Stewart Ross Ogilby, Sr. Sarasota, Florida (941) 545-3600 Following graduation from Ohio State University I worked for two years, earning enough to enroll in graduate school. When I returned to college I had a pleasant surprise. Due to a high undergraduate grade-score I was offered a paid graduate teaching position and scheduled directly into a PhD program by my graduate school advisor. After teaching undergraduate students for a full year I decided to forego an academic career for personal financial reasons. My brother continued at OSU, earning a PhD in geology that prepared him for employment with mining companies and the oil industry. Having established in Tampa, Florida a successful consulting business, he died years ago. I miss him greatly. Corporate sales background Responding to an employment advertisement, I interviewed in Ohio with Lever Brothers Company, the U.S. division of England's Unilever LTD, one of the world's largest companies. I was hired into a job that offered two years of in-field sales training in the marketing of consumer products. Monthly, throughout those two years, I consistently led the sales of the Ohio group. Following a promotion and transfer to New York, I worked with the company four more years in the introductions of several newly branded products in sales promotion, sales training, and key-account sales. I bought a house up the Hudson river in Cold Spring, New York an hour and a half scenic train ride down to Grand Central Station. Although I considered marketing grocery store products to be of minimal social value, whenever I considered leaving the company I was retained by a salary increase. After marketing consumer products with Lever Brothers for six years I voluntarily resigned from the company in order to move into industrial sales. I wanted to become involved with trucks or trucking, an interest since boyhood. I obtained interviews with U.S. Truck Body Company in Long Island City, one of the industry's major manufacturers. I was hired and trained initially to work with and manage the firm's distributors. Within three months I was given the responsibility of key-account representative in addition to seeking and appointing new distributors (truck-equipment companies), training and helping their salesmen. My personal sales prospects included major truck leasing companies (Hertz, Avis, Ryder, Leaseway, National, etc.). Within two years I became the nation's top volume truck-body salesman. After working two years for the company and obliging its plant to schedule manufacturing to more than a year in the future, I was shockingly terminated. The company's president promised me that my earned commissions would be paid as their products were manufactured, delivered, and paid for, on the condition that I not go to work with a competitor for a period of one year. A totally honorable man, he kept his word. A year later, after playing a lot of tennis and, by giving group sales presentations, becoming the top producer for a manufacturer of an interesting audio-visual point-of-sale product, I accepted a sales management position from among three promising employment offers in the industry that I had come to enjoy most, the manufacturing and sales of specifically designed truck bodies. During the six years that I enjoyed working in the truck-body business, I was recruited twice. In my final corporate job I turned around Lyncoach & Truck Company, a troubled division of Instrument Systems Corp., a publicly listed company. I am proud of having saved the jobs for workers at the largest employer in the city of Troy, Alabama. That truck body manufacturing firm continues prospering to this day. Corporate Sales Re-cap: Consumer products marketing Consumer products sales trainer Corporate industrial distributor marketing Corporate industrial direct sales Corporate sales manager & general manager Having suddenly become a single parent, I moved my twelve year old son to Worthington, Ohio, the location of Ohio's top rated public school and worked close to home for the next decade. My personal life was enhanced greatly by meeting and teaming up with a lovely and responsible nurse practioner and single parent of her own three children. I initially had to scramble, earning a living by means of direct sales and repeatedly became the top salesman, sales manager, and sales trainer in various areas: top salesman to leads for home water treatment systems (General Ionics) obtained Ohio real-estate sales license top on-site salesman of converted condominiums to cold walk-ins. Set record of five solid sales one Sunday (Ray T. Soltesz Realty) referrred by a condominium owner to her boss at Beltone Hearing. Hired as sales-manager and trained personally by owner, Ed Ledford Major hearing aid marketer for one year in Cleveland, Ohio Having been northern Ohio's leading on-site salesman of condominium conversions and sales of their purchasers' contingently listed houses, I was recruited by the regional sales manager of Century21 to turn around a failing agency. Within a year my residential real estate business had become the top agency in Century21's Ohio region. At the regional sales meeting we collected the top award in every category: sales, recruiting, listings, and profit. Having met that goal, I decided to provide valuable information and help to others and got an Ohio insurance