Constant Ignition Ground

A five-year-old, sitting on the floor, surrounded by plastic parts, holding a motor in his hand like it was a gold nugget. Everybody else was looking at the dog. I was looking at the wires coming off the back of that motor and wondering where they went.

I snapped the body together. I found where the motor went. I hooked it up. And then I flipped the switch.

It whirred.

The wheels turned. The whole little machine came alive under my own hands, and something in me came alive right along with it. When that little motor started spinning, something in me started spinning too.

After all these years, it has never once wound down.

I fell in love with anything electronic or mechanical that day. We call people like me gearheads, and I've been one ever since. Snoopy, I'm sorry. You were a fine dog. But you were never the point.

So picture it. A store aisle. A display turning slowly, minding its own business. And a small boy walking up to it, very casual, like he's just browsing.

Then the hand goes out.

My fingers wrapped around it. My hand against the motor. The motor against my hand. I could feel it pushing back, humming, straining. I could feel exactly how strong it was. And I had to know. Who wins?

Picture the store clerk watching a small boy arm-wrestle the merchandise.

The merchandise usually lost.

So did I, once my mother found out. I'm fairly sure that got me in trouble more than once. But that's where my love of physics and electronics began, right there in a store aisle with my fingers wrapped around a display that had no idea what it was up against.

The Investigation

It didn't stop at store displays.

And a sibling standing in the doorway, staring at what used to be their favorite thing, now in pieces, looking at me like I'd just run over the family dog.

My sisters started locking their bedroom doors.

Now, a normal kid would have taken the hint. A locked door means stay out. That should have been the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

Somehow, thanks to an early grasp of physics and a firm refusal to be stopped, I still got in. I'll leave the method to your imagination. Let's just say a locked door is just another mechanism, and I was very interested in mechanisms.

The Moon Crawler

And then there was my brother's toy.

My brother had a Major Matt Mason moon crawler. The motorized one. If you were a kid back then, you know exactly what that meant.

It just wasn't the one my parents had in mind.

The lesson I took was that the inside of a machine is the most interesting place in the world, and getting in there is worth a little pain. Every pop upside the head was just tuition. And I was getting one heck of an education.

The Other Direction

When I got old enough to ride my bike around, the rest of the neighborhood kids had a destination. The record store.

That's where the cool kids went. Flip through the albums, look at the covers, see what's new.

I went the other way.

While my friends rode their bikes to the record store, I pedaled in the opposite direction, to Radio Shack.

Good old Radio Shack. If you never walked into one, you missed something. Drawers of parts. Little plastic bags of components hanging on hooks, row after row.

I practically lived on my Science Fair 150-in-One Electronic Project Kit, made by Tandy. If you never had one, here's what it was. A board full of little springs, and parts mounted all over it, and a book full of projects. You took little wires and connected spring to spring to spring, following the diagram, and when you got it right, the circuit did its trick.

A light would blink. A buzzer would sound. A little radio would pull a station out of thin air.

One project. Then the next. Then the next.

A hundred and fifty projects in one box. For a kid like me, that was a hundred and fifty reasons to skip dinner.

I worked that kit from about eight years old to fifteen. Seven years. Hours and hours on it. Sitting there, bent over that board, connecting one wire after another, completely gone into it. I learned so much.

And I kept everything. Every part, every scrap of wire, every component I ever pulled out of anything. Some kids collected baseball cards.

Rule the World

And it was on that Radio Shack kit that I learned the distinction that still runs my life today.

First, I learned that electricity is the movement of electrons.

Then I learned that electronics is the manipulation of electrons.

And if you can manipulate electrons, you can rule the world. Or at least every electronic device in it.

Think of it this way. Electricity is a river running downhill. It goes where gravity tells it to go, and it doesn't care what you think about it. Electronics is you deciding where the river goes. You build the channels. You open the gates. You make it turn the wheel.

Most people spend their whole lives standing beside the river.

I wanted to build the gates.

Every burger was supposed to come out the same, whether the manager was standing right there watching you or whether he was in the back on the phone. Same standard, watched or unwatched.

Most people think of that as a fast food rule. I think of it as the most important rule in my whole career.

You'll see that idea again, much later, inside a torn-apart dashboard where nobody but me will ever look.

The Door Swung Open

Around that time, a friend of mine came over. He was already into car audio.

And he had something in his car I'd never heard before. A simple amp and a pair of Jensen 6x9 coaxial speakers in the back.

Now, today that doesn't sound like much. But back then? This was unheard of. Most cars came with a radio and a speaker or two that sounded like somebody talking through a paper towel tube.

The Eight-Track

There was just one problem. I didn't have money for a real system.

What I had was my brother's eight-track player.

Yes. The same brother. The moon crawler brother. You'd think he'd have learned to hide his things from me by then.

Now, that eight-track was built for the house. It ran off 120 volts, straight out of the wall.

A car doesn't have 120 volts.

A car has twelve.

Most people would have stopped right there. Wall power, car power, two different worlds, end of story.

But I had spent years on the floor with that project kit, and I knew something most people didn't. Most of that stuff runs off twelve volts anyway. Down inside that player, the wall power was just getting converted down to what the electronics actually wanted.

I had built my own personal jam box.

And I remember exactly what I played on it.

Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" was just coming out back then. If you know that song, you know how it builds. It starts quiet. Moody. It takes its time. You're waiting, and you don't even know what you're waiting for.

I cranked it up on that jam box. Two 4-inch speakers giving it everything they had.

And then the drums came in.

That's when I realized how good it sounded. A wooden box, a battery, and two little speakers I'd mounted myself, and it hit like that. I can still hear it. That song and that homemade jam box go together in my head like constant and ground.

Other kids bought their boom boxes at the store. Mine started life as my brother's eight-track, did a tour of duty in my car, and came home as a jam box. Same player, three careers. That thing worked harder than I did.

