Mailing address: 242 South Washington Blvd. #323 Sarasota, FL 34236
Mobile: (941) 545-3600
After graduating from Ohio State University I worked two years in low-paying laboratory jobs.
To earn enough money to attend graduate school I drove a GMC-620 truck over the road for exactly one year.
When I returned to college I had a pleasant surprise. Due to my high undergraduate grades I was offered a paid graduate teaching position and scheduled by my graduate school advisor directly into the PhD program .
After teaching undergraduate students for a full academtic year I decided to forego an academic career for personal financial reasons. My younger brother continued at OSU, earning a PhD in geology that prepared him for working with mining companies and the oil industry. He built his own consulting business in which he did very well. He died years ago and I miss him greatly.
Corporate sales background
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. I consistently led the Ohio sales group monthly for the two years.
Following a promotion and transfer, I worked four more years with the company in New York in key-account sales, sales promotion, sales training, and in the introductions of several newly branded products: All laundry detergent, scented Lifebuoy hand soaps, Dove liquid detergent, Dove bar-soap, Mrs. Butterworth syrup, Lucky Whip dessert topping mix.
I earned enough money to buy a house up the Hudson river in Cold Spring, NY that was an hour and a half scenic train ride into Grand Central Station. Although I considered the marketing of consumer products to be of no real social value, whenever I considered leaving the company I was retained by an increase in salary.
After marketing consumer products for six years I finally 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.
Having obtained interviews with U.S. Truck Body Company in Long Island City, NY I was hired and trained initially to be the firm's distributor sales manager. Within a month I was given the responsibility of key-account representative in addition to finding and appointing new distributors (truck-equipment companies), training and helping their salesmen. Sales prospects included the nation's 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 over loading the company's manufacturing capacity 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 product was manufactured, delivered, and paid for, on the condition that I not go to work for a competitor for a period of one year. A totally honorable man, he kept his word and a year later, after having played a lot of tennis and becoming the leading salesman for an audio-visual sales training manufacturer, I accepted another position in the industry I enjoyed most.
During the full 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 to have saved the jobs for the workers at the largest employer in the city of Troy, Alabama. That truck body manufacturing firm prospers 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 unexpectedly become a single parent, I moved with 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. I initially had to scramble, making my living by means of direct sales. I became consistently the top salesman, sales manager, and sales trainer in several areas:
- top salesman to leads for home water treatment systems (General Ionics)
- recreational land sales appointments (Apple Valley)
- phone sales of registered investments (I don't recall the broker's name)
- obtained Ohio real-estate sales license
- top on-site salesman of condominium conversions (Ray T. Soltesz Realty)
- salesman of homes listed contingently on condo contracts (RTS Realty)
As Columbus Ohio's leading salesman of condominium conversions and the 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 became the top agency in Century21's Ohio region. We won the top award in every category: sales, recruiting, listings, and profit. Having met that challenge, I decided to move on vocationally and got an Ohio insurance sales license.
Personal Sales and Local business re-cap:
- top sales agent in local office of Globe Insurance Co.
- studied life-industry industry's products
- began an insurance agency
- found, attracted, selected, trained, & licensed agents
- marketed selected insurance products
- insurance agency general management
- 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 Diachuk 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 mentor, George Diachuk of Multi-Financial Corporation, Denver, Colorado.
After six years of marketing term life-insurance, flexible payment and single payment deferred annuities, I wrote the book, Financial Recovery.
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 and started Wisebird Financial, LLC. I am hugely grateful for having had ten years in Florida with my cherished younger brother before he moved on due to cancer.
My formal education, as my brother's, was largely scientific. Our father was a brilliant self-educated research chemist. Despite no college or other formal scientific education, in doing pure research while doing laboratory work with corporations, he oversaw college graduates who had PhD's.
When I came to Florida I spent years during the daytime on the beach 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.
Although in college I focused largely on science, 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. Now that I had the time, 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 that might be reviewed. 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 (some of my links are listed below). 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.
My first website, The Big Eye (orignally at bigeye.com and now at 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 twelve key pages. A full page newspaper article referring to my online work 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 ten year span from 2007 to 2017.
In later years I placed some of my articles, including a few of those that I had written for VeteransToday on Bigeye, as well as links to various socio-economic-political matters. I generated personal income through various health-related affiliate marketing links online as well as created the first social-media type online resource. I called it The Email Club. For historical interest I have left its URL online at emailclub.com
As a member of both Sarasota Memorial Hospital's Health-Fit facility and the Sarasota YMCA, I swim twenty pool laps several times a week.
The following links represent a portion of the years spent on my part-time website hobby. Wait for the "archived" pages to load. I hope that you enjoy the browsing!
archived: bigeye.com
The BigEye Blog: THE Big Eye Blog
News Watch: NEWSWATCH.ORG
archived: newswatch.org
The New Letter to a Generation
Historical: emailclub.com
archived: Featured columnist at VeteransToday 2007-2017
