Show Notes

Why it matters: John MacGugan built a 25-year satellite technology career without a college degree, proving that curiosity and initiative can overcome traditional barriers.

The journey: Starting in a phone company mail room in 1989, John worked his way up through voicemail systems, satellite installation, and business ownership before landing at DirecTV as a traveling engineer.

Key turning points:
– Fixed accounting errors in the mail room, making it profitable for the first time
– Missed Amazon stock options in 1997 but learned about diversifying skills
– Lost his satellite business in the 2008 housing crash, forcing a move to Texas
– Became a LinkedIn content creator during the pandemic

What you’ll learn:
– How technical skills transfer across different technologies
– Why “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” for networking
– Four principles for sustained career success
– How to bounce back from business failures

Breaking news: John announces his upcoming book on brand ambassadorship, combining his engineering expertise with content creation experience.

Bottom line: John’s story shows how continuous learning, authentic relationships, and calculated risks can build a resilient tech career even without traditional credentials.

Guest: John MacGugan, DirecTV Engineer and LinkedIn content creator, based in Kansas City, Missouri

Connect: Follow John MacGugan on LinkedIn for satellite technology and professional development insights
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-macgugan/

Career Downloads features real stories from technology professionals about career pivots, lessons learned, and practical growth advice.

TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their experiences and their career to help you as you’re managing your own career. For today’s episode, I have with me John MacGugan. John and I actually have never worked together. I met him when I was actually purchasing my first motorcycle. He was very knowledgeable, very helpful, so he answered a lot of questions. We spend a lot of time together, just understanding the motorcycle and through that process, we started talking about what we did for a living and eventually connected on LinkedIn and have maintained a relationship over that time. So I’m very excited. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about what he does, but he actually happened to be in town and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to bring him on and have him as a guest. So with that, I’ll introduce John.

Johh: Hey, how are you?

Manuel: Good.

John: I’m excited to be here, thank you.

Manuel: And I’m glad that you’re able to come on. We’ve talked about it a little bit before about kind of your experiences. So I knew just a short period of kind of what you’re doing now and what you were doing when I was working together, but I’m excited to kind of go through the whole experience.

John: Before I do that, I’ll just say I’m a huge fan of the Career Downloads podcast. I love the interviews and the reason why I like it is because every time I listen to an interview, I learn something. And there are a bunch of podcast style interview shows that are out there in the marketplace where you walk away after an hour or two, you don’t learn anything. And I’m in a place in my life where I wanna learn skills, I wanna learn what other people have done in their lives, take those lessons, apply into my own life, my career, and you have a great platform to do that. So it’s an honor to be here, thank you.

Manuel: Thank you, I appreciate it. And I’m glad that even somebody like yourself who’s kind of managed your career and is still finding value out of it.

John: Yeah, absolutely. So I work for DirecTV, nine years, about the time this goes live, it’ll be nine years, but I’ve had 25 years in the DBS industry, direct broadcast satellite industry. This is my third stint with DirecTV, but the first as an actual employee, as a contractor for a number of years. My specific job is engineering. I’m an engineer with DirecTV. My core duty is to make sure that local channel contributions to DirecTV are always up and always running in the Midwest of the US. I’ve got 20 designated market areas throughout the Midwest. I’m based out of Kansas City, Missouri, right in the heart of America. And I travel every week of the year. It’s either preventative maintenance, break fix maintenance, channel changes, FCC related work, whatever it takes. I’ve got a great group of guys we’re all spread out around the country and that’s what we do. But I have some deep ties to Las Vegas, even though I’m not here now. And it was interesting driving through today because this is the first time that I’ve been here in 10 years where I’ve actually taken a minute to look back. Come to trade shows, conventions, one here last week, but you’re always looking forward like here at the now. I forget, I lived here for 17 years. And you’re talking about my career, I’m looking back and I’m like, “Oh boy, I had a lot of memories here, a lot of memories.” So it is great to be back for a couple of days.

Manuel: That’s awesome. And I’m glad that you kind of had the opportunity to take a moment and just kind of sit there and reflect. I mean, a lot of times we are, we’re go, go, go. Here’s what’s happening in the future. I need to take care of this, but sitting back and saying, “Wow, look at what’s changed.” And like where I’ve come from when I left to coming back now 10 years later.

John: It’s not the same Las Vegas I left 10 years ago. So it’s a lot of construction. There’s a NFL stadium over there that wasn’t here last time I was here.

Manuel: And a hockey team and pretty soon a baseball team.

John: Yep, crazy.

Manuel: So now if you don’t mind, just like we do with all the other guests, just kind of give us a little bit of background of kind of where you grew up and then eventually what got you started in, I know that you’re not a directly in technology, like in a traditional sense with most of the guests, but there is that tie-in and you’re more the engineer. So just kind of your background and eventually how you got started in your field.

