Believe it or not I have no history in the bicycle business other than the constant love for riding and building bicycles and a passion for inventing.
After earning a finance degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison, I went to work for Security Bank here in Milwaukee. Working my way from supervising the telemarketing area to running the home equity direct mail database, I learned a lot about working with people, inside and outside the company as well as hands on marketing training.
I left Security to work for, at the time, Midwest Express Airlines. I started as a sales analyst but worked my way up to working for the head of sales and marketing (also a board member) because I was working across so many departments building custom database applications. I also led the team that relaunched the Midwest Express website and helped start the e-business department.
I really enjoyed working at Midwest Express but my entrepreneurial call was beckoning. My wife had a good job and this was before kids, so I made the leap. Business Information Design has now been successful in the database software area since 2001.
As I said I am also an inventor at heart. I suppose all I do is help invent solutions to problems in my software business, but by about 2003 I had created a list of mostly product inventions and decided it was time to bring one to market. So I started with the one idea I had the most passion around. A bicycle that reminded me of riding my old banana seat bike as a kid but with more style than anything on the market. See “The Progression of an Idea” for more on this.