I was getting better. Job by job, pizza by pizza.

And then one day, the big one walked in.

My First Big Check

A real job.

Not a radio swap. A decent job, with a lot of equipment. The kind of job I'd been dreaming about since the day my friend's car hit me in the chest.

And the customer was somebody I knew. My girlfriend's best friend.

I remember thinking, this is it. This is the one that makes me legit.

She dropped off her vehicle, and I had it for a couple of days. And I want you to understand something. I did not just install that equipment.

I courted it.

I planned every run before I touched a wire. I took my time. I did it over when it wasn't perfect. Every connection right. Every speaker mounted like it came from the factory that way.

I may have shown it to everybody.

In my head, I'd already spent it. I knew exactly which piece of equipment was coming home with me. I was already planning the next big job, and the one after that. If one check felt this good, imagine ten.

So I went to the bank. Walked right up. Handed it over with the confidence of a man who had earned it.

And a few days later, I found out.

It bounced.

Mother of all things that are sweet and pure.

My first big check. The one I'd shown to everybody. And it came back faster than it went in. Two days of my best work, and all I had to show for it was a piece of paper and a story.

To this day, I don't know if I ever got that money back.

But I got something out of it. That was my first lesson in business, and nobody had to charge me tuition for it.

I didn't stop.

I kept coming back. Not once or twice. For about a year and a half, I kept showing up at that shop and asking that man for a job. Every time he said no, I went home. And then I came back another day.

Think about what that looks like from his side of the counter.

There's the door. And there's that kid again. Same kid. Same question. Week after week. Month after month. Seasons changing outside the window, and that same kid still walking through his door asking the same thing.

At some point, a man has to make a decision about whether this is ever going to stop.

I'd like to think he admired my persistence.

More likely, he was just tired of seeing my face.

And then, one day, I walked in and asked again, the way I'd asked a hundred times before.

And he looked at me. And he sighed. And he said:

The locked bedroom doors that didn't stay locked. The moon crawler that didn't survive. The kid on the bike headed the wrong way. The eight-track with three careers. The bounced check. A year and a half of hearing no.

The constant wire is always live, and so is the man who won't quit.

But here's something every installer learns the hard way. A current that never shuts off will drain whatever you hook it to, if you hook it to the wrong thing.

The trick was never just having the current.

It was choosing what to connect it to.

It's a bay, a workbench, a pile of tools, and a car with its guts hanging out. It smells like carpet glue and hot solder. There are wire scraps on the floor and somebody's coffee going cold on a speaker box.

I thought it was the finest room on earth.

I worked there for many years. And then I went to work at the same company's other location.

That's where I met the basement.

The Basement

We worked downstairs, underground.

No windows. No daylight. You went down the stairs in the morning, and the next time you found out what the weather was doing was when you came back up at the end of the day. Rain, sun, snow, a parade going by out front, you'd never know. Down there it was always the same time of day, and that time was work.

And down there with me was a country guy.

He really kept to himself. Very friendly, but quiet.

I'd be bent over a door panel, and a song would come on about a man whose truck, dog, and wife had all left him in the same afternoon, and I'd think, all right, today's the day. Today I ask him to change it.

And then I'd look over at him, quiet as a church mouse, working away, perfectly content. That station was clearly the one thing in that basement that made him happy. Who was I to take it away?

So I didn't fight it. I just kept working.

And here's what nobody warns you about.

You hear something enough times, over and over, day after day, and something happens. It gets into you whether you invite it or not. First you stop minding it. Then you catch yourself humming along. You're running a wire under the carpet and your foot is tapping and you didn't tell it to.

Then one day you realize you know all the words, and you didn't even try to learn them.

I remember the moment I caught myself.

There's a lesson in there, too, and it took me a lot of years to see it. Sometimes the thing you'd never pick for yourself turns out to be the thing you needed. You don't always get to choose what you learn. You just have to be in the room long enough for it to get to you.

Every Shop in Town

After that location, I worked for a different company. Then another. Then another.

Over the years I worked at nearly every car audio shop in our area that was possible to work at. If there was a bay and a workbench and somebody who needed a man who could pull a dash apart, there's a fair chance I stood in it at some point.

People sometimes hear that and think I couldn't hold a job. That's not it. Every shop did things a little differently. Every owner had his own tricks, his own shortcuts, his own idea of what a clean install looked like.

The Alpine 1601

I was always into music. I wanted great sound everywhere, in the car, in the house, anywhere I happened to be standing. And now I spent all day putting great sound into other people's cars.

You can guess what that does to a young man.

Every day, I'd finish a customer's car, turn it on, and hear what it could do. And then at the end of the day I'd walk out to my own car and turn on my own radio and hear what it couldn't.

That's a special kind of torture.

So with the limited funds I had, my ambition was to build a real system in my own car. And I couldn't wait to get my hands on an Alpine 1601 cassette deck with the HLTAC tape head.

That was the bomb back then. Supposed to be the top of the line.

I'd look at that deck in the catalog the way other guys my age looked at a car they couldn't afford. I knew the model number by heart.

It cost serious money, and nobody in the shop had ever seen one, installed one, or heard one. Not the owner. Not the old hands. Not me. Nobody.

You have to understand what that meant back then. We knew cassettes. We knew radios. We knew every trick in the book for making a tape deck behave in a bouncing car. And here came something brand new, something none of us had ever laid a hand on, and it was going into a customer's car, and it was going in at our shop.

The box alone scared us.

Grown men, professionals, standing around a cardboard box like it might bite.

Nobody wanted to be the one to open it. Because whoever opened it was going to be the one who had to install it, and whoever installed it was going to be the one who explained to the customer what happened if it didn't work. Somebody finally cut the tape. Everybody leaned in.

And it got worse.

The head unit was only half of it.

Then checked them again, because when something costs that much money, you check it twice and then you check the check.