John: I did start in IT actually. I’m born and raised in the Seattle, Washington area, Pacific Northwest, went to public high school there. We did trimesters in Washington state, not semesters. So it was broken up into threes. And by the third trimester of my senior year, I had enough credits to graduate. So I went to college early, went to a small state college, literally right up the street from my high school. So I’d go to high school for an hour or two, then I’d go to college. And I was the youngest person there. I still lived at home. I was still in, if you will, the high school mentality, but I was going to college and it was too soon. I didn’t understand what college was when I originally went there. I didn’t understand principally the core thought of critical thinking, which is a lot of what college is. High school was all about academics. You read a book, you write a book report, they make sure you read the book, you understood it. College was a whole different scenario and I didn’t understand that. So when I graduated from high school, I told my dad, I said, dad, I was all freaked out. I just, I don’t know if I’m gonna make a commitment to do this. I don’t know what I wanna do with my life, but I gotta go find a job. And my father was an officer with the phone company, Pacific Northwest Bell, US West, and it was Quest and now I think it’s Lumen. And he made a call and got me my first job in the mail room of the phone company, Downtown Seattle in the basement. So 18, 19 years old, I got up every morning, moved to Seattle from my hometown, 60 miles away, get up every morning and would go to the mail room and from eight to 10 a.m. we would sort mail. You’re gonna love this. The mail was inner company, 11 by 17 legal manila envelopes with the little tie strap on the end and 18,000 boxes on it. And you put the address and the person in the box and when you get the mail, you scratch it off, then you resend it and you do the next person. We would get all that mail and we would sort it and we’d be done by 10 o’clock in the morning. Because there was nothing else to do in the mail room, it was also the forms distribution warehouse for the phone company. So you think about this, if you want a half day off or you need anything from human resources, you go to Infor, Workday, whatever platform you’re using, you fill it out, you send an email to the boss and you’re done. When I started in the workforce, you had to fill out a form and not just a piece of paper, a three tiered carbon copy form, one for you, one for the boss and one that got mailed in to HR. And there were probably a hundred thousand of these forms that would be needed to just do the daily function of work. In our mail room was a library, but instead of books, it had brown boxes with the fronts missing and little numbers on them in each box were the forms. So we would get mail in the morning and we’d open up the envelope and it would be a form with an order form for more forms. So all the different divisions in 13 states could do their work. So we would spend the day and we would fill out these orders and we’d put them back in the envelope, so scratch it off and mail it out. This is how I got into IT. Before the order went out, you had to give them a receipt. So we had an IBM computer, not on a network, a standalone IBM computer with a DOS program on it. And you would open up the program and you would put in their account number and you would put in the forms that they ordered and hit return and it would do a dot matrix receipt. And you’d peel off the holes on the side and you’d put it in the envelope. And most of the people in the mail room were in their 70s and I was 18. And so they’re like, you get to be the computer guy. So when the orders would come in, they would go fill them in their little carts and they’d bring me and then I would go to the computer and I would enter all the information. Also the information was wrong. The account number was wrong or they wouldn’t even write it down because people wouldn’t know what it was. But if you put the order in the IBM computer and you hit return, you still got a receipt, even though it was wrong. And the orders would just still go out. It was almost like going to McDonald’s and buying a happy meal and not paying for it. And I’m like, that’s okay, you don’t have a credit card. Here’s your meal and here’s your receipt. So I did a novel thing at 19 years old. I started calling the people in whatever state they’re in. I’m like, hey, I got your form here and your account number is wrong. Or the form number isn’t, we don’t have that or whatever. Can you tell me what you want? And then I would fix their form and I would put it in the computer and it would fix it. And every month somebody from upstairs, I will loosely call it IT, but in 1989, it really wasn’t IT. They would come down with a big six inch floppy and they would put it in and they would download our receipts. And then they would take that up to wherever. They would do a printout, they would do an inner company change of funds. We all call it funny money in the industry. We all know what it is. I remember after about six months there, the boss came down and she’s like, I don’t know what you guys are doing down here, but keep going for the first time ever. This mail room made a profit in our company. And all of a sudden, you know, where we got this and now we’re doing more forms and they’re moving other states here. And it was just simply because one or two of us were putting the right account numbers on the orders. And so the three cents for each form could be calculated. I did that for about a year and I tried to promote out of the mail room. And how it worked at the phone company in the day was every six months you got an opportunity to meet your boss. And if you wanted to promote, you would say, hey, I would like to promote. And every six months I was turned down. I started in the mail room at 5.65 an hour. I was there two and a half years. I was making 6.25 an hour. Couldn’t live on that in Seattle. So I managed a Godfather’s Pizza store. I actually started just making the pizzas and became the manager. I was making as much in one day at the pizza place as I was making a week at the phone company. But I was programmed as a kid to think, well, the phone company is your future. It’s a big company. That’s your, you know, I was fourth generation phone company. Everybody else in my family retired from there. So I thought I had to do this. I went four years every six months. It’s making like 7.25 an hour after four years. And I called my dad. The one thing I said I would never do. And I said, dad, I know everybody is from the phone company and I’ve told them what was happening. And in not so many words, he basically said that I’m never gonna get promoted because he’s an officer. And there was like a nepotism thing where they didn’t want people to think that because I was his son, that I was just gonna naturally graduate. And I didn’t have a college degree. But I couldn’t afford to go to college anymore because I had to work two jobs to make pay for my apartment in Seattle. So got permission from the family to quit the phone company. And I started, my dad got me into CDL school, commercial drivers license school. Back in the day, it was eight weeks, get a CDL. I started driving a dump truck and a flatbed and a backhoe all around Seattle, metropolitan area. And I would dig trenches for POTS lines and the new thing at the time, ISDN, the new hip internet at the time. And I did that for about a year and a half, my first day, $25 an hour. So I went from 7.25 as an employee to being a contractor for the phone company at 25 bucks an hour. And I really liked that job, but the weather for anybody who’s been to Seattle in December, it’s pretty tough work, when you’re outside working, having machinery. And I was in it about two years. And for anybody who does any work in your home, you get your home located. The company comes out with the paint and they locate water, power, gas, low voltage, if there is any. And the law says that if you have a commercial piece of equipment, you cannot dig within 24 inches of the paint on either side. That makes sure that nobody hits anything underground that you don’t wanna hit. Well, I fell victim to a bad locate and I cut a electrical main power line to a subdivision. Thank goodness I followed all the protocols and procedures and my backhoe was lifted up and it was grounded because I would have died, but it scared me. And I went back to my dad and I said, not sure I wanna be an operator the rest of my life. I’m gonna go do my own thing, literally forging my own trail, if you will.

