Steve began his entrepreneurial endeavors with a paper route at age ten. He continued with his own Junior Achievement company, selling handmade products door-to-door and at malls. In high school, he became heavily involved in journalism, due to a highly influential teacher. He developed a campaign for the journalism department of live radio-like commercials on the public address system during morning announcements, which promoted a package deal of yearbook and newspaper subscriptions. This dramatically increased sales from previous years.
To pay his way through school, he worked for five years at Six Flags Over Texas which gave him hands-on management experience. He earned multiple restaurant and ride Manager of the Month awards, in addition to winning a college scholarship through Six Flags. While attending the University of Texas at Arlington, he sold advertising for the school newspaper and the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity calendar. He also created a public relations handbook for the Student Employment Service. He completed coursework in radio, television, and history.
His first professional job after college was as an Account Executive for WBAP radio, the number one station in the Dallas-Fort Worth marketplace, where he won numerous sales awards. His duties included selling ads in sports programming for the Texas Rangers and Dallas Mavericks. While at the radio station, a former general manager persuaded Steve to embark upon a new career in an emerging industry, cable television.
This new career began with Cable Advertising Systems, the first cable sales ad rep firm in the country. A principle stock holder of the corporation was John Conley, former Governor of Texas and the Secretary of Treasury. Steve’s position was Senior Vice President, with responsibilities that included market development for new cable systems and managing a sales force.
During this time, Steve’s entrepreneurial spirit was still burning. He decided to begin his own company, with his own cable advertising rep firm, called Cable TV Ads America. Over the last thirty years, he has developed hundreds of small-market cable systems. In 2002, Comcast came to him with the challenge to assimilate all Dallas-Fort Worth area small-market cable systems into one larger system, called the Interconnect. These types of small systems had never been in an Interconnect before. Steve achieved this by developing groundbreaking software and automation techniques, continually refined throughout the years.
Recently, he has decided to release this proprietary intellectual property for sale through his new company, Global Ad Automation. These techniques will allow drastic savings on labor costs, at a time when industry profits need to be maximized. To quote Churchill, “This is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.”
