An Amazing Ride... It�s Been a Pleasure

An Amazing Ride... It’s Been a Pleasure

A little over 9 years ago I was working for a large telco as a network engineer and I got the bug to start my own business. In college I had worked as a painter for a man at my church and he taught me well and I picked it up quickly. I decided I’d take this desire to start my own business and the skills I had learned as a painter and start my first company. The only problem was... how do I run a painting business? I had more questions than answers and being from a technical background I immediately started to look online for knowledge. It wasn’t long before I found a site called Painters Chatroom and it amazed me. I had never been apart of a forum before but I learned so much in such a short amount of time that I started to look around for other forums. I found landscaping forums and other trades and quickly noticed that 50% of the knowledge (sales, marketing, business, etc.. ) was all the same. That gave me the idea to start ContractorTalk.com and bring the trades together. One location where we could break down trade specific discussions while all sharing more general knowledge.

A few months later we started to notice a trend. More and more homeowners where finding our site and asking DIY questions. That wasn’t the intention for Contractor Talk but I didn’t want to turn them away and some pros were wanting to help out so we created a special site just for them called www.DIYChatroom.com. I had no idea what it would grow into... and it’s been an amazing and fun ride.

As fun as it was, over the years the sites started to take up more and more of my time and exceed my technical abilities. I felt like I wasn’t doing a good enough job on my own and was a little tired of being on call day and night. In order to keep growing the sites into the resource I wanted them to be and not get burnt out in the process I realized I needed help. Because of this, in January of 2010 I merged my company with Escalate Media. We still operate independently as “The Building Network” but they have taken over all the back end work that I’m not good at. That has allowed me to just focus on administration which is something I’ve always enjoyed and the sites have continued to grow.

I still love these sites and having had the opportunity to be apart of them has been a great honor for me. That being said, a little while ago I realized that I was ready to do something else. The world has changed a lot over the past 9 years and so has my life. With that in mind I started to hand over a lot of my administration tasks (password resets, username changes, email inquiries) a few months ago to another great admin at Escalate Media. The process has been going smoothly and I think I’m ready for the next step which is to step down as admin of DIYChatroom.com and it’s many sister sites. I’ll still be around but I’ve given up ownership in the sites and I’m going to step aside and let someone else take the reigns.

So, what does that mean for the members of DIYChatroom.com? Nothing really. The site will continue to operate as it always has and I’ll make sure that is the case. The Building Network will live on and continue to be the place where homeowners can get friendly advice. The reality is that I have been less and less involved in the sites over the past few years anyways so me leaving will have little to no impact. I just wanted to let everyone know what was going on and why.

I want to thank everyone who made this site possible over the years. The members of this site have always been great and most of all the Moderators are what make this site possible. They are the backbone of this site and a few of them have been with me since the beginning. Thank You for all your help. It’s been an honor working with you.