Manuel: So the question I have there is when you mentioned you went and decided to do the CDL, at some point, you talked about becoming a contractor. And it sounds like you’re doing, like you said, POTS lines, still phone related. And is that because of the experience that you had working for a phone company and just being able to kind of leverage contacts? So again, you don’t have to share a ton of detail, but I’m just curious how you made that transition into becoming a contractor. Was it just, hey, I have a CDL and they are in need of that many people? Or was it, oh, I have connections. My dad also knows a couple of people and let’s move and utilize what I have.

John: Great question. First of all, for those who don’t know, a POTS line is an acronym for Plain Old Telephone Service. It’s bare copper in the ground. And of course, back in the day, you were running your 56K modem on that POTS line. So that was also your internet feed and the phone company need those put in. So the phone company has past tense and now have a list of contractors that they use. And the issue that you always have is there’s not enough skilled trades. It’s worse now, but even in the 90s, they couldn’t find enough people that could pass a CDL test. And to be quite honest, alcohol consumption is a big part of a CDL class. You can’t be an alcoholic. You can’t have a DUI. You can’t have more than three tickets to travel with commercial equipment. You can drive a truck, I think, but you can’t pull a flatbed with a backhoe and a dump truck full of dirt. I mean, it’s a huge load. And of course I was young and I had a clean record and I was not an alcoholic and I didn’t have any DUIs. And so there was a niche that was easy to be filled there. My dad didn’t pull any strings, but he basically said, “Look, it doesn’t matter who you call. If you get a CDL, they’re all gonna hire you.” And they did. But after I cut that line, I then tag teamed with somebody who had lost their CDL license, but was a great operator. And so I would drive other people around for a while, but I didn’t make the big money anymore. I was like a courier, it went to like 12 bucks an hour. And I thought, “You know, I can’t do this.” And so I really enjoyed working with the IBM system. I really enjoyed the DOS system at the time because I had figured it out. Not only when I was working at the phone company, did I see that there were problems with the accounting, but I saw that the form numbers were wrong. Some of the form numbers would be like a 1040_A, but the same form would be under there under 1040A with no space, some would have a space. And as we all know with DOS, every space matters. You can’t have a differentiation. And so I was fixing all that at the same time. I was going through the whole database because sitting there looking for stuff to do. So I went to a want ad and I saw a customer service job for a voicemail company. And on the bottom it said DOS-based voicemail systems. And I thought, “Oh, I know that, I know DOS. I’m not very good at it, but I have experience.” And so I interviewed and I told them what I did at the phone company and I got on right away as a customer service agent. And basically the company had voicemail systems connected to ISDN lines, like a 24 brick of phone calls. So 24 people could call the voicemail at any one time and get to the person they wanted. And I could actually, with the customer on the phone, I could modem in on a 56K modem and see their system. And it was the same system I was using at the phone company because DOS is DOS. The big difference was that the phone company systems had *.txt because it was a form system. And a voicemail system was *.wav because they were voice, you know, “My name is Joe, leave a message after the tone.” And if it’s corrupted, it didn’t say wav, it said dot gibberish. So I would be able to better articulate the issues, send them off to engineering. I was in that job for like two months and I was upgraded into what I will call engineering today. In the day they called it tech support. And so then I started getting the calls from customer service and fixing the voicemail issues with the DOS systems. And within six months of there, I became the technical director of all the operations for that company.

