Origin Story

Hey, I'm Judd.

I'm an independent consultant and I help industrial manufacturers generate more leads.

I've always been super curious and someone that liked to learn how things work.

I like to deconstruct things.

I used to take apart my alarm clocks when I was little.

My mom would walk into my room and say, what on earth did you do to your alarm clock?

I would take it out into a million pieces, and I just wanted to see how it worked.

So I've always been a curious person.

Crack open the encyclopedia, I'd want to learn about animals, or I'd want to learn about mountains or whatever.

Part of that generation, the Xennials I think they call it, which is smack dab in between Gen X, you know, the grunge generation, and the Millennials.

And so we were the first group of students to have the internet at our school.

You could socialize on the internet, you could read things, you could look at pictures.

And so that curiosity has a through line in my life and in my career of that self-directed learning and being able to follow that impulse wherever it takes you.

If you were into some weird obscure thing and you live in Kaysville, Utah, you can connect with someone in South America or someone in Europe that loves that thing just as much as you.

So, the internet, needless to say, is an incredibly powerful thing and I'm I'm happy to still be working on it all these years later.

I grew up a snow skier, a basketball player, ended up playing a year of basketball at a place called Dixie College, and from there ended up moving to San Francisco and attending San Francisco State.

I was taking a video editing course.

I convinced my dad that for Christmas I needed a more powerful computer so that I could edit the videos.

And rather than buy a computer, I ended up buying all the parts for a computer and learning how to assemble a PC.

So I spent an entire winter break figuring out how to put a computer together.

And when I got to the end of it, I was out of money and could not afford a copy of Microsoft Windows.

What I ended up doing was burning a disk of Linux, and I ended up kind of changing my life because I discovered this entire universe of how computers work.

I learned to use the command line.

And I learned about programming and scripting and this whole kind of subculture.

I use some of that stuff I learned through that experience to this very day.

I ended up going to graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin.

And as I was wrapping that program up and looking for jobs, I landed an interview at one of the hot agencies in town, the fancy office at the top of Frost Tower.

And they were looking for someone that had digital skills.

So I was super excited to to build on my experience of of freelancing and making websites in San Francisco.

So I thought I would be perfect.

I landed the interview and it did not go well.

The guy interviewing me was cutting me off every other question, and I knew I didn't get it walking out of there.

And I thought, you know what?

I'm never gonna be more broke than I am right now coming out of graduate school.

Why don't I just start freelancing again?

As luck would have it, my last semester I was taking an entrepreneurship class and one of the guest speakers was starting a startup and invited me to come help him out.

We worked in his carport and he ended up- it ended up becoming a venture-backed startup called MindBytes.

Guy's name is Jason Renaud.

One thing led to another, I started getting referrals to other clients and I haven't looked back.

So as I was in Austin and started to build a client base, Austin was on the rise as a tech hub.

And the tech scene at the time was very laid back.

There was an incredible energy in Austin at the time, and that there were meetups almost every, every night of the week, and people were not competitive, people were not sheisty.

We were genuinely sharing what we were learning because the web is the web was rising.

So there were groups like Refresh Austin and some of these other groups where it was literally a group of us that were obsessed with making websites and programming, and we would get together and someone would pull it up on the at someone's office, they'd pull it up on a screen and pull up some code, and we would drink a bunch of beer and just nerd out on, on web stuff.

And we would all learn from each other, we'd refer gigs to each other.

2007 to, I don't know, 2012-ish, that, that window.

Looking back, that was really an amazing thing to be a part of and helped form my thinking around technology and community and sharing what you know and being open and not not hoarding knowledge.

Great timing to be in Austin.

I'm very big on what I call teach and transfer.

I try and be as open and free with everything I know and teach and train my clients so they can do a lot of this stuff by themselves.

And so I like to work with market leaders that are ambitious and want to build these capacities and capabilities in-house, and I can help them accelerate that.

So it's the whole you know, teach a man to fish type approach.

And so philosophically, I am very big on keeping things simple, keeping things direct.

I ended up landing a project through an agency out of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and I specialized in a particular content management system at the time, and they connected me to a client in the packaging machinery world, which I had never heard of.

I had never thought about All of those things you see at the grocery store, how did they get boxed?

How did they get labeled?

How did they get poured into the bottle?

How did the cap get screwed on?

Well, there's these huge machines that do it all.

When I got in and looked at their analytics and learned about their business, I thought, wow, this is a fascinating, fascinating world of kind of B2B manufacturing or in the industrial world.

And so I thought it might be time to explore this.

On a deeper level.

As my business and my thinking evolved, and as I was working with these industrial manufacturers, it felt like the time to start to explore other opportunities.

I'm solar-powered and need the sun, so I knew I wanted to move somewhere warm.

I ended up living out of Airbnbs for a year with my beloved dog Maddox, traveling throughout the Southeast U.S.

to try and figure out what exactly would be next.

And so I I did the digital nomad thing for a year where I worked off a laptop, and I spent time in Chattanooga, Tennessee, was in Miami for several months, had a stop in Atlanta.

And Atlanta was amazing.

I stayed at an Airbnb in Reynoldstown, and I could not get over how cool the little pockets of Atlanta were.

Different neighborhoods, different vibes.

I love the street art.

I love the adaptive reuse of all these old buildings.

The history is incredible in Atlanta.

It's not tech heavy, so it has high tech.

It's got corporate, it's got manufacturing.

There's nowhere else like Atlanta.

It's a it's a one of one.

I spent 2 months here and ended up buying a place and knew this is where I wanted to be for the next chapter of my life.

So I end up buying a place here and moving to Miami while I'm waiting for it to be built.

And I get back to Atlanta, I'm super excited and life had other plans.

End up having my son Lorenzo.

The light of my life, and COVID hits.

For a lot of us, a lot of things got put on hold during COVID New dad and have been an independent consultant for many, many years, and I was always very self-motivated.

But you want to talk about the most motivating thing possible- trying to create a strong future for your son.

And so now I was more determined than ever to sharpen my skills and make those connections and take my business to the next level.

And that's really where I started to transition from a web developer or someone who can make websites to a true consultant.

The difference is who's telling who what to do.

When you become a consultant, you're telling the client what to do.

When you're a contractor, the client tells you what to do.

So I grew up playing sports competitively.

On travel teams and on the AAU circuit.

So I ended up specializing in basketball and dropping the other sports.

Some of my closest friends I made in athletics.

And so a few of the things I definitely took from sports, one is being part of a team.

So even though I'm a soloist, when I'm stepping into a client situations, I need to figure out what role can I play?

Am I in a supporting role?

Do I need to lead?

The other thing is computers.

If you're not a curious person and you're not constantly redeveloping and refining your skillset, That takes practice, that takes reps.

And you do that on your own, and you do it when no one's looking, and there's no immediate payoff.

And so that's something that's definitely transferred into my career, was the ability to have self-discipline and to train, knowing that the payoff is deferred.

One of the great benefits of being in Atlanta is it's the centerpiece and kind of the crown jewel of the of the South.

It it is the place in the Southeast United States.

Obviously the Midwest is huge in industrial manufacturing, but the Southeast US, starting in the Carolinas all the way down through Atlanta into Florida and across the way into Alabama, Louisiana, and on into like the eastern part of Texas, is just loaded with incredible manufacturing companies building anything and everything you can imagine.

I can hop in the car and drive a couple hours and get into South Carolina.

I can hit Tennessee, Alabama, can jump on quick flights, you know, into Florida.

And so this is an amazing central place to be.