Hours went into that car.

We got it in.

Somebody turned the key. The display lit up. Nobody breathed.

We put in a disc.

The shop went quiet.

It wasn't the kind of quiet where something has gone wrong. It was the other kind. The kind where four or five men who have heard every speaker and every deck and every amp in the catalog all stop talking at once, because nothing they've heard before has prepared them for this.

No hiss. No tape noise. No wow and flutter. Just the music, clean, coming out of a car like it was being played in the room.

I had spent years chasing sound. That was the first time the sound turned around and caught me.

That day, I'll never forget it.

Probably three or four hundred dollars to replace, if anybody remembers that. Three or four hundred dollars, for a sticker. That's the kind of car it was. Even the decoration had a payment plan.

I loved that car.

And I spent every day making other people's cars sound incredible. You can see where this is going.

I went all in on that car.

All In

I started by tearing it apart.

I pulled the metal out of the rear deck. I pulled the metal out from behind the seats. A normal person would look at that and say, son, you're taking the car apart. I was. On purpose. Because the metal was in the way of what I wanted to put there.

I replaced it with prep board, so I could cut it, shape it, and mount whatever I wanted right where I wanted it.

Behind the seats went two 15-inch subwoofers.

Two of them. Fifteen inches each.

And I cut out the ashtray so the equalizer would mount flush.

Think about that one for a second. I took a perfectly good ashtray, a part of the car the factory put there on purpose, and I cut it out. Because the equalizer needed a home, and it needed to sit flush, and close enough was not good enough.

Every night, every spare hour, every spare dollar went into that car. Measuring. Cutting. Running wire. Mounting. Stepping back to look at it. Going back in.

It had a little of everything.

The Moment of Truth

Then the day came to hear it.

I'd been waiting for this the way a kid waits for Christmas morning. All those weeks. All that money. All that board and wire and steel I'd pulled out and put back different.

I sat down in the driver's seat. I turned the key.

Six woofers, three crossovers, an equalizer where my ashtray used to be, and a bird on the hood that was about to need a facelift. And all of it adding up to less than I'd hoped.

Live and learn.

More gear is not the same as better sound, and more work is not the same as the right work. I didn't know it yet, but that car was teaching me the first lesson of every install I'd ever do for the rest of my life: it's not what you put in, it's how you put it in.

That gold Trans Am taught me more by disappointing me than it ever could have by working.

The Cellular Years

While I was working in the shops, my first real business came along, and it came in a strange package.

People who needed to make a call from the road and were willing to pay serious money to do it. When they handed you their keys, they were handing you an expensive car and an expensive phone, and they expected both of them to come back looking like nothing had happened, except that now the car could make calls.

That's a different kind of pressure than putting speakers in a buddy's hatchback.

And I liked it.

The Specialist

On the side, car audio shops started calling me for specialized work.

This was the part that got my attention.

They didn't want to hire a full-time man just for that one kind of job. Why would they? Pay a man all week to do something that came in once in a while? No shop owner in his right mind wants that. So instead, they called the guy who could do it, and paid him for that job only.

Go to the customer. Do the job right. Get paid for the job. Let them call you back.

Hold on to that. It comes back around.

The ALC System

Before I ever opened a shop of my own, I invented an electronic device that solved a problem.

In most states, the law says that if your windshield wipers are on, your headlights have to be on too. Plenty of drivers forgot. So I went to the drawing board.

I got some enclosures. I got some triacs, which are basically specialized transistors, and some relays. And I built a system that did one simple thing: when you turned your wipers on, your headlights came on automatically. I called it the ALC system. Automatic Light Control.

Then I hermetically sealed it so nobody could get into it. Remember the kid who took apart every one of his siblings' toys? He grew up and built one that nobody could take apart.

So I pulled out.

I don't look back on it with regret. When something doesn't work out, I pick myself up off the ground, learn from it, and move on. I wouldn't trade that experience for the world. And I went on to better things.

Traffic Jams

Eventually I opened my own car audio shop.

Retail.

Yikes.

But I didn't know to say yikes yet. At the time, it felt like the dream. My own shop. My own name on the work. Everything I'd learned in every bay in the area, finally under one roof that belonged to me.

I built the showroom and everything.

I mean that. I didn't walk into a space somebody else had set up and hang a sign. I built that showroom. Walls, displays, the whole look of the place, the room a customer walked into and decided whether they trusted you with their car.

Everybody else wanted to be where the action was. I wanted to be where the action wasn't yet, because that's the only place you don't have to fight for it.

It took a lot of work, and I had a good time doing it. I won't pretend I didn't. There's a pride in unlocking your own front door in the morning that nothing else gives you.

But that location brought its own challenges. The same thing that made it special, being out where nobody else was, also meant it came with problems a busier spot wouldn't have had.

And the shop brought something I hadn't counted on.

The Retail Trap

Here's a lesson I'll give you for free, because I paid full price for it.

Retail makes you a slave to your own business.

I didn't see it coming. You never do.

You're at the shop. The door has to open, and you're the only one with the key.

Mother of all things that are sweet and pure. I'd spent years trying to get off somebody else's clock, and I'd gone and built myself a clock that never stopped.

The restaurant is the perfect example, and it's one of the hardest jobs there is. You show up every day and you have no control over what walks through that door. You might sit empty all day long, wiping down the same clean table for the fourth time. You might get slammed so hard you can't breathe. And a lot of it depends on nothing more than where your building happens to sit.

You don't own a business like that. It owns you. And it doesn't give you weekends off for good behavior.

New Every Time

And there's something else about retail, and it's the part that bothered me most.

Every time a shop called me for specialized work back in the cellular years, that's what it was. They knew me. They called me. I came. That was wholesale, and I hadn't even had a name for it.

Now, there's nothing wrong with retail. It may be some people's thing, and some folks are wonderful at it. It just wasn't mine.