Manuel: And all of that really just came down from curiosity, right? Like nobody, I mean, they showed you how to do things, right? Like, “Hey, here’s how you enter in the information. Here’s where you put the forms.” But then after that, it’s just your own curiosity of like, “Okay, well, how do I fix this? Well, wait a minute, I can’t find this form.” Everybody else just kind of was like, “Well, I will push it off.” And just, they said, “Just put in whatever.”

John: Yep.

Manuel: So it’s curiosity. So having, I’m gonna say a certain level of, like a standard or a worth ethic that says, well, it’s not correct, that’s not good enough. Whereas we see it a lot in all industries where a lot of people are like, “Eh, good enough.” Right? And just kind of move on.

John: But you know, anybody who’s an IT professional has got a little bit of OCD in them. And I have a lot. Like for instance, your Career Downloads, I have to listen to them in order. I’m like halfway through. I can’t skip to the new one because I’m afraid of what I’ve missed on the way. Little things like that. So for me, it was like, well, that form is wrong. So this form’s gotta be wrong. So I’ve gotta check this. I got it, because it needs to be right. And of course, if you’re a business and you’ve got a voicemail system and you’re pressing two to talk to Larry and you’re getting Samantha, or you’re pressing for Larry and you’re getting a blank and then a beep for a message. I mean, that’s unacceptable. You have to fix that. And so I had a knack for finding that. But moreover, I found out in the mid 90s that I also had a knack for relating to the engineers who were doing the work. And I of course respected them. And I did not have a college degree, but everybody that worked for us did. Had some type of computer or, this is 1995. They had some type of computer or programming degree. And it worked well. I knew the owner pretty well. And one of their benefits of that company was they retained the maintenance of all the systems they sold. So if you could not get into a system with a 56K modem, through the backside to fix it, you would have to fly out. And I became the flyer, because I was the boss. So I would fly out to Milwaukee or Atlanta or wherever our systems were, I would meet with the customer, would sit down and I would log in directly and then I would call somebody in my office. And together we would find it. And then they would log in on the modem and they would upload whatever needs to be fixed and would fly back. So I’m 26 years old. I’m managing a team of people. And I’m flying all over the country. I’m making a ton of money because I’m a director now. More money than I ever thought that I would make as a child. And it’s 1996. And then I started losing engineers, tech support people. And they were leaving my company to go to work for another company and actually make less money. We were paying people a lot of money and we couldn’t figure out why they were leaving to make less money. My office is in downtown Seattle. There was a small startup up the street. It’s named amazon.com. And the carrot was that they were offering stock options with anybody they brought in right around or right after they went public. So Amazon wasn’t profitable in the beginning. So they couldn’t pay people a lot of money but they were giving them the stock, letting everybody know if you come on now and you stay with us, we’re gonna be rich and you’re gonna be rich and you’re gonna forge a career. But even better than that, I mean, Amazon really was like the wild west of internet shopping. They really were the pioneers, the first ones. They weren’t the first ones to sell books but when they started integrating kitchen utensils and I forgot the name of it, you might know but every day they had a deal on the top banner where every day you could go into Amazon and you could click the deal and whatever they had too much of at the warehouse was like half price but you could only buy those items and they were leading the industry and we started losing people to that.

Manuel: So before I get into that, one of the things I wanna touch on and you mentioned, you kind of moved up, you became a director and you’re flying out dealing with people. One of the things that I’m assuming as well and that kind of help propel you up is it’s not just the knowledge but being able to talk to people. If you’re flying out and you’re visiting customers in person and then also you’re leading a team, I’ve brought it up a couple times with other people but I wanna kind of get your experience and your take on it is communication is gonna be very important there, right? Cause you could have been super smart and telling these people what to do but if you’re not communicating it properly or if your attitude is terrible, they’re not gonna wanna follow you, they’re gonna complain, you’re probably not gonna get promoted. If you’re going out and visiting customers, right? These are the people that are paying that are bringing in the revenue, same thing. If you’re not pleasant or let’s say maybe you are pleasant but the way that you’re explaining it and trying to help them with their problems, they’re just not getting it, you make them feel dumb and I know that that’s pretty common. Is that that communication skill, is that something that you felt helped you and how did you kind of develop that or is it some people are just very natural at being able to explain complex items in simple terms?

John: Yes, that but one of the things that I learned early on was that I acknowledged that I couldn’t do a lot of the functions at my office because I don’t have the degree. I did not spend four years in front of a computer learning basic keystroke commands that propel you to a higher level to do, on the DOS front, executables and other things of that nature. I made no bones about the fact I can’t do that but this is the position I’m in, this is what I’ve been asked to do by the boss and I always, even today in my company, we’re very diverse in who does what. Everybody has a job and a responsibility and you have to respect the people that do that job and even from an early age on, I always made sure that I respected the people that brought the expertise to the table. I do bring something that might be different from what they are but never pretend to know something I don’t and I never pretend to be better than anybody else, whether I’m higher or lower educated than anybody else because we all have value and everybody’s life experience is different and I don’t care what any hiring manager says, a job is a job but your life experience that you bring to that job is definitely gonna help propel you. Regardless if you’re flipping a burger or taking out the garbage or whether you are talking about finance to people who don’t know how to use a calculator, we all have a life experience that we bring to the table and you have to respect that with everybody.

