Orlando and Back (2001-2002)
I moved down to Orlando about a week after the September 11th attacks. I had taken a leave of absence from school, as I felt that I had sort of hit a wall, and I was extremely miserable there. Moving down to Orlando was a life changing experience. Not only was it my first time out on my own, but I was 1300 miles away from home and was running our Orlando operations.
Fortunately for me, two other guys from Buffalo moved down there with me. One of which was my lifelong best friend, Matt. He was my right hand as we began to do work in the Orlando system. Things started off slowly down there for us. We were doing about 8-10 jobs per day between three of us, while our counterparts in Buffalo were doing upwards of 75. It was probably for the better, as it took us all a little bit of time to get adjusted to being on our own and being in a new city.
Our first major test came when we received a call from the Adelphia technical supervisor on a Friday afternoon. They had just acquired a contract for an apartment complex. Their sales people had went on a blitz, and had sold over fifty broadband service contracts. Did I forget to mention that they were all scheduled for the next morning? In grunt fashion, we worked for 14 hours and installed nearly sixty accounts. This was a new record for installations in a day per person as we each topped out close to twenty.
In my own mind, this was a big jump for me and my career. I had proven (mostly to myself) that I was able to handle pressure, and get things done with what I had. We had also proved something to Adelphia, as they began handing off quite a bit more work to us. Our office soon began to grow, and we were making good money for the company.
Debbie moved down in January of 2002, and started to attend school at Rollins College. She definitely had a harder time than me, as I had my best friend and had built up some other friends amongst the Adelphia workers. One of these friends was Sol, who I had met on IRC in the late 1990s during the height of the 7th Sphere days. Despite Debbie being homesick, we still had some awesome weekends going to the beach and partying downtown.
In March of 2002, Adelphia turned on a new area, consisting of thousands of houses that could now get broadband access for the first time. This was an affluent area in East Orlando - needless to say, things got crazy for us. We went from doing about thirty jobs in one day, to doing over 100 the next day. Our office began generating more revenue for the company than the home office, and things couldn’t have been going better... until Adelphia filed for bankruptcy three months later.
The old saying “never put all of your eggs in one basket” is quite the truth. Soon after Adelphia went bankrupt, they also cut all of their contracts. Not only did we lose 200k in revenue a month from our office, they also went bankrupt with all of the money we had made from March forward, as they typically paid at 90 days. I had to lay everyone in the office off, Matt moved back to Buffalo, and I took a drastic pay cut.
Not knowing what to do, I went back into doing what I was always interested in - web development. I was convinced that I would grow the Orlando business by offering web development work, or software as a service that we could market to the masses. I came up with a concept for a software package, and started developing it. For the next three months, I taught myself PHP and relational databases. I began to develop a prototype of what I had hoped could turn into a nice product. I went into the office every day, sat by myself, and coded until I was red in the eyes.
Then, something else interesting happened. I got a call from Scott who said that he wanted to explore the LAN center concept again..
