I don't want to talk much about my work, but it is a big part of who I am. Right now I am Founder & CEO of a company called Sky Retail Solutions. We are based in Atlanta with a fabrication facility in Ohio (to be central of America). Currently we are going through an acquisition and merger of a company called CDS out of Portland, Oregon. We will change the name to SKY+CDS once complete. CDS has been in business for over 30 years, big into design and fabrication. SKY, being more of a fabrication and installation heavy company. The owner at CDS and future partner is a great man and mentor, I look forward to learning as much as I can before he retires.
I started the company back in 2010, before that I had a landscaping company that I sold to a competitive company. I tried a marketing company for the next year and failed. So I wanted to go back into construction, just not landscaping. When I did that, I fell backwards into the retail world. It has been good to me, and we have seen a lot of success.
Covid of 2020 was not good to us, however. Being in retail, it shook all of our clients and cut us at our knees. But we stayed resilient and strong, and climbed back to where we were, just with some added scars. In 2023, also a bad year for us, as I went through an unfortunate dispute with my ex-business partner. It got ugly, I lost a friend, but I kept Sky in the end.
I found a mentor and investor, a great guy that understood and provided us with a chance. We are still going, and I have the best team in the industry, duel locations and the ambitious of no other. Some days I think entrepreneurship means stupidity - someone dumb enough to take the risk it takes. Someone dumb enough to not see what is in front of them, yet always looking to what else something could be.
My biggest lessons learned, so far, is that I was never paranoid. I always thought we were the best and nothing could beat us down. I never expected what happened, and if I were a bit more paranoid, I would have prepared for the unknown storms that were brewing.
There is something to be said about working a 9-5, or 'working for the man'. It brings a life, it brings your time being yours, however you want to spend it. As an entrepreneur, you handcuff yourself to your job, your time is not yours, you owe it to your employees, their stability, their families, and to your clients that trust you with their projects and careers.
It is not all bad, we all have to work for a living, and this is the path I chose. I really do enjoy what I do, we work with retailers across the country, providing them design - shoppers don't have to go shopping, they have to want to. And we help them with that. We provide the fabrication needed for signage and decor to entice or enhance the shopping experience. And lastly, we provide the white glove service to get it installed nationally.
I've met some really awesome people throughout my career. I love my team and I love my clients. I would be nothing without them.
I am a firm believe that everything happens for a reason, and everything that did happen, brought me to this point in my life. When something happens that is negative, don't think about the bad today, think about the many doors of opportunities that just opened for you to explore.