Manuel: And that makes a lot of sense, right? Being able to be humble and understand that I know what I know, I know what you know and then how do we kind of make this work to say, okay, here’s my experience, here’s your experience and not try to overcompensate or try to show kind of like that bravado of, oh, I know I’m the director so you’ve got to follow me. Like when you have an experience, you have information that I don’t possess and let me use that to my advantage.

John: Oh, but I made some mistakes.

Manuel: We all do.

John: Two big ones. The first one was in 1997, someone who had left our company came back to me and said, you know, John, I know it looks bad on the news. I know it looks like Amazon is like losing money and they keep borrowing money and we know that the stockholders think it’s junk stock and blah, blah, blah, but we know it’s gonna go. We know, like the people working there are like, we know this is gonna change the world and you should really come on board, you really should. And I’m like, man, I don’t know. I’m like, I can just go to Barnes and Noble and buy a book if I want to. I really don’t need to buy one on the internet. I just don’t know if that’s gonna fly. And I passed on the opportunity to go to amazon.com in 1997. And then the other mistake that I made when I worked at that company was one that I’m trying not to make again, that I see a lot of people making today is that I failed to diversify my skills when I was at that company. Because in 1999, the code was sold and the portfolio was sold by the owner and the company was dissolved. The people didn’t go. And so a year and a half after I decided, not to switch jobs to make this job a long haul career for me, it ended. But I didn’t know, so most of the people on my team were dabbling with a new operating system that had just come out called Unix. Everybody had a Unix box in their basement. And after they got done with work at our office, they’re down there trying to figure out these new platforms. And of course, when it came out, there were several different platforms, but these guys were playing with all of them. But I was the guy who was like, yeah, I gotta go to Milwaukee. I gotta go, come back, I got a staff meeting. I’ve got this, I got that. I didn’t diversify. And so when the company closed in 1999, I didn’t have a job, had some money in the bank, but I really didn’t have a way to pivot. I made way too much money for a customer service manager job. I wasn’t qualified to go and work in tech support. I couldn’t code. We had a Windows NT network in our office, but everybody had since moved to a new Windows platform, which was totally different than NT. It was next level. And I didn’t know that and I couldn’t, and I was really stuck. So for the first half of 1999, I really just searched the want ads, kind of drank my sorrows away. I had a beach house on Alki Point. I had a race car. I was single, I was playing the field. I was traveling the country, and then all of a sudden it was over. And I had to sell everything, and I moved into an apartment to save money. And so I couldn’t find a job. And the jobs that were out there, I refused to do because I thought that I was worth more than what the jobs were. It was a pretty tough time. And then my boss at the time who sold that company came back to me and checked up on me. And I told him, yeah, not working. And he knew things weren’t good because no one had any notice. It just one day ended. And he said that he had bought an interest in a consulting firm in Las Vegas, and that he got a condo here in Summerlin. And that this company that he bought into was managing ancillary contracts for MDUs, for apartments, multi-dwelling units, because Las Vegas in 1999, 2000 was going through this huge boom. And he said, look, they just signed a contract with this new company called Direct TV. And the Direct TV is putting dishes on apartments and setting it up. But the consulting firm is in Los Angeles. There’s nobody there, and they need a project manager. And so he threw me a bone and said, would you like to go out and manage this thing? You can stay in my condo until you get set. And so I did. So in the summer of 1999, I took everything I owned in the back of my pickup truck, and I drove from Seattle to Las Vegas. And I set up working at MediaCon Realty Advisors. And they started installing Direct TV in a way, in a format that renters could use it. You didn’t need to own a home. And that was revolutionary at the time, and it was great. And I also liked that I was the only employee here, and I was in charge of my own schedule, and I was making it right, and the money was okay, wasn’t the best.

Manuel: Him reaching out to you, right? I’m assuming that there were a number of employees. What is it you think that made him reach out to you specifically? Is it the fact that you were a good employee, that you had this project management, you’re managing people? What type of skillset do you think kind of set you apart? Because I’m sure, I mean, we won’t know for sure, but maybe he, maybe you’re the first person he called, maybe you were the fifth. But obviously there was still something that you were on the list to be called. So what types of skills do you think made you stand out in his mind?

