For those who don't know me (or my story), I'm gearing up a Home Automation integrations business in central California. I'm a long time IT guy by trade. Started with PC & printer repairs in the late 80's, then started with networking shortly after. Did lots of cabling back in the Coax Ethernet & IBM Token Ring days and have kept up to speed since with fiber and the ever evolving twisted-pair Ethernet.
Sometime by the mid-90's I'd worked through Netware and MSCE training and found myself employed in the manufacturing world where I've been ever since. Over the years I've managed various size IT groups and have worked for manufacturing companies that tend to do lots of acquisitions and have global locations. While this has been hugely challenging and a bunch of fun, I'm finding myself getting burned out after all those years of being on-call 24x7 and attending conference calls in the middle of the night due to working in different time zones.
My current employer (Agility) was acquired by JDSU last fall. They'll be shutting down our existing locations, and my unwillingness to re-locate means the end of my employment in March. Santa Barbara's a relatively small place, so IT management jobs don't come around everyday... with this in mind, I've decided to take a leap of faith and break from IT altogether and start Santa Barbara Smarthomes!
I've been involved with home automation for nearly 10yrs now. My first exposure to HA came while trying to figure out how to assist a quadriplegic colleague with some of his day-to-day activities. I found X10 and after setting up some basic lighting automation for him, thought I might give it a try at my place too! In 2000 I came across HomeSeer and that's what really started my passion for all things HA.
At this point I've got a couple more months of gainful employment and will be in the financial position to allow pursuing my own business. I've been working slowly at this for more than 6 months, but still have lots of responsibility and long hours at the day job which will keep me from really diving in until April. I've been working contacts with local architects, builders, and contractors and have given a number of HA tours at my house. Because of CA requirements, I won't be licensed to do high or low voltage wiring and have already made arrangements to sub this work out. I've done a few small simple installs and have started doing sales of Russound gear to a few on the message boards I frequent.
This weekend was spent nailing down a new web site to replace what was previously a personal HA page. It was fine for that, but made a poor statement for the business!
If you're interested, please take a look and provide comment... I only had time to do photography and get the home page and contacts page finished. Additional pages will be added to detail products and services soon.
www.sbsmarthomes.com
Cheers,
Paul
Sometime by the mid-90's I'd worked through Netware and MSCE training and found myself employed in the manufacturing world where I've been ever since. Over the years I've managed various size IT groups and have worked for manufacturing companies that tend to do lots of acquisitions and have global locations. While this has been hugely challenging and a bunch of fun, I'm finding myself getting burned out after all those years of being on-call 24x7 and attending conference calls in the middle of the night due to working in different time zones.
My current employer (Agility) was acquired by JDSU last fall. They'll be shutting down our existing locations, and my unwillingness to re-locate means the end of my employment in March. Santa Barbara's a relatively small place, so IT management jobs don't come around everyday... with this in mind, I've decided to take a leap of faith and break from IT altogether and start Santa Barbara Smarthomes!
I've been involved with home automation for nearly 10yrs now. My first exposure to HA came while trying to figure out how to assist a quadriplegic colleague with some of his day-to-day activities. I found X10 and after setting up some basic lighting automation for him, thought I might give it a try at my place too! In 2000 I came across HomeSeer and that's what really started my passion for all things HA.
At this point I've got a couple more months of gainful employment and will be in the financial position to allow pursuing my own business. I've been working slowly at this for more than 6 months, but still have lots of responsibility and long hours at the day job which will keep me from really diving in until April. I've been working contacts with local architects, builders, and contractors and have given a number of HA tours at my house. Because of CA requirements, I won't be licensed to do high or low voltage wiring and have already made arrangements to sub this work out. I've done a few small simple installs and have started doing sales of Russound gear to a few on the message boards I frequent.
This weekend was spent nailing down a new web site to replace what was previously a personal HA page. It was fine for that, but made a poor statement for the business!
If you're interested, please take a look and provide comment... I only had time to do photography and get the home page and contacts page finished. Additional pages will be added to detail products and services soon.
www.sbsmarthomes.com
Cheers,
Paul
