I was born an engineer and I never knew it. From my earliest days as a child, I always invented stuff, tried stuff, and was baffled why it didn’t always work.

In college, I was never was able to get a job and I was complaining to my  advisor that I couldn’t get a job. He said quit complaining and write a grant proposal. I asked him what was a grant proposal? He handed me a National Science Foundation grant application and said “go think of a good idea, write it down and we will submit it. If they like it, you’re going to get funded for this summer to develop whatever it is or idea you come up with.”

When I left the engineering building, I was crossing the street and witnessed a electric wheelchair failure in the middle of the road.

So I ran out and asked the gentleman would it be okay if I helped him, and of course he said yes.

While I pushed him out into the parking lot to find his vehicle I ask him many questions.

As a pilot, we always have a fuel gauge so it asked him if he knew how much energy he had in his batteries. If you knew that, you would know how far you can go before you run out of power. He said to his knowledge that there wasn’t such a thing.

So, I took my grant paper home and wrote up a concept for an energy meter for powered wheelchairs. Took it back to my advisor the next day and we submitted it.

To my great surprise, I got a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a microprocessor-based energy meter for powered wheelchairs. I hired eight of my friends for the summer and off we went.

The rest as they say is history.

I actually was flown to Washington DC to present my findings on the wheelchair energy meter. Needless to say many years later I found out that the United States Air Force used that concept and their ballistic missile facilities.

They used my invention to know when they had just enough energy left to launch a ballistic missile.

So most of my career has been inventing one thing or the other, some for the work, and others for my entertainment value.

The most inventive area of my life as an engineer were with the scrolling signs, the vending machines, tasers, special operations forces inventions, and many for advanced startup businesses.

Having worked with Aerospace, many other big corporations, allowed me to gathered skills in both engineering plus management to help entrepreneurial companies develop.

I enjoy taking ideas and making them happen. Everything from doing a master schedule to run an entire company and keep it on point plus on time. In addition working and tying in budgets so we can see what we’re spending. I also like to work directly with the engineers, physicists, software engineers, manufacturing, and production to insure that we are on time and under budget. In addition to the scheduling aspects I do like to evaluate the engineering approaches, designs, and efforts to make sure we can really truly attain our goals.

Needless to say I was a born engineer, manager, visionary, and in some cases a tough nosed scheduler for programs.