John: I 100% bought in to the mission of the company when I worked for him. I was in 100%, and nobody knew that it had been for sale for a year. And by the way, it was for sale for a year, because it was a DOS based voicemail system, and that was going away. And I didn’t believe it. I thought DOS was here to stay, it was here forever. I never thought that a Unix or later a Linux would ever replace it, because the code was so sound that we were using. Of course it did. I was wrong about that. But I never called in sick. I always worked hard. And I’m sure that played into him calling me. But I think for the most part though, it was because I believed in the mission. I believed in him. You know, it was always there. And I loved working for the Realty Advisors. I loved working for DirecTV. I didn’t work for them, but I represented the apartment owners to make sure that the DirecTV systems worked. But that meant I had to learn how to use the DirecTV systems. And in 2000, I started that and it immediately clicked for me. I immediately understood satellite services. I understood how it worked. The frequencies made sense to me. I don’t know why, but they did. I had a knack for the remote with our RCA set top box. It was easy to figure out. I had an easy way of explaining it to customers when the installer would come in and put it in for them. And I helped the apartment managers with backend support trying to sell it. And I enjoyed it so much. And I liked it so much that when the contract ended with the Realty Group, I actually went to work for the dealer, for the DirecTV dealer as an installer because I enjoyed it so much. It felt natural for me. And I was an installer in Las Vegas for DirecTV for two years. And then I got married and met my wife here. We had a child, bought a house in North Las Vegas. And two years into it, I took a little money out of my house and I invested into the dealership. And in 2013, I became a partner. And as well as an installer, a partner, and became part of the ownership team for that. And that’s when everything exploded here in the Valley. We started selling and installing Dish Network. We had DirecTV. Circuit City was a big store here, couple of them at the time. We had the DirecTV installations for them. There was a new store in the South End of town called Fry’s. We installed for them. There were some stores in Henderson we installed for. And then we brought out high speed internet on satellite, which in the early 2000s was the darling of the day. Everybody thought satellite internet was gonna be the new standard. So I worked with the union here in Las Vegas and got credentials so that I could work on the rooftops of the casinos. At one point, every casino on the strip, whether they admit it or not, every one of them had a satellite dish on the roof with a one meter antenna as their emergency backup, basically out of band connection in case the main internet fell out. Because they all thought that at some point it was gonna be one meg down, one meg up with no latency, which is, I could have told everybody on the first day, it’s 32,000 miles to space and back. You’re always gonna have latency and you’re never gonna get to one meg, at least not in the early 2000s. But we did that. I then got government contracts. I started installing satellite services at the Air Force bases, Creech, Nellis. There was a base in Tonopah, I can’t remember the name of it. Later on, I started installing some other commercial services for the gas companies. So they were using satellite internet on the gas stations because most of the gas stations were not on any type of a high speed internet grid. And the running joke for a while is that our company had installed an antenna on every gas station in the four state region. Because we had all of Nevada, Eastern California, Northern Arizona, Western Utah, and all was under our purview. And for the next six and a half years, we made so much money and we did so much work because anybody who was here between 2000 and 2008 saw the growth. It was incredible.

Manuel: I do remember that because right around that 2000, that’s when I graduated and I started working in IT but my dad was in the construction business. And I remember at that time, I mean, they were just, they couldn’t keep up with the amount of work. I mean, they were just anybody that they knew that they could bring in. I mean, it just, it exploded around that time.

John: Nobody could keep up with the work in any industry. And at one point we used to get up in the morning and we would get our jobs, list of jobs installations. And we would literally have to sit down and figure out how you got it all done in a day because you’re either in somebody’s house or you’re at their business. And it’s all gotta be routed. You know, you can’t send one guy to North Las Vegas and then send him to Boulder City. You can’t send somebody to Summerlin and then Henderson. And it was like a game of Jenga trying to get the schedules. And I remember for a couple of years, we were trying to decide how to get the jobs done. But with that boom, I remember in the summer of 2008, it started to slow down a little bit, a little bit, which was great because at the time, I felt fully diversified as a company. I felt like I learned my lesson. I had government contracts, had a big contract with Hughes Network Systems, installing antennas for them, health monitors, so they could look at the integrity of their networks. And I had a casino contracts, I had trade show contracts working with the union for conventions. We had residential installations with all the satellite providers. And then I remember in the fall, I’m like talking to my wife, I’m like, “You know, we may have to scale Christmas back a little bit because guys are only doing one or two jobs a day.” You know, and of course, you’re part of an ownership group of a satellite company, which only makes money when you’re installing satellite services. So if you’re not out there installing, you’re not making any money. There was no residual money coming into the dealership if the techs weren’t out working. And Thanksgiving of 2008, I really started to get scared. And as we all remember on December 29th of 2008, the stock market crashed and the housing bubble burst and the epicenter nationwide was right here in Las Vegas, Nevada. And it did not matter what industry you were in. It did not matter how diversified your portfolio was. It did not matter how diversified your business revenue stream was. Everybody lost big and lost big.

Manuel: I do remember that. And it’s funny that you thought that you had kind of diversified, right?

John: I tried.

