Entrepreneur

In 2008, I read some fantastic books like Think and Grow Rich, The 4-hour workweek, and Rich Dad - Poor Dad. These books gave me the confidence and drive to pursue entrepreneurial activities on my nights and weekends. These activities have taught me more than any book could while enabling me to meet and work closely with fantastic like-minded people.

The following are various entrepreneurial like projects I have worked on over the years. I haven't had financial success with these projects yet; however, I have enjoyed the time I have spent and the things I have learned because of these activities. I suspect that I will always be involved in some type of fun project throughout my life!

Brian's Projects (also known as my fail resume)

YouTube Logo

2007-present YouTube Personal Channel
I joined YouTube in 2007 and uploaded my first video. After reading Gary V's book, "Crush It," I decided to try to become an influencer. I started posting videos about my travel, my speeches (once I joined Toastmasters), and some software coding talks. One day, I posted a fun video I made of a person in a dinosaur costume at a local radio station event. That video went viral with over 2 million views, this helped boost visits & subscribers to my channel. I still have this channel today and recently have posted about Spain, UX design, and the occasional cooking video. I have not become a true influencer, BUT I love making and posting videos.

SsZ TV Logo

2010-2011 YPCareer-SSZ.TV Professional Vlog/Blog
As I progressed in my career at Siemens, I realized that much of what I was learning should be shared. So, I started a blog called Young Professional Career (YPCareer.com). In addition, I decided to use a multi-channel marketing approach and created a video blog using the same content called SolutionShortz aka SSZ.TV. Over several years, I created around 40 articles, some of which were also turned into youtube and vimeo videos.

Social Folio Logo

2011-2012 YSMR-SocialFolio Smart Website
One of my favorite blog posts, "The Traditional Resume is Quickly Becoming Obsolete," led me to start a new project called "Your Social Media Resume." The idea was to create a website that would scan your social media presence and provide a score along with guidance on improving your social media footprint. I pitched the idea to three computer science students at Drexel University. They liked the concept, and we started converting my original prototype to Java while working on a marketing plan. Unfortunately, the team was busy with other commitments, and we did not make much progress before the team dissolved.

Career Boot Camp Coaches Logo

2012-2018 Career Boot Camp Coaches LLC Startup
After launching and running a successful career development program at Siemens, my colleague and I decided to see if we could turn our passion into a full-time career. So we formed Career Boot Camp Coaches LLC. Our vision was "to empower and inspire individuals to harness their career potential." We spent our nights and weekends creating a two-day workshop (Bootcamp) focused on self-discovery and self-direction. After a couple of years, we decided to pivot and convert our boot camp into an online digital career coach. We had two additional founders join us with marketing and machine learning backgrounds and created career informatics, an online digital career coach.

The digital coach consisted of the following features:

  • Ability to parse Resume & Linkedin Profile automatically saving skills to your profile Integration with Indeed jobs searching jobs based on your skills and target job to return jobs the user is qualified for
  • Interview assistant that asked tailored questions based on the job user is interested in
  • Machine learning features learned which jobs the user was interested in tweaking the results based on user preferences

After countless nights and weekends, brainstorming sessions, and unsuccessful partnerships, the team decided to focus on other parts of our lives, and the company was dissolved in 2018.