Jeff Goodwin

Jeff Goodwin was interested in being an entrepreneur since he was younger. When he was 17 he wanted to make money to help pay for college. He talked about how he was determined to pressure wash people's roofs to earn money, because companies were charging too much to have it done, but it was harder than just going out and doing it. Every time he went out to wash people's roofs they said no, so he didn't give up and he kept trying to get that yes. After finally getting that one yes, he started to get yeses from others in the neighborhood and collected enough money to buy his own pressure washer and pay for his first year of college. He went to Washington State University and received his degree in business with some focus on computer classes. After graduating he got a job at Boeing where he continued to go to school at night learning cobal, 4tran, and x86 assembly. While he was on his honeymoon in California he was offered a job as an assembly programer where he worked for a couple years, when he left to work for IBM. He continued to work for IBM for 5 years and during those years he started to show them ideas that he had for new business, which they did not back him up. He left IBM to start his own buiness in Austin, Texas building fixed price device drivers, where IBM became his customer. After doing this business for ten years he noticed that his company was growing, but he didn't have the mean to keep growing the way he was, so he decided to do a SWOT (strength, weaknesses, oportunities, and threat) analysis on his own business. After getting the results of the SWOT, he decided to sell his business and employees to CISCO. CISCO didn't know about this until Jeff sat in their lobby until they were ready to talk. He also signed a 4 year contract with CISCO to keep his project going. After 3 1/2 years he left and moved back to Washington to pursue yet another business opportunity, Lexbe.com where he overseed marketing. Goodwin is currently the president of Goodwin Attorney Services that is located in East Tacoma in the William M Factory business Incubator.

He did give ideas on starting a company and what to do to help with a company.
1) Start a company with about 5000.00 (he has started with Angel investments and then changed to Venture Capital later.
2) The closer you get to the customer, and the more you can understand their experience/problems, the more value your business will have.