United Standard Service Co. 1986 to Present

I started working in the water conditioning and purification business in December 1986 as a contract sales representative for United Standard of America (formerly United Standard of Michigan) and was their number one representative. Seeing potential, In 1987 I opened my own office in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Almost immediately, it became one of the top offices in the nation with about 50 employees.

About a year later, I saw an opportunity to start a service division not only for my company but also for the company that started me off in the business. After a 1-year trial run with my company, I contracted with United Standard of America to offer their customer base an Automatic Annual Service Program along with Regular and guarantee services too. I sold separately my Sales office and service division in Grand Rapids, moved back to Flint, Michigan and Started United Standard Service Co. I purposely used a similar name as to relate itself with United Standard of America.

A few years later United Standard of America and the company that had bought my office in Grand Rapids closed their doors. However my company was going strong just supplying an automatic service plan to the three-thousand customers which they had on the books. So I continued until today.

However, without a sales division to keep new customers coming, due to attrition my customer base slowly dwindled. By 2008 I was barely earnng a living but kept on going because I felt a loyalty to my customers whom had been so loyal to me over the years..But fate stepped in and the economic slowdown forced me to make a change. I still get an ocassional call for service, but will officially close the doors once I am able to start my new career.

I decided that since 1984 I had a fascination with computers, electronics and gadgets like the recording equipment I had used in my recording studio over the years. Realizing the future of computer technology lay in Networking and Network Security, I chose to go back to school to get a more formal education in the field.

• Contributed to profitability by striving to keep costs low and profits high.
• Consulted with clients to determine their needs and priorities.
• Demonstrated effective presentation, communication and negotiation skills.
• Developed and implemented a customer-tracking program using Microsoft Access, providing Salt and Potassium usage, filter change, dates and automatically prompted you when services were due. (Also keeping water analysis data for each customer.
• Engineered, installed, maintained computerized accounting, customer tracking and profit analysis programs.
• Tripled sales volumes over a period of four years.
• Established a successful line of private label water purification, conditioning, and filtration products.
• Implemented new procedures for servicing and diagnostics, providing more accurate and timely troubleshooting of water filtration, conditioning and purification systems.
• Interviewed and hired installation and service technicians.
• Maintained close personal contact with Manufacturers of product parts and components.
• Maintained high standards of excellence.
• Maintained inventory of water filtration, conditioning and purification parts and components.
• Responded to written and telephone requests for sales and service.
• Was personally responsible for more than 50% of system sales.
• Supervised up to 50 employees, scheduled work hours, resolved conflicts, and determined salaries.
• Wrote designed and produced personalized form letters advertising company products and services.

Most of my IT work at USSC was in the area of Database design and maintenance, Word document design (merge documents and forms), and lots of fairly complex excel spreadsheets.

it also included computers, ad-hoc networks, printers, scanners, fax machines, multi-purpose printers/fax/scan/copy etc. initially it was on a bus topology using a hub and BNC connections on 4 workstations. Later it became wireless and in the last year included wireless printers.