I was proud of Traffic Jams, and I'm still proud of it. I built that place. I'd do it again just to say I did.

But somewhere in there I started looking at the door and realizing I was on the wrong side of it.

I needed a way out.

And it turned out the way out had been sitting on my plate the whole time, like icing nobody had bothered to eat.

And if you do get the job, you do it beautifully, and he drives away happy, there's a good chance you'll never see him again anyway. He bought one stereo. He's done.

A dealer is a different animal.

A dealer has a lot full of cars. Next week he'll have a lot full of different cars. And the week after that, more. He doesn't buy one stereo. He buys over and over, as long as you keep doing the job right and keep showing up.

While I had Traffic Jams, I got a good taste of it. And once I'd tasted it, walk-ins started to look a lot less appealing.

It's like eating the icing first. Once you've done that, the plain cake underneath is a little hard to get excited about.

Four Men Not Selling Cars

Here's why dealership work was so sweet.

A dealer back then had very little added to his vehicles from the factory.

Then, when the job was done, I'd call the dealership. And a while later, another car would pull up out front. Two more salesmen. Same shirts, same ties, different faces. One to drive the finished car back, and one to drive the other car back.

Sometimes they'd have to wait while I finished up. And they'd stand there in my showroom, jingling their keys, looking at their watches, looking at the speakers on the wall without really seeing them. You could tell their minds were back on that lot. Every one of them was thinking about the customer who might be walking around out there right now with nobody to talk to.

One day I was watching two of them do exactly that, and I did the math.

Two to drop it off. Two to pick it up.

That's four men off the lot. Four men not selling cars. For one simple install.

Mother of all things that are sweet and pure. You could field a barbershop quartet with the staff it took to get one cruise control installed.

Why not?

The dealers already liked the work we did. They already needed it. The only thing that made it painful for them was the trip. The drive over. The two men, then the two more men. The waiting.

So take the trip out.

Not as a side dish. As the whole meal. Instead of making the dealer come to me, I'd go to him. Load up the parts and the tools, drive to the lot, and do the work right there where the cars already were. No salesmen in my showroom. No jingling keys. Nobody off the lot but me.

And just like that, I'd be in the wholesale business. No more worrying about retail.

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The more it made sense, the more excited I got. And the more excited I got, the less I slept.

But I knew I couldn't do it alone. Not the way I wanted to do it.

There was one man I wanted with me.

He's the kind of man who thinks before he talks, which made him the opposite of me in a few useful ways.

And then he agreed.

I don't think I've ever been more relieved to hear one word in my life.

And that's where the history of API Signal began. API stands for Automotive Products and Installation. Automotive products, because that's what we put in. Installation, because that's what we did better than anybody. That same friend went on to become my right-hand man and my manager. We were car dealer expeditors.

The theory was simple. If we could do dealerships better than everybody else, then maybe we could take over the world. Remember the kid at Radio Shack who figured if you could manipulate electrons you could rule the world? Same kid. Bigger electrons.

At the very least, we could capture all the dealership business.

The first few times, I think the salesmen didn't quite know what to make of us. Here were two guys in the corner of their lot, pulling panels off a car that was supposed to be for sale. One or two would wander over and watch for a minute, hands in their pockets, the way people watch a man fix a sidewalk.

Then they'd see the car get done. Right there. No trip. Nobody gone from the lot.

That's when the light came on for them.

And for me too, honestly. I'd had the idea in my head for a long time by then. But there's a difference between an idea in your head and a car with its dash back together, sitting on the lot with the job finished and nobody having driven anywhere. The first one is a theory. The second one is a business.

And we put in everything. Keyless entry. Cruise control. Backup cameras. Power locks and windows. Security systems. Speakers and audio.

Back then a lot of cars didn't come with a lot of things. Remote entry wasn't even popular yet.

A Smile With a Missing Tooth

Some dealers had entire inventories with no radios in them at all.

I mean the whole lot. Rows of cars sitting there with a hole in the dash, looking like a smile with a missing tooth.

Picture walking down one of those rows. Car after car after car. You open the door of the first one. Hole. Open the next one. Hole. Every one of them sitting there quiet, waiting for somebody to give it a voice.

Most people would have looked at that and seen a lot of empty dashboards.

I saw one big job.

So we'd offer them a deal to outfit every last vehicle. Not one radio. Every car on the lot. Every missing tooth filled.

And that's the beauty of wholesale.

And then she looks at the one parked right next to it.

Same model. Different color. And that one has cruise control.

The one she loves doesn't.

Now the salesman has a problem. She doesn't want the other car. She wants this one. But she wants cruise control too, and she's starting to wonder out loud if maybe she should look somewhere else. Maybe another dealer has the right car with the right options. Maybe she should think about it. And every salesman on earth knows what "think about it" means. It means she's walking off the lot, and she's not coming back.

That used to be a lost sale, or a long wait, or a trip to a shop with four salesmen.

Not anymore.

Now the dealer just picked up the phone and called us.

"We've got a customer here. She wants cruise in this car. Can you do it?"

That's a different business, and it paid like one.

A gadget is worth what the gadget costs. A closed car deal is worth a whole lot more to the man who owns the lot. When you understand which one you're really selling, everything about the way you work changes.

Free

So I sold Traffic Jams.

That was my decision, and I'd be lying if I said it was nothing. I'd built that showroom. I'd put in the work. I'd had a good time there. A man doesn't hand over the keys to something like that without feeling it a little.

I remember the last time I looked around that showroom. The speakers on the wall. The counter where I'd stood waiting for the door to open. The spot where those salesmen used to stand jingling their keys, the ones who'd given me the idea that was now taking me out of there.

No more staring out the front window wondering if today would be the busy day or the empty day. No more seven days a week chained to a showroom.

Instead, the phone rang, and we went.

