How Unishippers' Ceo Went From Running One Unit To Running The Company

MY parents moved from San Luis Obispo to the Mojave Desert, about four hours to the east, after my dad, a physicist, got a job at what is now the Naval Air Weapons Station, China Lake. My younger brother Chris and I grew up catching lizards and snakes and riding motorcycles. We were also on the local swim team.

AGE 53 BIRTHPLACE San Luis Obispo, Calif.

FAVORITE SKI SPOT Canyons Resort, Park City, Utah My family camped and hiked in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and often traveled back to San Luis Obispo and Morro Bay for the ocean. I moved back, closer to the coast, to attend San Diego State University, graduating in 1983 with a biology degree.

In 1980, while in college, I got a job as a beach lifeguard in San Diego; in my third summer, I switched to surf rescue boats. When the surf was high and the riptides were strong, we"�d sometimes rescue nearly 100 swimmers a day from a single rip current. I stayed with the lifeguard service for two years after college and raced outrigger canoes on a team with my lifeguard friends.

In 1983, representatives from a Singapore tourism board donated three dragon boats to San Diego for a festival. Our outrigger canoe team won and traveled to the World Invitational Dragon Boat races in Singapore the next year.

I really wanted to train dolphins for the Navy, but I knew that I needed some experience, so I applied to SeaWorld San Diego, hoping to train the killer whales there. In 1986, SeaWorld hired me as an assistant marine mammal trainer. I worked in the water with the whales and saw how intelligent these mammals are. Eventually they come to know you, which is a big part of successful training.

After working at SeaWorld for about a year, I got a job at Seaco, a government contractor that managed marine mammal programs for the Navy. I worked on a project that used dolphins to detect swimmers near submarine bases. Each team member had a dolphin to train; mine was named April.

Training dolphins was such a popular job that it didn"�t pay much, and I left in 1988 to work for the restaurant group McCormick & Schmick's as an operations manager and then a general manager. I helped it expand from the Pacific Northwest, opening two locations in California.

A friend and I were at the bar in one of our restaurants after work one day when I overheard two people discussing a Unishippers franchise. Unishippers Global Logistics is a third-party intermediary between carriers like United Parcel Service and small and medium-size businesses. The company owns no vehicles and doesn"�t actually ship goods; it negotiates shipping rates with carriers and handles the shipping details for customers.

The next day, I called the Unishippers corporate office to learn more. Within 45 days, I had bought my first California franchise. I left the restaurant industry in 1991 to run it, and started attending meetings of franchise owners. At one meeting I missed, in Chicago, the group voted me to represent it at headquarters. The members had some ideas about the franchise agreement, including controls on royalty rates they paid the corporate office. Over the years, I got to know the corporate executive team in this role.

In 2002, the Unishippers executive team offered me a position as executive vice president and chief products officer. In 2006, I was promoted to president, and, in 2011, to chief executive. I had bought additional Unishippers franchises before taking a corporate position, and I"�m still co-owner of seven.

I"�ve always had the desire to lead, though it's not always smooth sailing when you run a company. Some people don"�t want the risks associated with the job. I"�ve never been afraid of that challenge.

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