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Rob McNealy
Rob McNealy is an Entrepreneur and networking professional. At the time of his interview with me on December 19th 2009, Rob has three businesses including a social media marketing company. One business is full-time that he is in the process of selling, another is full-time that he is starting up, and the third is a part-time business. Rob is also a husband and father. If this wasn’t enough, Rob announced two weeks before the interview that he is also running for office as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, which according to him is “the most enormous, gargantuan marketing project I have ever undertaken”.
As can be imagined, Rob is a very busy man, but he knows the value of networking as the lifeblood of his businesses and public life. Rob is very active on Twitter, at last count having over 164,000 followers as of February 2nd 2010. Rob has taught classes on “Using Twitter for Influence and Profit” and with the launch of his congressional campaign, has the first campaign launch ever to be done via Twitter.
Rob was born in 1972, grew up lower/middle class in Metro-Detroit Michigan. His father was a high school teacher in Detroit’s inner city. His mother was a shipping clerk in a factory. Rob has kind of been working his entire life, starting at age twelve running paper routes. Instead of doing the typical sport kind of thing in high school, he worked because his parents never gave him any money since they didn’t have any money.
To Rob’s way of thinking, at that age, sports were sort of a waste of time. He would rather just work and kind of pull his own way. Rob would say in many ways that he was emancipated at a young age. Very self-sufficient from the time of about fifteen or sixteen, he didn’t rely on family very much.
Rob worked his way through his undergraduate degree – First starting at a community college and then going to Central Michigan University for his undergraduate degree. He studied geography, specifically ledgers, planning, environmental analysis and graphic information systems and then he minored in marketing. The marketing teachers and the science teachers couldn’t figure out what the heck he wanted to do and then when Rob started taking maps and applying mapping technologies to solving business problems, they kind of went, “Oh, I get this.”
Rob finished his last semester of undergrad in Ireland at St. Patrick College in Maynooth in 1997. He enjoyed it immensely and then kind of wandered around the corporate world in a few industries – automotive, aviation, and environmental. Everything kind of spanned around project management and technology. That was kind of the threads that went through his early career in the corporate world and then he moved into sales.
During that whole time, Rob was always an entrepreneur on the side. He was always doing consulting or trying to come up with a great “Get Rich Quick” scheme that never materialized, but he learned a lot.
Rob got married in 2000 when his wife Kristie graduated from her undergraduate degree. They moved out to Utah for a year while she was applying to medical school. After meeting disappointment with acceptance into the University of Utah, Kristie got accepted into the University of Colorado, so they moved again to Colorado. Kristie started medical school at University of Colorado and Rob started business school at night at Colorado State University doing his MBA.
Things seldom go exactly according to plan. Rob had been working for a technology company in Utah during the dot-com boom. The company was based in Denver and Rob was hoping to transfer to the Denver office. It seemed to be a great fit, but things changed with 9/11 and the dot-com bust and Rob was laid off a month or two before moving to Colorado. Rob struggled to find a job after that whole tumultuous period.
Eventually Rob got an internship making about a third of what he was making in Utah. He did that for a couple of years, graduated with his MBA, but wasn’t really happy with what he was doing in the corporate world. They were going through some financial troubles at the time and his wife was getting stressed out, they just had a baby, didn’t want to put the baby in day care, and so Rob became an entrepreneur at that point and a stay-at-home dad while Kristie finished medical school. Next came baby number two, right around Kristie’s last year in medical school. The baby was a 9-week preemie.
She ended up having to be in the ICU for several months and on oxygen for almost a year, so Kristie graduated from medical school but then did not do a residency because she became a stay-at-home mom caring for their chronically ill child at the time.
The original plan was that after Kristie graduated, Rob was going to go back to the corporate world, but his company had actually been doing really well. He got over the ego part of being a floor company owner with an MBA, and just said he was a business owner with an MBA, who is making a good living where he can support his family without having to put their kids in daycare.
About a year this whole period of time of graduate school and medical school and children and all this Rob and Kristie had a long chat about their plans, their life, and ultimately just decided that they were happy with her not being a doctor and Rob being “just a floor guy” because they actually get to see each other a lot and get to hang out with their kids.
It has been four and a half years since that conversation – and along the way Rob started networking.
No stranger to overcoming challenges, Rob had a night vision company start-up that he had developed originally before the floor company, this was his first start-up. He started the floor company to pay for that night vision company start-up and although he would never recommend starting a start-up to pay for a start-up, in their case it worked.
The original star-tup didn’t work, but the flooring company did, so Rob stuck with the flooring company. A couple of years later, Kristie started blogging, Rob started blogging too, he started networking in person and then started learning about networking online at the same time. Rob tapped into some people that knew a lot and then started experimenting and got the hang of it.
Rob started speaking about social media across the country at different locations and teaching seminars. He and Kristie do consulting with their company “Contrived Media”, but it was almost like a part-time thing. It’s not enough to live off of, but it makes a decent side income, which they still do today.
With the decline of the economy over the last couple of years, the floor company that was doing really well began to decline along with the economy because it is so closely tied to real estate construction. Rob doesn’t think the economy is going to get better any time soon. In fact, he thinks the economy is going to get a lot worse going forward, not better.
One of Rob’s friends is a medical device representative back east in Michigan and he turned Rob on to a company that’s looking to build up their nationwide distribution. His wife is more interested in doing something in the sphere of medicine because she doesn’t want to waste her medical degree, so to speak. They made some choices and are now in transition again, ramping up a new company called Atlas Medical Devices and getting ready to exit out of natural wood floors over the next six months.
Rob announced on December 3rd 2009 that he is running for US Congress. Maybe a year ago, Rob started getting involved with politics on the social media side. People were asking him, “Rob, you kind of know this social media stuff about online marketing, can it be applied to politics?”
“Of course it can!” Most politicians don’t understand even how to turn their email on. So, Rob started working on a campaign for a gentleman running for office here in the state of Colorado. After about a month, they created a strategy. The gentleman didn’t want to do anything with the strategy, and then Rob found out about a lot of this gentleman’s political ties. Rob couldn’t endorse or support these ties. Getting frustrated with politics in the United States, thinking “our country is going over a cliff”, Rob and a buddy decided that one of them should run for office and the other would lend his support. Rob stepped up and said, “I will run this time; you run next time.” So they have been preparing over three or four months to really develop a strategy and how they can win the election. Then on the last two weeks, they committed, pulled the trigger on December 3rd and became the first congressional candidate to ever announce via Twitter on the internet his race for office. Now they are in fund raising mode and for almost the next year, that’s all Rob is going to be doing on top of running his business, family and everything else.
“To me, the race has a lot of obstacles and hurdles with someone of my background who has never been a politician before and never run for office, but the great things are the people that I am meeting are amazing, and the things that I am learning about marketing in politics are also amazing, and they are things I will use the rest of my life. So, regardless of the outcome of this race, the things that I am gaining just for doing this, running a campaign and running for office are amazing. And that’s how I am here.”
You can find out more about Rob McNealy at RobMcNealy.com and ContrivedMedia.com or on Twitter @RobMcNealy.
I will be featuring more tips and wisdom from Rob McNealy and others on my blog over the coming weeks and featuring the interview with him in my book “50 Attraction Marketing and Networking Professionals”.