We'd do dealership expediting for about fifteen years or more, and it was mobile from day one. We went to the work. That habit would matter more than I knew.

We served businesses now, wholesale, and businesses called when they needed us. A dealer who liked what we did called us again. And again. And again. We weren't strangers trying to earn somebody's trust from scratch every single time. We were the guys who showed up, did it right, and left the car better than we found it. Trust built on trust.

That's the move I'd make again and again for the rest of my career, and I'd tell any installer reading this to think hard about it.

Retail had taught me plenty. It taught me to build something from nothing.

A business owner, sitting at his desk, knowing exactly where every truck in his fleet was, right now. Which driver was where. Which truck was closest to the next call. To me that wasn't the future. That was obvious.

It was the same feeling I had on the floor with that Snoopy motor. Here's something that works. Here's something that moves. Why isn't everybody looking at this?

Now, to be honest, I wasn't the salesman to sell it. I was the guy who could wire it. Put me under a dash and I'm home. Put me across a conference table from a man in a suit, and selling was another animal.

But my marketing guy? He was quite proficient. He could sell. He could walk into a room full of strangers and walk out with everybody liking him.

So the two of us set our sights high. Not some little outfit with two vans. One of the largest HVAC companies in our area. A big fleet. Trucks everywhere.

It wasn't a quick no at the door. It was a long conversation. The kind of conversation where you start doing the math in your head while the other guy is still talking.

And I was doing the math.

How many trucks. How many installs. How long it would take. How many days I'd be in their yard, truck after truck after truck. A job that size could carry us. A name that big could open every other door in town. If the biggest HVAC company around was running GPS, every smaller one would want to know why.

I remember thinking, this is it. We're about to be in the GPS business. Big fleet, big name, and we got in early. I was already picturing the installs.

I could practically feel the dash panels coming off in my hands.

We shook hands. We walked out to the parking lot feeling like a million bucks. I don't think either one of us stopped talking the whole drive back.

And then we waited.

The Gap

Here's something most people outside this trade never think about.

Aftermarket electronics had always lived in a gap.

The gap was the years between a new feature showing up in the world and the factory finally offering it themselves. A new gadget would come along. People would see it, and they'd want it in their car. But the car companies weren't putting it in yet. Not this year. Maybe not next year either.

Sometimes that gap was huge. For something like drop-down video screens, it could be about six years.

Six years.

Six years where, if you wanted the feature, somebody like API Signal had to put it in.

That gap was my whole living.

Every keyless entry we installed lived in that gap. Every cruise control.

And that gap kept shrinking.

Six years became less. Then less again. Year after year, the space between a new feature showing up and the factory offering it got a little narrower. Until the manufacturers could bring a feature to market almost the moment it appeared.

It's like standing on a sandbar while the tide comes in. You don't notice it at first. The water's just a little closer than it was. Then a little closer. And one day you look down and realize your feet are wet.

When the gap closes, the people who live in it have to find somewhere else to live.

I was about to find mine.

And if you've been paying attention, you might already have a guess where. Something I'd seen early. Something nobody wanted yet.

But first I want to stop the story and tell you what all those years had actually taught me. Because before I tell you about the road, you need to know what I was carrying when I got on it.

It came one vehicle at a time, one mistake at a time, with my head up under somebody's dashboard and a flashlight in my teeth.

Let me show you how it got laid.

The Joke

I'm flat on my back on a dealer lot, head up under a dashboard, when the salesman leans in the open door.

From where I'm lying, all I can see of him is a pair of shiny shoes and the bottom half of a necktie. The rest of him is somewhere up there in the sunshine, where people stand up straight and sell cars.

"So what is it you do, exactly? You an electrician?"

I've heard this one a hundred times. I've got my answer ready. I've had it ready for years. I don't even stop working to say it.

Smart man.

I go back to my wires. He goes back to selling cars. And I'm left there under the dash with the truth of it, the part the joke leaves out. Low voltage won't hurt me. But it's not me I'm worried about.

It's everything I'm about to touch.

The Kid in the Back Row

Nobody taught me any of this in school. Grammar school, middle school, high school, it was never a class anybody offered.

Which was fine, because school and I were never close friends anyway.

Picture me in math class. Desks in rows. Numbers on the board that might as well have been written in another language. And the clock on the wall.

I swear that clock ran backwards.

I'd watch the second hand go around. Then I'd look at the board.

The classroom was never where my learning lived.

There's a real certification now, the MECP, and it's worth having. But it teaches you the fundamentals, not the trade. It can tell you what a circuit is. It can't tell you what it feels like to have your arm buried to the shoulder in a dash, working blind, trying to find one wire by feel.

My right-hand man helped me when I first started. He'd been at it longer than me, and he showed me plenty. But most of the rest, I learned on my own.

Trial and error. The school of hard knocks.

And the tuition comes due the first time you burn something up.

The Shortcut

Here's how it happens. It's always the same.

You're up under a dash, deep in a job. You've been at it a while. Your back hurts. Your neck is bent at an angle the good Lord never intended.

The back of your neck gets warm. You lie very still under that dash and listen, like a man who just heard a noise downstairs at three in the morning. And you think, well. That wasn't nothing.

I'll say something most installers won't. If you've never blown anything up, you're probably not that great an installer.

I don't care how good you are. It's a numbers game. Do enough vehicles, and sooner or later, one of them gets you. And I've paid my share. Anybody who tells you he's done thousands of installs and never once fried a thing is either very new or very creative with the truth.

The great ones aren't the ones who never did it. They're the ones who did it, learned from it, and made it rare. That's experience. It doesn't come any other way.

And what I learned is simple. You don't pull things you don't know about.

It's not curiosity that gets a man.

But I still had to reach into it and find the one wire I needed.

And then there were the switches.

Mother of all things that are sweet and pure. The switches.

Some switches are built like a tank. And some are built like they were assembled by elves on a deadline, held together by good intentions and one tiny clip.

