Have A Plan

The Inventive Journey 
Episode #343
Have A Plan
w/ Kirk Allgeyer 

"Have a good plan. Because I pulled a little bit of a TF2, if people know that video game, where one of the characters asks a support, are you sure this will work and the support replies I have no idea. I just had the idea and then just punched through it really. I just kept punching through it until things started to mold together. If you can sit down and give yourself some time in the day to give yourself a couple hours to look up business establishment. Understanding your company mission, your company values, your mantra, developing an early press kit. Something you could provide to potential investors or employees to show you have a business plan. I'm convinced I could work for you comfortably because your a man with a plan, and I can contribute my plans to that as well."

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What Is The Inventive Journey?

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated transcription

have a good plan because yeah no i pulled a little bit of like you know a tf2 if people know that video game like where you know one of the characters is acting asking like a support like are you sure this will work and then the the support replies i have no idea like i just kind of had the idea and then i just like punched through it really just kind of kept punching forward until you know things started to really mold together if you can like actually sit down and give yourself some time in a day to take a couple hours to look up like business establishment understanding like your company mission your company values your mantra and developing sort of like an early press kit something that you could provide to potential investors or employees to show like hey you do have a business plan you know maybe you got a head you know screwed on straight on your shoulders and i'm convinced that i can work for you comfortably because you're a man with the plan and you know i can contribute my plans to that as well [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devon miller the serial entrepreneur has grown several startups into seven or seven and eight figure businesses as well as the founder and ceo of miller iplock where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com grab some time to chat and we're always here to help now today our we have another great guest kirk allgeier and uh kirk was in his own words was a bit of uh found high school to be a bit of a weird time um because uh he did i think he did homeschool for a period of time which is our part of the time that he's in high school did home school part of the time we did it in public school um college um didn't quite know what he wanted to do so studied a bit in networks and applied science i believe to do a software um and then uh still was a big i had a hard time figuring out exactly what he wanted to do in college or what he want to do after college i guess and so i found that he enjoyed uh playing video games at the time switched degrees to allow him to work on game development focusing on software and game development found his their passion and drive there and decided he wanted to go work for himself so i started to try and figure out what the or how to make that bit or find a business and a passion and uh started to do that doing what he does today and building a team starting the business getting the marketing sales along with their product and going from there so with that much as an introduction and hopefully mostly accurate welcome on the podcast kirk hey devon thanks for having me and absolutely pretty much got the summary down you know traditional education just didn't seem to be the way so i finished what i had to and then you know i'm on the venture to make things happen for myself all right well uh before we jump to the end of the the end of the journey let's start a bit of the beginning so tell us how things kind of got started in in high school for you sure so like you said my education history was a bit of a roller coaster between uh public school and homeschool i was in a program called k-12 online they may still be around i'm not sure it's been a few years but i started uh my early high school like 8th through 10th grade through there and then you know switched over to public high school at dutch fork high for those who know that uh for 11th through 12th grade and it was a bit of an unusual time you know i was a bit standoffish uh more so then because of my background you know not being around people all day and having a lot of time to yourself to just do you and like make sure your tasks are done in the checklist like a lot more straightforward than having you know a structured schedule of classes and walking around the classrooms and you know maybe hanging out with a couple of people that you don't really know day to day all right no it makes sense and so you know and i think no matter what your high school experience for 95 percent of people it's always going to be a bit of awkward or an interesting time of life and everybody comes out with a different experience and so you're saying okay went through and did partial homeschooling did partial you know public schooling i'm still trying to figure out kind of where you know what your place is in the world so to speak or what you want to do as you can or enter the working world or finishing up education so you went off to college and i think you uh started out um with the um the your first or initial degree which was uh i think it was networks and applied science is that right pretty close it was networking in cyber security which was an associates in applied science so i was close i give myself at least a b plus for getting it close yeah yeah i'd give you 85 so you say okay you start out in that degree and you're and you're working through that and if i remember kind of our conversation correct me i'm really not putting words in your mouth but that what just wasn't quite jiving with what you're wanting to do or wasn't quite what you enjoyed or passionate about and wasn't quite what it excited you is that right it did excite me on the onset to give the tl uh it was a choice i had between that or robotics and my parents at the time were like son if you go into robotics you're going to be working on the factory lines for some big company you ain't going to do nothing exciting so reluctantly i took the networking cyber security version but it opened the door to understanding like computers as a whole for me just you know how technology actually works and you know what people do to make it do the things it does so that kind of intrigue was where it all started and then later on after the program there when i went to my uh to midlands tech for my associates in