It’s About Opportunity… (and the lack thereof)
In 1982 I quit my job washing dishes at the Ormsby House Casino in Carson City, packed up and drove to California because a better opportunity was waiting for me just on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I arrived in Rocklin with $20 in my pocket, half a tank of gas and all my belongings in the back of my 1973 Bug.
I was set up in a room from a family I knew and proceeded to get a job at the local Video Store (be kind, rewind). They were looking to diversify the product line and were awarded an Apple Computer dealership right after I started working. I immediately saw this as an opportunity to learn something new and began to learn how to type on the typing tutor program. Within two years, I was the top salesman in the Northern California region and really took to the whole computer thing that was changing the landscape of how things were done.
In 1984, I was invited to the rollout of the Macintosh Computer and purchased my Macintosh 128k computer directly from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. I took that computer back to Rocklin and proceeded to sell the pants off that machine and made a huge pile of money. In 1985 Pagemaker was introduced and I began to sell publishing systems to every major company in the Sacramento Valley and together we revolutionized the way information was distributed.
In 1986, I founded The Electric Page and purchased the second PostScript (a page description language from a fledgling company named Adobe Systems) photoimagesetter west of the Mississippi. I took this opportunity to built a company that at one time employed 50 full-time people (I proudly paid living wages, the kind you could buy a house with and take a two-week vacation once a year), had 5 locations and grossed 5 million dollars a year in annual sales in the printing and communications industry. We pulled off tons of firsts including the first internet connected business network, on-demand distributed printing solutions, and California printing company website
My opportunity in California was spectacular and with hard work and great people on my team, we made the most of it.
One of the main reasons I became involved with the State of Jefferson Movement was because of the dismal opportunity that awaits my children. Looking at the mainstream pathway to employment that includes 15,000 hours of government schooling to prepare my kids for an (artificially inflated) minimum wage job or borrowing money from the US government to pay for skyrocketing tuition to earn a nearly meaningless 4 year degree, the outlook is grim.
Since all my kids have an entrepreneurial spirit, their prospects are even more grim. California continues to rank dead last in “Business Friendliness” with 590+ California State Agencies whose self-appointed, unelected function it is to Fee, License, Tax, tell your business what it can and cannot do, or all of the above (and throw your ass in jail if you blink). The barriers of entry to the budding entrepreneur are so great that without Venture Capitol or a loan from mom and dad, most dreams of making it by your boot straps remain just that. Regulation, onerous oversight, out of control fees and licenses and a hungry tax on crumbs might be left over are what create that whooshing sound you hear as businesses with good paying jobs leave for Nevada, Texas, and Tennessee.
When I started The Electric Page in 1986 my cost of goods sold from the state was roughly 3%; fees, licenses, and other regulation mandated expenses. By the time I shut down in 2006, it was pushing 20%. That meant in my last year of operation I needed to sell $20,000 worth of business cards just to pay Sacramento for the privilege of doing business in the Golden State. The consequences, unintended or not, of out of control bureaucracy effects everyone in ways not easily measured; everyone suffers from the weight of regulation.
This is not the opportunity that greeted me 30 years ago when I made the drive over the mountains. And the last thing I want to see is what has happened to almost every one of the my kids friends when the are old enough; they move to another state where the opportunity for success in Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is greater than that of Sunny California. I want to watch my grandchildren grow up on my knee, not on Facebook.
I cannot, in good conscious, deliver this reality to my kids without doing something, so I am not sitting on my hands and shrugging my shoulders. I stand and I fight for the State of Jefferson and the promise of opportunity that lies just on the other side of the mountain. I am strengthened by you standing with me; together we will make the 51st state a reality.
To learn more about the State of Jefferson movement, check out our website here.