You pop the back off one, nice and careful. Slow. Gentle. You're handling it like a bird's egg.

And the springs and the little contacts come flying out of it like they've been waiting years to escape. Gone. Across the floor. Under the seat. Into some crack in the carpet no human hand will ever reach.

You hear one bounce. Just one little tick, somewhere off to the left. Then nothing.

Ay, Chihuahua.

Big rig, tall cab, the kind of truck you look up at. I need the turn-signal wiring. Should be simple. I pull out my phone and search.

Nothing.

I search again, different words.

Nothing.

Nothing. The internet has decided it never heard of this truck.

So I put the phone in my pocket and walk back to my own vehicle and pull out the old books.

I've kept a wiring library for years. Thousands of older vehicles. Paper. The kind of thing younger guys look at like I just pulled out a rotary phone. But I flip through, find the truck, find the page, and there it is, plain as day.

When the internet comes up empty, the old books still answer.

I walk back to that semi feeling about ten feet tall. Score one for the old man.

Someday another installer is going to open this vehicle and find my work. Maybe a year from now. Maybe ten.

He'll never meet me. He won't know my name. He'll just be a stranger with a screwdriver, looking at what I left behind.

What's he going to think?

I knew exactly what he'd think. Because I'd thought it myself, plenty of times, looking at other men's work.

I didn't want to be that man.

I unbuttoned it and did it right.

From then on, I installed as though someone was always standing behind me, about to judge. Because someone is. He just hasn't shown up yet.

Remember McDonald's? Same standard, watched or unwatched? I didn't know it at sixteen, flipping burgers, but that rule was going to follow me for the rest of my life.

That's where it went.

I can see the man who did it.

I've never met him. I've never heard his name. But I can see him, clear as if he were standing right there next to the vehicle.

Unmarked dirty car. No uniform. Doesn't take care of himself.

I'd bet money on it. Because the way a man does one thing is usually the way he does everything. If he doesn't care about how he shows up, he wouldn't care about anything else. And the proof is sitting right there in front of me, wrapped in tape.

So we always showed up the other way.

On time, when we said we'd be. Marked vehicles. Uniforms. Looking professional and speaking properly.

A customer sizes you up before you ever open a door. He sees your vehicle pull in. He sees what you're wearing. He hears how you talk. And before you've touched a single wire, he's already decided whether he trusts you.

The plugs were already there. Speakers dropped in. And a whole generation of installers never had to learn it.

That doesn't make them bad installers. They just never had to.

Then along came the 360 camera systems.

And suddenly everybody had to take the doors apart again.

Into the panels. Into the jambs.

The newer guys were scratching their heads. Looking at a door like it was a locked safe. Where does this go? How do I get through here? What's all this?

Me? I'd been in there a thousand times.

I felt like an old ballplayer called back off the bench. The old-school skill circled right back around, and I was already fluent in it.

I learned one thing in those doors the hard way.

Behind the panel there's a water barrier. It's not exciting. It doesn't light up. It doesn't make any sound. And it's in the way.

The Can of Worms

Here's a moment I've lived more times than I can count.

I open up a vehicle to do what I came to do, and there's somebody else's mess staring right at me.

Ugly. Wrong. The kind of thing that makes my eye twitch.

Everything in me wants to fix it. You have to understand, this is the same kid who couldn't leave his brother's moon crawler alone. A mess like that is practically calling my name.

My hand is already reaching.

And I stop.

I hold it right there in the air, an inch away. And I think it through.

Because I've learned what happens next. The second you touch it, their problem becomes your problem. You fix one wire, and the next day something else in that vehicle acts up, something that's been waiting to act up for years.

Fifty vehicles in the morning meant fifty harnesses that night, every one of them done before I pulled out of the driveway.

Picture it. Late evening. Harnesses laid out in rows, one after the other, like I was getting ready for an army. And in a way, I was.

Every address went into the navigation, so I'd never be sitting in a parking lot in the morning trying to figure out where I was going. Toolbox cleaned out. Every tool where it belonged. Every part loaded, so I'd never be walking back and forth to the truck in the heat of battle.

I even had a theory about my hands.

Any movement you don't have to make is time saved. Reaching for a tool that isn't where it should be. Walking to the truck for a part you forgot. Digging through a messy toolbox. Each one is only a second or two. Nothing, right?

Wrong.

Cut a few movements out of one vehicle, and it doesn't look like much.

Hands on the wheel. Looking at that empty lot. All that preparation, and the day had other plans.

But that's the job. You plan for everything, and sometimes everything still doesn't show up.

And you know what? I'd still prep the same way the next night. Because on the days it does all show up, the planning is the only reason it goes smooth.

You get back in the truck and drive to the next one.

Their Vehicle, My Name

Every so often, a customer wanted it done a way I knew was a bad idea.

He'd stand there by the vehicle and tell me exactly where he wanted it and how he wanted it. And I'd be standing there thinking, oh, no. No, no, no.

But I also know it's not my vehicle.

So I'd tell him. Tactfully. You learn early that how you say it matters as much as what you say.

And those standards are exactly what keep people coming back. People don't just want a guy who does what he's told. They want a guy who'll tell them the truth.

Snap

And yes, sometimes it was us.

I'd love to tell you we never broke a thing. I'd also love to tell you I was a millionaire by twenty-five.

You're working a panel loose. Careful. Easy. Feeling for the clips. You've done a thousand of these.

And you hear it.

A little snap.

Not loud. It doesn't have to be loud. Every installer knows that sound. It goes straight from your ears to your stomach. You freeze. You hold your breath. You hope, for one second, that maybe it was something else.

It wasn't something else.

And went home with nothing to show for it but a lesson and a clear conscience.

That's tuition too.

And I'd pay it again. A job you lose money on, you can make up next week. A customer who stops trusting you, you never get back.