the field i realized that it's gonna be like the rest of my career what i was doing there and most of what i was doing was like network configurations just setting up equipment that basically makes devices like our phones or computers like talk to each other you know telling them how to do that and then telling them what information needs to go where and that coupled with the other work like uh troubleshooting or maybe like you know packet observation or traffic observation with packet sniffers for networks i realized that this is probably gonna be what i'm gonna be doing from nine to five and then i asked myself is this really what i want to do with myself and that question you know the answer was no and that's when i decided to make the pivot to pursue my bachelor's degree in software development because that was the closest thing that i could get related to game development oh that makes sense since they're saying hey what is you know i don't know if the advice was correct on robotics it's probably a bit different today but at least that was a perspective tainted your view on it decided to go the different directions started out interesting said okay do i really want to do this when i grow up so to speak or when i graduate and go into the working field and said okay and i don't know i still feel like sometimes i'm still figuring out what i want to do when i grow up um but you know so you enter into you said okay we'll switch majors um we'll kind of go in a different direction and as you're switching that you know one question i had was you know was it kind of one of those where you just all of a sudden one day says okay this is where i'm gonna this is what i what i enjoy and i'm gonna switch or kind of how did you make that decision or transition that you're going to to change the focus on what you're going to do i mean you pretty much hit the nail on the head there the one major reason for the switch was my personal satisfaction as a career choice because yes cyber security and networking for those who work in the field who might be listening to this now know that it makes stupid amounts of money and it does afford you certain clearances or benefits that other jobs might not have that could lead to additional funds and that sort of you know uh looming spirit of it i guess follows me around and some you know underhanded comments that i get whenever i see you know family members commenting on some kind of big security breach on the news saying that could have been you son you know you could have been up there making the big bucks making the headlines and yeah it's it's a little irksome but i've kind of gotten over it now because i know i'm doing what i want to do with software development and game development and running my own company and i don't really have regrets for switching you know i think that there is a lot of things that hit on there and one of the big ones is you know there is a difference or trade-off just because you can do the field that is the or you know the job that may be the most profitable or maybe the you know notorieter people know about you or anything of that nature doesn't always drive the passion now you know if you're poor and you know don't have any money and you're eating by that also it's hard to be uh you know happy you'll be able to of subs or subsist and so you're always looking to find that the balance to where you can find something that you enjoy you're passionate about it it provides a you know good lifestyle for what you're looking for and if you can find that then it definitely makes it you know an enjoyable um you know path along the way so now as you said okay gonna make that switch find out you know where that balance is gonna get the degree that it facilitates that i'm also going to start to look to build my own company how did you kind of get into did you start building the company or the business while you were still in school did you wait till you graduate is this you know where is it at today kind of how did you make or how did you make that leap so it all started with how most things start just an idea i thought about what i would want to you know name the business i'm not sure i usually try to structure things with a name before i go into the details about it it could be a flaw in my design approach but it's how i do things so i wanted to like theme it off of the core values that i'd wanted to have so i started just like spitballing some names to see if i could get the ball rolling with that and i settled on uh imagine nexus because i wanted it to be kind of like a central next generation sort of game development company that really focused on creativity the reliability of delivering those you know creative experiences and giving like access to people like in a community that revolves around that and that's kind of where it started it all started with that kind of idea that kind of end goal and from there i couldn't do much in between the job that i was holding still holding it now for the time and my college work so i ended up doing the best that i could to try and collect information and do more studies outside of my school so i'd usually find myself on google like looking up youtube videos on how to use like the unity game engine because i was most familiar with c sharp as a programming language and that's what unity primarily uses so i found it to be a slightly easier transition than the other engines on the market and now if you're doing that kind of give us you know give us and definitely insightful so give us an idea where where's the business at today if you've launched it have you provided services are you still bringing in clientele hiring people out doing it as a solo guy or kind of where is that along the journey as far as where you're at today it to be honest it did start as the idea of a joint venture i had a friend of mine who was interested in the idea of you know being at the top and running your own company we did have some heart-to-heart discussion about it as of late and that venture never really went in that direction so as of now it's an independent venture uh run and managed by me uh i don't have the front-facing assets prepared quite yet in the pursuit of getting this to work i've been focusing more on the product which is a prototype trading card game that i've been working on and building it from the materials that i had collected throughout my bachelor's so being that i'm the only person of the business so far i've had to manage the disciplines involved to every discipline involved in the process both in the business ownership management and the game development side and focus on one at a time because i'm only one person i have done some minor contracting for uh graphic designers or logo artists to help get my branding