About

Fall 2010: Chris with wife Hannah and son Ethan

I graduated in 1997 from Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA with a degree in Biblical Studies.  There’s not much you can do in the business world with that sort of degree, and I wasn’t gifted for full-time ministry, so I had to trust God for my career path.

After some hard-labor j0bs (such as hauling mud up stairs) back home in Michigan, I decided to go back to school  in the summer of 1999 at the Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics in Dallas, TX. (I wanted to be a Bible translator missionary.)

I lasted 5 months or so before I knew it was time to just get a job and pay off my student loans.

I got a job as a temp worker doing general office work in Chapel Hill, NC.  This quickly turned full-time.  Five years later I had morphed into a web developer with specialized skills — small companies are great at giving you just the skills you desire.

A year spent in DC and two more years as a contractor at IBM back in North Carolina showed me I didn’t want to be in computer programming as a career.  I quickly reached the peak of my interest (and near my peak in pay) with decades still left to go before retirement.

The good news is that during this arduous time at IBM, I discovered a new career passion which was a much better fit than programming: marketing!  While at IBM I used my programming skills to help build a web application to help distribute relevant articles to other websites  (alright, it was pretty much web spam… but it was a start).  (A great programmer I found on ScriptLance built most of the initial core application.)  I got close to 100 people to pay about $100/month to use this application.

A year and a half later, the prospect of a big payday loomed large so I sold this business while I headed to Europe for two months.  Even after that experience, my business and marketing skills still felt pretty weak, so I decided to either get an MBA or get a job that would provide an equivalent “in the trenches” education in marketing.

Since a job actually pays money, I went that route to continue my business education.  I’ve been working for an online marketing agency in Raleigh, NC, for the past three years.  First as a PPC Analyst working with clients, and now as the Technical Marketing Manager, I’ve gained a world of experience.

I have much more to learn, but I decided to start sharing my “in progress”  Internet business & marketing ideas here.  Contact me if there’s anything I can do for you.