The Last Guy

Then there's the phone call where it wasn't us at all.

The phone rings. It's the company that hired us. And they're not calling to say thanks.

What's the deal with this vehicle? Device hanging loose. Something's wrong.

So we don't argue on the phone. We go out there.

We're not perfect, and we don't pretend to be. Maybe it was us. We go find out.

So we open it up.

And there it is.

A harness stuffed somewhere it doesn't belong.

Hold On One Moment

I'll tell you something about myself. I don't like talking while I'm working.

It's not that I'm unfriendly. Anybody who knows me will tell you I'm not. It's that when I'm up under a dash, I'm somewhere else. I'm following one wire through a hundred others. I'm holding a picture of the whole circuit up there, and it doesn't take much to knock it loose.

So picture it.

I'm in the middle of a connection. Two wires in my hands. Right at the moment that matters.

And somebody walks up and starts telling me about his weekend.

Where he went. Who he saw. What the weather was like. He's a nice man. He's having a great time telling it. He has no idea he's standing next to a man trying to perform surgery on a car.

I don't look up.

Some of the best people I know, I met standing next to a vehicle I'd just finished.

You Own It

Sometimes it comes down to this.

You're in a vehicle, doing your job right. Taking your time. Doing everything the way you're supposed to.

And something lets go.

And when you dig into it, it was half-created by the last guy's bad work. The wire was already rubbing. The connection was already loose. It had been on its way out for months, maybe years.

You just happened to be the one holding the screwdriver when it finally gave up.

Doesn't matter.

I know. That doesn't sound fair. It isn't fair.

You can fight the customer. You can stand there and explain the whole history. You can prove it wasn't your fault, step by step, until he has no choice but to agree with you.

Rows of vehicles, lined up neat and plain, every one of them the same drab color, every one of them waiting on us. There's something about seeing fifty vehicles all at once that makes a number real. On paper, fifty is a number. In a lot, fifty is a lot.

And somewhere in the back of my head, a little voice said, well, you wanted this.

A guy from the representative company came out there with us. He made sure things went right, and he helped. I was grateful for him. When you're doing something for the very first time, there's nothing better than having a man standing next to you who has already done it a hundred times.

Back then, everything was hardwired. No plugging a device into a port and walking away. That came later. Back then you wired every single one of them into the vehicle.

And here's the funny part. When you hardwire a GPS unit, what does it need?

It needs a constant. It needs a ground. And it needs an ignition.

For years, we'd been doing dealership work. Good work. Steady work. But dealership work came with strings. We had to manage product. We had to carry inventory. We had to keep the dealer happy, keep the sales managers happy, worry about trim levels and what the factory was going to start putting in next year.

This job had none of that.

No managed product. No inventory sitting on shelves. No dealer to keep happy about trim levels. Just the work, and good money for doing it right.

I sat with that for a while.

I had already been toying with the idea of getting into GPS. Remember the HVAC company, years before? My marketing guy and I, all that excitement, and then nothing. Being early is a lot like being wrong, right up until it isn't.

Now it wasn't.

GPS was a real thing, and it was up and coming. I could see it as plain as I could see those fifty vehicles in that lot.

I'd type in a name and three more would show up. It was like pulling one wire out of a harness and finding it's connected to everything else in the truck.

We built a list. Probably a hundred names.

Well, actually, probably about fifty back then. Fifty sounds less heroic, but it's more honest. A hundred makes a better story. Fifty is what was on the paper.

And then I looked at that list.

Fifty companies. Fifty strangers. Fifty phone numbers that didn't know who I was and had no reason to care.

Some people would see that list and feel sick to their stomach.

I saw a list of doors.

We picked up the phone and started calling, and we said the same thing every time:

"Can you direct me to whoever is in charge of your installation partners?"

That was it. That was the whole pitch. Not "let me tell you about our company."

A lot of people never called back.

That's how it goes.

You call. You leave a message. You cross it off, or you put a little mark next to it that says try again next week. And next week you try again. And sometimes they answer, and sometimes you get the same voicemail greeting you heard last week, the same cheerful recording, and you leave the same message, a little friendlier than the last one.

But here's what we didn't expect.

Some of those companies were already out there looking for installers.

They were trying to do the same thing we were, from the other side. They had customers with vehicles all over the place, and they needed somebody they could trust to go put the devices in. They were out there hunting for people like us while we were out here hunting for people like them.

So when we reached the right person, they were glad to hear from us. More than glad, sometimes.

We called the GPS companies. We called the fleets. We called everybody. If they had vehicles and a phone number, they were fair game.

Some days the phone felt like it weighed fifty pounds. Some days nobody answered and nobody called back and I'd go to bed wondering if anybody out there was listening at all.

And then the next morning I'd get up and pick it up again.

People ask me what finally got them to say yes. They want a secret. A script. A magic line.

One word. Persistence.

That's it. That's the whole secret, and it's not a very exciting one. You keep calling until the calling works. You keep showing up until somebody opens the door.

Sound familiar?

A year and a half of hearing no at a car audio shop counter had trained me for exactly this. The kid who wouldn't stop walking into that shop was now a grown man who wouldn't stop dialing.

And then a yes.

We did job after job for all of them, especially Fleetmatics. And we went all over the place.

The phone that I'd spent six or seven months calling out on started ringing the other way.

That's a sound I'll never get tired of.

The Big Boys

While we were out there working, the whole industry was changing underneath us.

I didn't notice it at first. When you're under a dashboard all day, you don't pay much attention to what's going on in the boardrooms. But you start to see it. A company you've been working with gets a new name on its paperwork. A contact you used to call isn't there anymore. Things shift.

Here's what you need to understand. Every GPS or telematics device runs on a cellular contract. That little box under the dash is talking to a cell tower, the same way your phone does.

Why fight to get your drink into somebody else's restaurant when you can own the restaurant? That way they decided what came out of the fountain. No arguing. No negotiating. It's their fountain now.