sales license. Personal Sales and Local Business Re-cap: top sales agent in local office of Globe Insurance Company studied life-industry industry's products began an insurance agency found, attracted, selected, trained, & licensed agents marketed selected insurance products created and managed one of the country's major personal lines agencies wrote the book, Financial Recovery After reading Consumer Reports magazine's shocking booklet about life-insurance I developed Unified Companies (Unified Insurance Agency and Unified Data Systems). When he read my book, George Diachok phoned me and set an appointment with me for dinner at the Holiday Inn restaurant adjacent to the Port Columbus, Ohio airport. That began a five-year friendship and working relationship with that exceptional man, memories of which I treasure. My personal insurance sales volume, together with that of roughly three dozen agents that I recruited and trained, placed me as the nation's top Marketing Director with my financial broker and mentors, George Diachok and Gordon Eddolls of Multi-Financial Corporation, Denver, Colorado. After six years of marketing term life-insurance, flexible payment and single payment deferred annuities, and several good unregistered tax sheltered investments (that became unavailable with the TEFRA tax law) I wrote the book, Financial Recovery. Sadly, after her three children and my son were into their own careers, my partner died of ovarian cancer. My brother, Robert R. Ogilby Phd, had been living in Tampa, Florida for several years. After my son married, had a job, and was buying a house, I moved to sunny Sarasota, Florida, after a delightful extended visit with my brother in Tampa. I came to Sarasota and bought the townhouse condominium in which I live today. I spent years during the daytime on the beaches and boating. For four years I and a couple of friends (my first and second mates) day-sailed the boat I bought, a tall-rigged sloop with an inboard auxilliary diesel engine. During those years I worked out physically with an excellent personal trainer, learning a lot about the importance of developing, maintaining, and respecting a sound muscular body as one grows older. Having obtained a Florida insurance license I worked with The Sarasota Health and Financial Agency prior to contracting with several insurance companies as a personal producer of selected worthwhile products, including long-term care insurance, term life insurance, and annuities, as well as working with Henry W. Abts, author of The Living Trust. I recommended several local Florida licensed attorneys that I introduced to trust documents of outstanding legal quality available from Henry's company before he died. I registered Wisebird Financial, LLC as a Florida agency after easily passing FINRA's Series65 examination. I have been an avid reader since childhood. During my first four years in Florida I spent evenings in the nearby Cook Library at New College, the Sarasota honors branch of the University of South Florida. Finally, with time and resources, I was intent upon getting the best liberal arts education that I could acquire to appease an esoteric curiousity about life, the foibles of humanity (history) and, perhaps, destiny. What followed in my life is epitomized as karma, an ancient concept from India. Little did I know that those evenings for four years would prepare me for a hobby that has increased over four decades. When the internet arrived around 1992 I began, at my home in Sarasota, the solitary hobby of creating websites and writing online. My huge work, The Big Eye, was originally prepared for students as an educational website to historical and intellectual websites for use in schools that provided computer access. The Big Eye, orignally at bigeye.com and now at www.bigeye.org, appeared in Newsweek magazine as a high quality search-portal for students. It linked to twelve hundred carefully selected websites along with essays that I wrote, within its twelve core pages. I placed online the first variety of what have become known as "social media" websites. For historical purposes, I have left its URL online linked to original pages containing links to Google's websites archive. After designing a website that looked a lot like Facebook when it arrived around ten years later, despite my offer to pay programmers whatever they wanted, they all declined, referring to it as "nonsense", saying that they had more important things to do. What they referred to was selling stuff online in the so-called "new economy". Programmers are to marketing as I am to programming. A full page newspaper article referring to my online works was syndicated by Scripps Howard and published in the nation's major newspapers. The senior editor of VeteransToday.com, Gordon Duff, emailed me and invited me to write for that popular website. Without experience, I initially declined after thanking Gordon. He persisted and I wound up by writing thirty-four columns for the site as a "featured columnist" over the next decade. I am hugely grateful for having had the time with my brother before he moved on due to cancer. As a member of both Sarasota Memorial Hospital's Health-Fit facility and the Sarasota YMCA, I swim twenty pool laps regularly and seek an opportunity to help an ambitious entrepreneur or a worthwhile business having growth potential.