The Beginning of Lace Anchors - Chapter 1

First and foremost, I am not a writer. I have horrible grammar, spelling and punctuation. You have been warned! I barely graduated high school and if I could go back and pay attention to just 1 class throughout all my school years it would be English. In order to graduate I was taking a before school class, after school class and working a full time job at McDonalds to get working credit. If you're younger, still in school and not doing so great, do yourself a favor and pay attention in English. No matter how smart you are, no matter how much you know, if you write with horrible grammar, spelling, and punctuation, you will lose instant credit with many people, especially if they don't know you or have never spoken to you or met you in person, which happens everyday in the business world.

Everything has a starting point. It's called the beginning. It's amazing to think a company like Apple literally started with a beginning, a point where it was just an idea and not a single tangible part or product in existence. It blows my mind what one person can accomplish even in a shorter than deserved lifetime. How many of you have ideas but never pushed the start button only to see "your" idea successful in someone else's hands? Shoulda, woulda, coulda but didn't. This happened to me on many occasions, and I didn't actually pull the trigger and run with my idea until I had to.

I was involved in property management from 18-30 years old and my wife was a real-estate agent in Las Vegas. 2007 rolled around and the market was a mess in Vegas. By the time 2010 came we were both ready for a change and had to make some decisions on our future. We didn't want to raise our then 2 and 4 year old son and daughter in Sin City (where I grew up) and since our income had changed dramatically for the worst, there was nothing holding us back. We took our savings and moved to a small town of about 18k people. Anacortes, Washington. Great schools, great community and a beautiful setting is what attracted us. There was only 1 minor problem. How do we make money?

Driving home from a store in a nearby town discussing our goals and our future I said "we need to make a product." This came out of nowhere and my wife turned to me and said, "huh?" I said something along the lines of "Yeah, we need to sell something that has huge market potential, something everyone can use." Right at that moment shoes popped in my head and within 5 minutes I had my idea. I know you're thinking, yeah right, it doesn't happen that fast, but honest to god it all happened within 5 minutes. I had my first home made prototype in my hands within hours of getting home. The prototype actually only took about 5 minutes to make as well but I had to do a little research on the computer before starting anything because I thought someone had to of already made something like this. I could find nada, zip, zilch. I contacted a patent attorney and at that point I knew I was going to follow through with this.

I am going to continue this story in our blog section and break it up into chapters. I am hoping someone out there will get inspired to follow through with their ideas and make it happen. It doesn't come easy, but in the end if you have a great idea or concept it will all be worth it. It really comes down to dedication and hard work. Getting the funds from investors for your start-up is the easy part in today's world.

Below you will see the picture of the VERY first ever Lace Anchor®. Made from a plastic lego style block and my Dremel tool. It's ugly, but it proved my concept would work!