Still the kid who took the stereo apart.

As a boy, I took apart my family's Sears stereo, the all-in-one console with a record player, radio, and tape deck, just to see how it worked. Getting it back together with a few screws to spare taught me the first rule of the trade: understand a thing completely, then make it work.

My father, who owned and operated an office products and furniture company, came home from a business trip after spending the entire flight next to a Commodore rep. Within weeks he handed me my first Commodore 64, and that pulled me into all things computers. That first computer turned into a lifelong pursuit, and I gained experience on the older Commodore PET, the VIC-20, and the Commodore 128. I expanded into early floppy disk drives, amber monitors then color monitors, and eventually an acoustic modem, my first taste of going online years before the web reached everyday homes.

The curiosity never switched off. It is the same curiosity I bring into your home today.

Long before the modern internet, I ran a bulletin board on the one phone line I shared with my siblings, wrote programs in BASIC and compiled them down to machine language, and built a Heathkit by hand. My first network was Token Ring. Then came early Ethernet, coax cable with BNC connectors and terminators on each end, years before the category cabling that runs today's networks. To play a helicopter game against my roommate two rooms away, I wired our computers together with that early Ethernet, through trial and error until it worked.

I built my first PC, a 486, ran early Windows on it, and wrote our family company's first website in raw HTML when the web itself was brand new.

That is where the networking came from. The foundation of every system we build is the part I have been doing the longest and the task I am most passionate about.

Growing up in the family business, I worked every role it had: purchasing, warehousing and delivery, marketing laid out by hand, customer service, phone orders, all the way up to general manager. I was also the only person who kept the computers running, from the office mainframe to the software the whole business depended on.

By the time I moved on, I understood something most installers never learn: how a job actually gets run, and what it costs a customer when the details are wrong.

That is the standard I hold every Bennett Technologies install to today.

I started Bennett Technologies with a single service call. I barely knew what to charge, because the work had never felt like work. An early client, a realtor whose computer I fixed, gave me the advice that set my course: charge a fair value, and let good work bring the next client. That was my first taste of word-of-mouth, and it still drives the business.

One of those early jobs was a thirty-five dollar phone-line repair. That one small call turned into a ten-year relationship covering audio, video, wiring, and support, and roughly a million dollars of work over the decade. A small job, done right, is how the big ones arrive.

My clients ran from working households to some of the most demanding designers and homeowners around. Every one of them got the same standard. Around the same time I installed one of the first fifty-inch plasma displays almost anyone had seen, back when few people had heard of them. Being early, and being careful, has been the pattern ever since.

Thirty years in, I have worn every hat a founder wears: sales, design, accounting, installation, support, service. The one thing that has changed is that I am no longer on every job site every day. Everything my team does, down to how they treat a customer, comes from my training and my standards.

I still work alongside my team on site, and I am the only one who programs the systems and configures the networks that hold each install together. The specialized work stays in my hands.

At its heart, Bennett Technologies is an audio and video company built on the thing I learned first: the network. Home automation, lighting, theater, and whole-home sound all stand on that foundation, and every one of them gets the same care on a one-hour service call as on a whole-home build. A standard with one author.