Well, the GPS industry did the same thing.

If every device needs a cellular contract, and you're a company that sells cellular contracts, what's the smartest thing you can do? Stop fighting to get your network into somebody else's device. Buy the company that makes the device.

The big players bought up the smaller companies, and many of them now own their own GPS telematics companies.

Same fountain. Different drink.

And there I was, a guy with wire strippers, watching giants trade companies like baseball cards. I didn't own a fountain. I didn't own a restaurant. What I owned was the ability to show up and install whatever came out of that fountain, right, the first time.

No shop with doors that have to be open. No showroom. No counter. Just the road, and a job at the end of it.

Remember Traffic Jams? Remember what I said about retail making you a slave to your business? Here I was, the exact opposite. My shop had wheels. My shop went wherever the work was.

There's a lot of time to think on the road. Long stretches of highway with the radio on and the miles rolling by. By then I'd become a big country music fan, thanks to that quiet country guy in the basement all those years ago, and I'd crank it up and sing along like nobody could hear me. Because nobody could.

It paid well too, better than we'd ever made before. We didn't have to manage inventory. We didn't have to deal with all the other things that came with dealership work, which was fine, but it was part of that business. Now it was just me, the vehicle, and the job.

That was the whole equation.

Everything With Wheels

We worked on everything.

And I mean everything.

If it had wheels, or tracks, or a motor, or a reason for somebody to want to know where it was, we put something in it.

Huge cranes. Not a pickup truck with a lift on the back. Cranes. The kind you look up at. The kind where you stand at the bottom and think, well, somebody's got to get up there, and then you realize the somebody is you.

There's a moment when you're working on a machine that size where you feel very small. The tires are taller than you are. The steps are spaced for a man with longer legs than mine. And the wiring is wherever the people who built it decided it should be, which is never where you'd want it.

But a wire is a wire. Constant, ground, ignition. The crane doesn't care how big it is. It still needs the same three things as a little compact car.

The road starts climbing and twisting, and the towns get smaller and farther apart, and the trees close in on both sides. Your ears pop. Your phone signal comes and goes. And somewhere up there, at the end of all that, there's a fleet of vehicles waiting for a GPS.

Here's the irony. I was driving up into places where my own phone could barely find a signal, to install devices whose whole job was to find a signal.

Then there was the job I still smile about.

One company had us put reverse sounders on a whole fleet.

If you don't know what a reverse sounder is, you've heard one. Every time a truck backs up and you hear that beep, beep, beep, that's a reverse sounder. It's the most annoying sound in the world until it keeps you from getting run over, and then it's the most beautiful.

Each one took about twenty or thirty minutes apiece.

How I don't like being talked to while I'm working, how I put my hand up and say, hold on one moment, please. And how, once the job is done, I love to stand there and talk with people for twenty or thirty minutes.

On the road, those twenty minutes turned into something I never saw coming.

I'd finish a job and get to talking with the manager, or the owner. And I'd start asking questions. I can't help it. It's the same kid in the store aisle with his hand on the display. What do you make here? How do you make it? What does that machine do? Where does that line go?

And once they saw how excited I got about what they did, they'd say, "Hey, you want to come look at the plant?"

Of course I said yes. Every time.

I think a lot of those folks didn't get asked about their work very often. People drive past a plant every day and never think about what's going on inside it.

Water. Cold. Done.

Simple process. Freeze some water, put it in a bag, send it out the door. I was already thinking it'd be a five minute tour, a quick look, a handshake, and back on the road.

The owner opened the door and walked me in.

It turned out to be huge.

The cold hit me first. Then the noise. Then the size of the thing. There were machines in there the size of houses, all working away, all to make something that melts if you look at it too long.

I stood there with my mouth open like that kid in front of his friend's car with the Jensen 6x9s.

All of that. For ice.

I walked out of there with a whole new respect for the bag of ice at the gas station. I've never looked at one the same way since. Every time I see that freezer out front, I think about those machines.

That's the kid at the store display again, the one who had to know what was inside.

And you open the door to your room and the whole wall is ocean.

The beach in winter is a different place. It's quiet. The wind comes in cold off the water. The sand is empty, except for maybe somebody walking a dog way off in the distance. The waves keep coming in anyway, same as they do in summer, whether anybody's watching or not.

I was watching.

It was a mix of vacation and work. A very interesting way to live.

Somewhere out there, a man was sitting in a cubicle under fluorescent lights.

I was watching the waves with wire strippers in my pocket.

And in the morning, I'd get up, look at the ocean one more time, load up, and go do it all again.

I was in seventh heaven.

Every Single Day

I'll be happy all day.

That was never the problem.

I wouldn't even call it burned out. Burned out is when you hate it. I didn't hate it. I just had so much on my plate, because I was doing everything. I was stressed because I didn't have enough energy left. I was wearing myself out, and at the time, I didn't even realize it.

That's the sneaky part.

When you love the work, you don't notice what it's costing you. You just keep going. You tell yourself tomorrow will be lighter. Tomorrow is never lighter.

Here's what it looked like.

I'd install all day. Up early, drive, install, install, install, drive. Then I'd get back to the hotel, and I wasn't done. Not even close. Because the paperwork doesn't do itself. The billing doesn't do itself.

So there I'd be.

Eight o'clock at night.

I had a man in a vehicle, working every day, with nobody behind him.

The Next Key

So here's where I'll leave you.

For years, I thought doing the work right was the whole game. Show up on time. Take your time. Install it like somebody's always right behind you, about to judge. Do that, and everything else takes care of itself.

And doing the work right matters. It matters more than almost anything. Every page of this book is built on it.

But here's the thing they don't tell you when you're a kid with a project kit and a dream of being a millionaire by twenty-five.

Doing the work right doesn't pay the bills by itself.

It just doesn't.