Manuel: You tried. And is that something, obviously the past experience brought that into play and say, okay, hey, I’m gonna start diversifying. Do you think now looking back, was there really anything that you could have done differently?

John: No, and because my electrical contractor friends, my HVAC contractor friends, casinos, gaming revenue plummeted at that time because for those who don’t live in Las Vegas who are watching this, you could drive through neighborhoods one after another and every home was vacant. People literally walked away. I mean, it was so crazy that before the crash, I was interested in taking money out of my house because we were gonna try and get a warehouse to store all of our cabling and satellite boxes and non pens and antennas. And they offered me a ninja loan. A ninja loan was no income, no job verification, no paperwork sign here and the loan is yours. And people were signing those all throughout Las Vegas. And then all of a sudden, nobody had any money to pay their mortgages and they just walked away and the banks couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t even know where the people worked. They didn’t have W2s. People would turn stuff in, but then they would leave the job but they would still have the mortgage. That happens a lot, but it was tough. Nobody was immune from that.

Manuel: Right, and that’s the reason I was asking, right? Because at that time, everybody’s gone. So I don’t know that there was much that you could have done to diversify.

John: I tried, but no, there really wasn’t. I was lucky though, that one of my electrical contractor friends called me. I was still working at the dealership, albeit, not making any money at all, literally just sitting there as an owner of nothing. And he called and said, “Hey, I got a call from a DirecTV company, a sub company, and they want us to install 784 outlets for DirecTV.” And I’m like, “Well, DirecTV is low voltage. There’s no outlet needed, only at the TV.” He’s like, “No, these all gotta be installed outside and nobody at our, I want the contract, but nobody knows anything about it.” And I’m like, “Do you think that your company could help us and do this?” And I’m like, “No, we can’t really help you because after the housing crash, Dish Network stopped letting us sell for them. DirecTV stopped letting us sell for them because all the dealers had folded basically because of the crash nationwide. The companies took it all in house. I no longer had credentials with DirecTV. I couldn’t do that. But I said, “I’ll come look at it for you.” And I went out and I found out two things. Number one, DirecTV had come out with a new system that would allow you to run up to 16 set top boxes on one dish. And before then it was four, but the caveat was it had to have an electrical outlet. It was a powered amplifier, which is why they reached out to this company. And of course, I know everything about DirecTV. And I told my friend, I said, “I’ll tell you what, I’ll come to work for you because I can’t do it through my other company and there’s nothing there.” I basically walked away from nothing and went back to manage a project to install outlets for DirecTV in the same exact apartments that I had done nine years before, the same ownership of the apartments. The difference was that the consulting company wasn’t involved this time. And so I went back and we started installing outlets. So anybody who has a house or an apartment, you’ve got a box outside. Houses have little boxes, apartments have a real big box and it’s got all the coax cable in it, all the phone cable, and that’s where the DirecTV equipment was put, but it needed an outlet. So the electrical company, we were putting all the outlets in the boxes. When they realized that I knew DirecTV and that I had sold DirecTV, the company, I forgot the name of the VAR, the Value Added Retailer for DirecTV that was selling it. I think it was called Multiband Communications out of Minnesota, but they asked me, “Well, will you tell the apartment managers and give them these?” And so I would give them program guides and say, “Here’s the channel lineup and this is how it works. It’s really easy when somebody rents an apartment, tell them they can have DirecTV and that’s how they would sell it.” And then we helped through the electrical company, it’s not electrical at all, but I knew so much about DirecTV. We went back and we did sales brochures for the existing customers and ramp that all up. And I did that for a year and then DirecTV took the MDU, multi-dwelling unit apartment phase of their business. They took that in-house and the company that had it lost that contract. And so again, I’m looking for work.

Manuel: And as you’re going through, one of the questions I have is there’s been a couple of times now where, I mean, part of it is I’m sure it’s easy to go through and say, “Well, this is drying up, I don’t have this.” But you’re still taking a risk and moving and trying to go and do something else as opposed to saying, “Well, I can continue where I’m at. Hey, I’m comfortable in this area or in this realm. Hey, electrical, I don’t know that I really wanna do that or go work for you. What is it that made you really, and maybe it wasn’t comfortable when you were going through it, but having the courage to go through and, “You know what, I’m gonna go try this.” Like you mentioned from Seattle coming down here, granted you have no job. You could have taken a little bit longer, probably eventually found something there, but you said, “You know what, I’m gonna go do that.” This happens again and now you’re moving around. So I’m just curious, what is it? Is it necessity? Is it, “Hey, I’m gonna figure this out along the way.” I’m just curious.

John: Fear.

Manuel: Fear of.

