I’ll try to make this a bit fancier in the future, but for now, here’s where I’ve been so far:

1998 - Graduated from USC with my MBA

1998 - 2003 Worked for PriceWaterHouseCoopers as a management consultant

2001 - read “Rich Dad Poor Dad” & realized that financial freedom is a goal that I need to obtain

2001 - 2003 Continued my education in the Rich Dad series & began playing Cashflow 101.

After playing the game several times, I realized that there was a quick way to win which matched my personal interests. The basis of the game is earning passive income through real estate investing. There are also opportunity cards for starting small businesses and selling them. During one game, I won quickly playing the small business opportunity cards. I realized that this is how I wanted to live my life. I’m still interested in real estate, but I have focused all of my time on starting businesses.

2003 - Began my independent consulting career by incorporating into an LLC.

2003 / 2004 - Launched The Food Experience with my wife.

2004 - present - My consulting work flourished as I remained billable 100%. Unfortunately, I haven’t expanded beyond myself as a billable resource. I’m essentially self employed. If I’m not billing my time, I’m not making any money. This is far from my goal of financial freedom. YES, the money is good & my billable rate is high, however, it is not a scalable solution.

2004 - 2007 - While consulting full time and with my wife working full time, we ran The Food Experience with multiple employees. We had operations running smoothly, received the highest ratings for food quality from the Philadelphia Inquirer for our segment and had acquired a lot of raving customers. We expanded our services and product offerings, however, as competition heated up in our local market and with our first child on our way, we determined the costs and effort to remaining open was just not worth our while. We closed our doors in October 2007. Happily our daughter was born on November 23, 2007.

We consider The Food Experience to be our educational pressure cooker. Diamonds only form under pressure and my wife and I became closer which we realize is an unusual situation as most husband and wife teams end in divorce when they fail in business together.

Financially, this first business took it’s toll on us. It’s taken us several years to recover, pay back many personal loans to family member. While we still have a sizable second mortgage on our house and owe some back taxes, some of our savings have recovered, but we’re no closer to being financially free than we were 9 year ago.

2008-2009 I stopped licking my wounds.....in 2008 I began a 6 month personal coaching program with Tony Robbin’s coaching. This helped me set some goals to get out of debt and get back mentally back in the game. Mentally recovering from closing our first business was difficult. We found out quickly that friends and neighbors were quick to call us failures. This was something that two TYPE A personalities didn’t hear too often. We never thought of ourselves as failures, ever, but this made us question ourselves. The thought remained with us for a while....did we really just fail at something? It was a tough pill to swallow and, frankly, we’re still sensitive about it.

This is where the power of words and focus came into play. Instead of thinking of this as a failure, we began to realize that it was just a very expensive educational process. We bit off WAY more than we should have for our first real business and we consider ourselves very lucky that our marriage survived.

Now we simply say that we have our undergraduate, graduate and Food Experience educations! We’ve done several lessons learned from this business, most of which I’ll eventually share on this site. Hopefully others will benefit from this.

2009- applying what we’ve learned and getting enough confidence back to start again. In May of 2009, I invested in myself by attending the Raising Capital event in Phoenix AZ, but on by Robert Kiyosaki & the Rich Dad company. I new, from The Food Experience education, that I would never fund a business out of my own pockets again. I needed to learn how to raise capital from others and ensure they would receive a healthy return on their investment. This was one area that I didn’t focus on in graduate school, so I decided that the event in Phoenix was just what I needed.

No only did I learn how to raise capital during that event, but I learned so much more. It was the final booster shot to my confidence, telling me that I knew what I was doing in business and that my Food Experience education was going to pay dividends in the long run. I also realized that my consulting experience and leadership skills were fully transferrable to starting a business. With The Food Experience, my wife and I attempted to do everything ourselves. After the raising capital event, I knew I would never take a solitary approach to starting a business again.

In August of 2009, I assembled a hand picked team of people I enjoyed working with. These are four people who I trust, respect and just enjoy being around. We brainstormed through 15+ business ideas and settled on the ones we were going to tackle together.

I’ve continued to round out this team for our first business. The team is now up to 6 equity partners who are all working for free in an effort to launch a successful, profitable business. My goal is to ‘test the team’. If all goes well, we’ll start another business after this one is launched and sold.

Right now, we’re in the feasibility stage, solidifying the concept and sending out questionnaires to potential customers. I’m tracking all major milestones & will share them on this site as we get closer to launching the business.

I’m optimistic that I’m on the right track with this team and this business. Stay tuned......

I’m also subscribed to Tony Robbin’s “New Money Master’s” program. This is some of the most educational information for anyone who wants to launch a business. I’m learning something new every time I listen to it

I may be crazy, but one business is just not enough. As Tony Robbin’s states in most of his coaching: “TAKE MASSIVE ACTION”....so, that’s what I’m doing. Based on Tony’s interview with Eben Pagan in in The New Money Masters, I decided to officially launch HowToGetFree.com. I’m using this site to document my journey and blog about my experiences. This is helping me to stay focused on my successes & keep the right frame of mind as I move forward.

Finally, I’m also writing an eBook based on my consulting experiences. Release Management in software applications is an area which I’ve specialized my consulting services over the last four years. I’m dictating my experiences of what works and what doesn’t work so others can learn and apply some leading practices into their own organization. I decided that consulting has kept me a float during the hard times, so I’m going use this eBook to expand my services, bring in more clients and hire in consultants to work for me. The eBook idea was another inspiration from The New Money Masters series and I’m amazed with how easy it was to write an outline and dictate and entire book.

I’ve used oDesk to find and hire a transcriptionist & editor and I hope to have a first draft ready for some technical editing by January 2010.

Am I busy? Yes! Am I excited...you can’t imagine. I haven’t taken this much massive action in my life ever. I know something will come of it. If nothing else, I’m learning something new and realizing that I can get a lot accomplished in a 24 hour day.

Stay tuned for updates. Most likely this page will end here and my updates to my timelines will occur on my blog page.

You can also follow me on Twitter, under the name How2GetFree.