My name is Rob Northrup.

 As a small boy, I loved to go with my Dad to the airport where he worked for Emory Air Freight, and I always loved to see factories and how things are made. 

I grew up in a small suburb of Minneapolis and have held numerous jobs since I was 10… starting with my first local paper route—the Post.  Then I graduated to the Mpls Star-Tribune and at one time I had up to 130 Sunday papers to deliver on foot (and it is cold at 5am on a Minnesota morning in January). 

 At 13, I moved up to a job as a delivery boy for Hoglund’s Flowers…

I worked there most days after school for a few hours and then a full day almost every Saturday.  I did this for a couple of years and I used the earnings to pay for a school trip with my German Club to travel all over Germany the summer before High School.

In High School, I took a job at a local supermarket as a bagger and I worked 20-25 hours a week. (I also played football every year and was the starting Center my Junior and Senior years on a woeful Robbinsdale Robins football team.  Yes, the Robin is a ferocious bird!).  

During the summers during my High School years, I had an assortment of jobs…

 …corn detasseller (grueling farm labor),

…unloading 100# bags of potatoes from train cars onto grocery store semi-trucks,

…night janitor in office buildings (only job I was ever fired from),

…injection molding factory worker.

 By the time I graduated from High School, I had already worked in 14 different jobs already (that I can remember). 

I was accepted to Georgia Tech to study Engineering and earned a small scholarship and the promise of a library job to earn a little bit of money for college.  I had to pay for my own college and I wasn’t interested in borrowing $100k to get a degree…

The summer before college, I worked 80+ hours a week all summer in mainly as a Pinkerton’s Security Guard patrolling factories and construction sites.  One of the construction sites I “guarded” was the Metrodome while it was being built. 

I have been in a lot of different types of businesses and I LOVE seeing a business make money and create things.  Math and Science were my passions in school, along with Humanities and Literature.

I have an Electrical Engineering degree from Georgia Tech.  I was a co-op throughout college which means I went to school a quarter and then worked a quarter at IBM.   I moved back and forth from Atlanta to NC every thirteen weeks a total of ten times and then I graduated and went to work with IBM in the area of Robotics and Control Systems.  I wrote a lot of software and got to work on some really cool projects, but my wife and I wanted to get back to Atlanta and I wanted to be part of a smaller business.

I left IBM and went to work as an software engineer at a small privately-help company in Atlanta which made plastics processing machinery.  The owner of the company was a solo entrepreneur who had built the whole thing himself starting when he was about 40 years old.  Within two years, I was being pulled into sales situations about half the time because I knew the product so well I could answer any of the customer’s questions and it really helped make the sales. 

Before long, I was hooked on sales and we grew the company rapidly.  Just before I left, I was responsible for about 35 people in Inside Sales, Outside Sales, and our Technical Customer Service, but I was tired of answering the same questions over and over.  I wanted to find new questions to answer…

I wanted my own business, and decided to start my own Sales Agency with one of my colleagues.  We found six manufacturers of machinery that gave us contracts to sell their machines.  We make 100% of our income from commissions. We pay our own travel and overhead, and we make money only when we are able to sell a machine to a customer in our territory.

We have made a great business from this and we are recognized experts in our field.   I love face-to-face helping these plastics companies to improve their operations.  This is my full-time “core business” which gets the lion’s share of my time and energy. 

But I also wanted to build a second business to generate additional income, and to help business owners at the same time…

I love small businesses… (cue the patriotic music)

I work with small business owners every day and I believe that small business is the engine of our global economy.  The future of the world depends on the small business person and I want to do everything I can to help them to prosper and thrive.

So, last year, I wrote a System called Corporate Veil Pro (being renamed to CYA*: Cover Your Corporate Assets as we speak) that teaches small business owners how to do all the insane paperwork that is required to have a “real” corporation that actually does what it is designed to do and protects the owners assets. 

I am looking to build this business with several more related products and to roll-out the CYA System to the 95% of small businesses who are completely unprepared for a lawsuit or IRS audit.  I have incorporated a second publishing business to market these business- and asset protection-related guides.

This blog is devoted to helping small business owners and entrepreneurial-minded people to understand the various complexities that they are up against… I hope you will return again as I cover these topics.

Rob