up and i'm collaborating with a couple right now in order to get some finalized versions of a company logo that i can use for some front-facing assets like websites a youtube channel maybe a twitch podcast that sort of thing and uh yeah just trying to move forward from there and now that i've got the prototype version of my trading card game up and out i'm making changes to that as i go but i'm trying to redirect my efforts towards building you know a company website to get some of that forward-facing and some blogs that i can use to showcase my projects and what i plan for them possible definitely sounds like a lot of things in the work a lot of opportunity and a promising future so with that as that kind of brings things a bit to where things are at today and even maybe a little bit looking into where you're headed um great time to transition to the the two questions i always ask at the end of each episode so we'll jump to those now so the first question i always ask is along your um along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what'd you learn from it that's a pretty good one i have made a couple of questionable decisions um i suppose the worst decision that i've made to date was assuming that i could do everything myself because i probably share this mentality with some of our listeners or maybe some other people out there doing their own thing but i get very tenuous when it comes to sharing my creative vision and i like to collaborate with people who can also see it or also understand it i'm all for promoting creativity like at the individual level but in the same vein i would like mine to be respected equally as much so i don't i'm a bit apprehensive to change or pivoting but through some business uh management and ownership and gaming development courses that i've taken uh i've been able to gain more knowledge and you know really do some introspection on myself and why i held that belief and i'm a bit more open to the idea of changes or pivots like you know on the fly for products for the greater good of seeing the vision through no definitely they're definitely you know i think that that is one of the hard things is for most entrepreneurs and i certainly would love myself in there is you know first of all realizing you can't do it all or and or coming to grips even if you could do it all you don't have time to do it all and you don't have the skill sets and it's not getting it done and it's going to limit the business but then to finding our not only having that realization but then actually starting to release the grip on the business so to speak and allow other people to come in and do other aspects of it and giving them the trust and turning those over is a hard thing that i think you always have to go through and it's one of those experiences until you go through it just figure it out as one where you're just having to uh you know to to go through those growth or growth pains question i always ask is if you're talking to somebody that's just getting to a startup or small business would be the one piece of advice you'd give them i could give them one piece of practical advice have a good plan because yeah no i pulled a little bit of like you know a tf2 if people know that video game like where you know one of the characters is acting asking like a support like are you sure this will work and then the the support replies i have no idea like i just kind of had the idea and then i just like punched through it really just kind of kept punching forward until you know things started to really mold together if you can like actually sit down and give yourself some time in a day to take a couple hours to look up like business establishment understanding like your company mission your company values your mantra and developing sort of like an early press kit something that you could provide to potential investors or employees to show like hey you do have a business plan you know maybe you got a head you know screwed on straight on your shoulders and i'm convinced that i can work for you comfortably because you're a man with the plan and you know i can contribute my plans to that as well so yeah tldr just sit down write things out make sure that they're really what you want and what your vision is going to be and then get used to sharing that with other communities and other networks find yourself people who are in the same vein and don't be afraid of rejection because that's just going to hold you back know that you're not everybody's person and you're not going to please everyone and that's okay just keep moving forward definitely i think it's some great words of advice and definitely things to keep in mind as your people starting and then doing a small business or startup well as we wrap up the podcast the people we want to reach out to you they're you know for game app development for any other themes whether it's to be a customer to be a client to be an employee to be an investor to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you contact your find out more uh sure so you can find me on uh twitter at captainkirk underscore030 and you can also find me as kirk the dude on instagram to reach out and if you want to check out some of my portfolio work i've got a github page at kda coding and my linkedin page uh my name is kirk algar so you can search me up over there i'm an early software developer with some web development experience on the front end and some back end experience with c sharp php and other database structured languages like sql and mysql so yeah if you need somebody to make a cool website or handle some database management or just you know simple structure and reorganization of applications i might be your guy all right sounds like there sounds great and i definitely encourage people to reach out make connections and uh and take advantage of some great uh talent and then and uh some good knowledge so with that thank you again for coming on the podcast it's been a fun it's been a pleasure now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own journey to tell and you'd like to be a guest on the podcast we'd love to have you just go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the show a couple more things as listener make sure to click subscribe share leave a review because we want to make sure that everyone finds out about all these awesome episodes and last but not least if you ever need help with your patents your trademarks or anything else with your business feel free to go to and strategymeeting.com grab some time with us to chat we're always here to help well thank you again kirk for coming on the podcast and with the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks for having me devon

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