered earlier. Usually nothing remarkable happened. Occasionally, however, something new emerged from the encounter between what was happening now and something accumulated long before.
That observation led me to begin developing what I call the Old Git Model, an attempt to describe and examine what may be happening when an encounter becomes an idea. You do not need to know the model to wander around this website; there is a separate page explaining it for anyone who becomes interested. What matters here is the question that came out of writing the book: Where the hell did that idea come from?
Which Is Why This Website Is Not Just About Me
I have accumulated a ridiculous number of stories, and some of them are collected here under My Stories. But the reason for telling them is not simply to preserve the adventures of an old fellow who wandered through an improbable assortment of occupations. The stories provide something to examine. They let us look backward and ask what one experience may have contributed to something that happened much later.
You have accumulated your own inventory. It may contain jobs, conversations, mistakes, people, places, things you learned in school, things you misunderstood, things you tried and abandoned, and things you haven’t consciously thought about in years. Most of those experiences probably seemed ordinary when they occurred. Mine did too.
That is why another part of this website is called Your Ideas. I want to hear about an idea, observation, problem, memory or experience that made you wonder where it came from. We may find a connection. We may find several. We may discover absolutely nothing. Any of those results is legitimate, because the purpose isn’t to prove that every encounter produces a brilliant idea.
It is simply to look. After all these years, I have become rather curious about what might be sitting in all our accumulated junk, waiting for something new to bump into it.