I’m Keith Borden, the ‘affiliate’ in Keith Borden, Affiliate. I’m asking you to trust me, and to do business with me (or through me, as an affiliate), so I think you have a right to know something about me.
Let’s start at the beginning. I grew up in exceptionally fortunate circumstances — loving professional parents, affluent middle-class neighborhood in Vancouver, Canada, and from grade 9 onward, excellent education: The Cambridge School of Weston (in Massachusetts, USA), then Cornell and Stanford.
But in 1972, I turned my back on a PhD program in neuroscience, and walked away from Stanford with just an MS, in order to live in an ashram. Now, whatever you think about that — and it could be any number of things — it’s probably nothing I haven’t told myself a hundred times. Anyway, it’s what I did. I want to point out, though, that this was California, and 1972 was basically still the sixties.
I soon left the ashram, and then knocked about for several years, even working as a teamster, a logger, and planting trees on a torn-up logging slope.
I must jump back for a moment. One evening at Stanford, I got an unfamiliar brand of candy bar from a vending machine, then joined other students watching TV in the medical student lounge. The candy bar was in two parts. I bit into one of them: Yuck! Horrible! But I didn’t want to waste the other half. So I asked the other students, “Would anyone like half a shitty chocolate bar?” There were no takers, but one replied, “You should be selling encyclopedias.”
Fast forward. How prophetic he was! Among my activities after leaving the ashram, I spent about five years selling encyclopedias. I was pretty bad at it, selling just enough to keep me poor.
But eventually, I found my way into an entrepreneurial career as a ghostwriter. My clients included private individuals, medical professionals, and businesses. At this, I was very good.
In 1989 I met Terri DiCamillo, who had left a graduate program in entrepreneurship at Babson in order to purchase and run a small electronics assembly company. She’s been my partner ever since. And in 1995, after she sold her company for more than twice what she’d paid for it, we founded Write for Business, Inc. We wrote marketing and technical material for companies of all sizes in a wide variety of industries.
Very soon, though, we found ourselves being asked about websites, so in 1997 we founded WebGrow, inc., serving much the same clientele. Terri worked more on the design side, and myself on development and programming, while both of us assisted our clients with marketing strategy. We also advised and assisted them with selecting and acquiring domain names.
However, we ourselves got caught in a common trap of small services businesses, a boom-and-bust cycle:
- We have no projects, so we devote our time to marketing.
- Our marketing brings us projects.
- We devote our time to projects, neglecting our marketing.
- We complete our projects, and don’t have more.
- Back to step 1.
Then came the dotcom bust, the commoditization of web design and development, and then the Great Recession. Web design tanked.
So, what did we do then? Tune in tomorrow, to find out.
