Jack Burkhalter:  

After graduating High School I went to Texas A&M where I switched majors just about every semester for 6 years. My biggest regret from my college experience is that I wasn't in the corps of cadets or at least live in the dorm. So I didn't really get to know many people on campus. I really enjoyed waiting tables while in college. I worked at 3C BarBQ, The Hilton Hotel and The Brazos Stock Exchange. My best memories and friends from college from waiting tables. Most all my memories from school are either stuff that happened while waiting tables or hanging out after work with people from the restaurant. I think everyone should wait tables or work in retail at some point in there life. Anyway, I eventually got out and went to work for State Farm in Florida and New York after Hurricane Andrew as a claims adjuster for about a year. After leaving Florida, I moved up to Washington D.C. to work at and eventually become a partner in Alpine Electric, an electrical construction company. I was an estimator there and sold large projects for the company for 3+ years until I got home sick. D.C. is a strange place. Not many people are from there and they are all headed somewhere else. I guess its politics but people don't seem to stick around more than 4 years. I didn't either. When I moved back home I really couldn't seem to make any money around College Station so I moved to Houston. Where I still live today. One day while making sales calls I stumbled across a company that designed, build and sold websites for businesses. I have always been interested in computers and I had some time to kill so I agreed to sit through their presentation. When I left there my life had been forever changed. I didn't really so much want to buy a website but I knew that one day the industry would be HUGE and I wanted a piece of it. For a year or more before the dot com explosion, I tried to sell websites to local houston businesses with that same company, Internet Presentations, with very little success. I had a real hard time convincing some very smart people that the Internet was really going to be big. Seems crazy now right? But most business people that I talked to, my family and friends just didn't get it. At least I couldn't make them get it. One guy who actually laughed out loud at me is now in the business. Anyway, this made it hard to make any money at selling websites. So...I figured if I couldn't sell them then the next best thing would be to build them. I got my first job building web sites by lying my way in. You see I happed to know all about what should be on a website so I could talk the talk but I didn't have a clue how to actually build one. My knowlege ended at filling out a sales order form. To get the job though,...Expand for more