My first business was called D&J Computing. It was the initials of my name and my dad's. I was 14 years old, and it was basically computer consulting for anybody I could convince to pay me money to learn about computers. This was in 1999, when the internet was still relatively fresh and computers were becoming more common in workplaces. My parents worked at companies that had some computers but could certainly use more help with how to deploy them and how to use different programs. So I started a company with the goal of seeing if people would pay a kid to help them with their technology.
Turns out, that was the best selling point. Everybody believed that kids understood this stuff, so why not hire one?
I first got the idea that I could start a business from browsing online. I found a network of other teenage entrepreneurs and learned that this was actually possible. I had this weird assumption at the time that since I was under 18, I couldn't enter into a contract, so obviously I wouldn't be able to start a business either. I learned quickly that it's true you can't sign a contract if you're not 18, but you can still start a business and you can still get help. You have to have your parents sign off on opening a bank account, but that's pretty much it. After that, it's just a matter of going out and finding customers who are willing to pay you.
I learned that was all possible. And it hit me: I could actually do this. So that's where it all began.
Here we are 25 years later, still chugging along and still working for, put air quotes around this, "myself." Because you never truly work for yourself when you don't have a boss. You end up with many bosses. Every customer is effectively a boss. Everybody that you sell to and convince to buy your services, they are paying you to deliver, and it's your job to do that. So sure, you're "working for yourself" and doing your own thing, but at the end of the day, you still have a lot of different bosses.
Starting in business at 14 was interesting. I was technically still in middle school at the time. So the idea of getting a job and working at another company never really crossed my mind. This just became the thing that I did.
After about a year of D&J Computing, I got deeper into websites and web development and learned about website hosting. I thought I needed to come up with a really cool name, so I did some research and found one I thought was great at the time. The .com was available, so I bought it, and the new company was born.
I learned all about what website hosting was and found out that you could actually go out and resell this. You didn't have to buy tons of servers and figure out server space and colocation and where to physically put them. You could just buy a reseller account and basically subdivide and rent out online website space for other people.
I started doing that, and it blew up. Within the first two years, we scaled to about 4,000 customers worldwide.
At the time, I was a freshman at a specialty IT high school. Ironically, it was the very subject I was supposedly there to learn. It was a very challenging curriculum, and at the same time, I was building this business, trying to run it from school. I wasn't doing too well with homework because I was constantly getting bombarded with support requests and inquiries, having to help customers and do onboarding. It took a tremendous amount of time to the point that I ended up failing out of that first year of high school.
The specialty school was actually something I had to apply for, and I didn't do well enough that year, so they sent me back to my regular high school. But I didn't mind at the time because I thought, well, that's just more time I can spend working on trying to build this web business.
We had a few good years, and then things got really commoditized. It became hard to compete and things got fairly challenging. A few good years followed by a few not-so-good years.
After graduating high school, a friend of mine from school got together with me and we said, let's see if we can continue with this and figure out if there's something we can do. I did some college on the side, some local evening classes. I quickly found out that was fairly boring. I was taking classes and learning things I had effectively already learned on my own, like how does business work, how do you sell a product, how do you do business communication. These were all things I'd already been doing for years.
I thought this was really dumb. Why am I spending all this money on going to school? So I stopped and just kept on with the business.
That began the 25-year journey. The business today is very dynamic. We have a lot of different products and types of services that we do. We have a small team, everything is fully remote, very flexible. It really feeds into the philosophy I was trying to capture when coming up with a name for this newsletter.
This idea of never clocking in, never having clocked in, never working for a "real" boss, and basically charting your own path. It's really appealing, and that's what this is all about. You can do your own thing, pave your own way, work on your terms, and have ultimate control of your time.
That's what's appealing to most people.
If you work for somebody else, if you're going to a 40-hour week or 9-to-5 job, you're giving up all that time to that employer. They effectively control all of that time. Whereas this idea of never clocking in, never working for somebody else, you retain that control. You retain the power, the ability to say no. No, I don't want to spend my time supporting someone else's bottom line. No, I don't want to support something I don't believe in.
I think the biggest misconception people have about working for themselves is that everything happens overnight and it's just very easy. You just say, "Yeah, I'm the CEO," and it's this whole great thing.
I'm here to say that the reality is most of the time, that's not the case. It can be a very long game, and overnight success is a myth.
Sure, you'll hear big stories. You'll hear success stories that do happen very quickly. But that's far from normal.
The goal of this newsletter, why I'm doing this now, is first, the technology is a lot better these days. It's easy to write this. I can write by talking. No, this is not AI-generated; this is my story and I'm writing it. I use some tools to help edit, but it's just easier to get these thoughts out now.
Ultimately, I want to help others. Help others who are maybe where I was 25 years ago and want to learn what works, what doesn't work. These are the types of things I've relied on myself over time, just seeing what other people are doing, what they've been doing, what has worked, what their stories are. A lot of times that's very motivating.
So that's one of the goals here. Put these stories out there. Share what I have done, what has worked, what hasn't worked. Hopefully you'll find something interesting that will be helpful in your journey.
Welcome to Never Clocked In.