Back story

It all begins with an idea, coupled with conditions to make the plunge.

It all begins with an idea. In my case the idea of starting a business percolated in my mind for years (decades actually) before I finally did it. Over those years I toyed with ideas for various business concepts. What finally made me take the leap, was the fact that the company I worked for at the time was moving location to another state, and we did not want to relocate our high school age children. I seriously considered starting my own restaurant franchise. So I did my homework. I took classes on food based businesses at the New School in New York, I frequented restaurants of a similar model and took copious notes on customer traffic, staff, supplies, basically anything i could observe as a patron. Then I created an Excel workbook, researched costs, and crunched the numbers. I concluded it is very difficult to be successful with a restaurant. One option I considered was asking a CEO I knew about possibly joining their company that I had a very favorable opinion of. I had signed my employer up as their first large customer and had seen them grow. My concern was that the most exciting work (in my humble opinion) had largely been done; so figured I’d probably wind up in a role requiring a lot of travel. In my mind, if I’d have to do that much travelling again, then I might as well do it for myself. I decided to start my own consulting firm. As a side note, it is hard to find a name for a consulting firm in my niche that wasn’t already taken. I’ve had to explain to people my whole life, that yes my last name ends with 2 “er”s. Well Double ER sounds too much like a dude ranch, so I named my firm ER Squared. Figured I’d learn more in 6 months of starting and running my own company than I would in 5 years in another corporate environment - so I took the plunge. Well that 6 months turned into 11 successful years, before I accepted a position as a VP at one of my clients. Throughout this time I had numerous ideas about additional business opportunities, but did not have the time and resources to pursue them. Now that I retired from my last job, I have the time to pick some of these ideas up and run with them. Therefore, ER Squared is no longer a consulting firm, but still exists to pursue my other ideas. The first 2 are UltiVideoRec and UltiCashFlow. I’ll share the back stories for each of these in additional posts.