John: Fear. So I just lost my business and it dwindled to nothing, but I’m married. I have my own mortgage. I’ve got two children, young children, and one of my children is special needs. And my wife was not able to work. He needed, and still needs a lot of care. And I had bills and I had no revenue coming in. And again, this is a second time now, somebody that I knew came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got this contract for you.” But it was fear. And what’s crazy is that when this contract ended and DirecTV took MDU in-house, I got another call from Hughes Network Systems in North Las Vegas. Cause I had been installing health monitors for them for the last seven years. And they said, “We have this big contract that we need you to do with your company.” And they said, “We want you to do it because you’ve done all the other ones.” And I said, “Well, I work at an electrical company and I don’t work there.” And they said, “Well, we’ll bring you on full time and you can do this contract. And when you’re done, we’ll throw you into engineering.” So again, somebody else that I had worked for came back to me and said, “We want you.” And so in November of 2019, we wrapped up the last outlet at an apartment complex next to Nellis cause we ran the whole Valley and the Nellis corner was where it ended. And the following week, I went to work for Hughes Network Systems at the North Las Vegas Network Support Center off of Craig Road there right by the Cannery.

Manuel: I saw a post about this recently and it just, it made me think of your exact situation as someone reached out, someone that you had worked with. And we all talk about like, “Hey, build your network. It’s who you know, it’s who you know.” But it’s really, it made me think differently. It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you, right? Obviously you did something well because again, this is someone that knew your work, knew the type of person that you were, your work ethic. “Hey, this is the quality that you’re putting in.” You could know them all day, but if they don’t know who you are, if they’re not paying attention or if you don’t leave some sort of lasting impression, I’m sure you weren’t going around like, “Hey, look at everything I’m doing.” But they’re seeing it. Would you say that that’s pretty accurate, at least in these situations?

John: Yes, and one of the things that I had learned when I came to work at Hughes is I realized that they had been watching me when I didn’t know it. So when I would install an antenna on a ground grid, it has to be lightning protected. Grounding is everything in the satellite business because if you don’t have grounding, you’re going to get feedback. It’s going to carry a small amount of electricity and it could just be literally somebody touching it with their finger and you can shock an LNB and it’ll fail. And when I would get done with my work, they would go back and they would look at it and they would say, “Is it grounded? Is it the right grounding cable? Is it the right gauge of cable in case it’s a massive lightning strike or a little one? Are the wires labeled? Can somebody else find it later and know what you did? Like, is it transparent? Or did you do the work in a way that only you can go back and fix it?” And I never did that. And we never trained people to do that. Always made sure that you follow the best practices and that you never veer from that. And that’s why I went, when I went to work for Hughes, they later told me that and they said, “We need the best work possible.” And I was grateful for that. I’m also grateful that a lot of people think that they work really hard and they’re not noticed. And I promise you, if you’re at a good company, people are noticing. If you’re at a crappy company and your boss doesn’t know your last name, they don’t know you’re married and they don’t know you have kids and not saying they need to know. But if they have no idea who you are, yeah, they’re not gonna know what kind of work you’re doing. But most companies out there, especially in IT, are invested in their people because the equity in IT are the people that are creating that work, the IT. I’m saying that weird, but you know what I mean. A robot is not gonna do what you do. It’s a mind. It’s somebody thinking. It’s articulating a code. It’s making it work right. It’s pivoting. And for me, doing satellite work, it’s the same thing because eventually all the satellite internet that I was working on goes to a computer and it runs through an IT network. I mean, Chevron is one of Hughes’s biggest customers. And the antennas that as a dealer I installed all over the four state area would go into that NOC where I was now working. And they were looking at all the money they we’re spending on gas, how many gallons were pumped, when does the truck need to go out, how much revenue was generated, when does the price need to change. It all happened through that antenna. You install it wrong, it isn’t gonna work.

Manuel: That’s interesting, like you said, that they were going, I mean, it makes sense because of the amount of money that it’s gonna cost them, the damage that that could cause that they would go back and review it, but it never came up during that timeframe.

John: Nope. I ended up working at Hughes for seven years. And I gotta say when that initial project was done, it was a really hard seven years. I have a lot of respect for Hughes, for EchoStar, the parent company. I love, love, love the people that I worked with, nothing but respect. I went there for seven years every day. I could have left anytime I wanted, I didn’t. But I was a small business person who had for 20 years been working in small business, getting up every morning, looking at job orders, going out in the world, making things happen, and being successful in that, and then going home and then reaping the rewards of my work. I went to work in a data center at a NOC, and I sat down at a chair and I waited for the phone to ring for seven years. And I’m not that guy. I am not that guy. And I struggled immensely with that. I started a motorcycle company, a custom company. I started moonlighting, doing consulting for apartments and for other groups with trying to use the knowledge that I had. I started building things and actually selling on Etsy in my backyard. I opened an Etsy store, but I just couldn’t find that thing to move on. But I couldn’t leave Hughes because I have three kids now. And I have three boys and my wife and a house, and they’re relying on me. And then something devastating happened to our family in 2015. We were in our minivan driving on Camino El Norte. For those not from Las Vegas, a lot of the streets in Las Vegas have got sound barriers, seven foot brick walls, concrete on each side. And it’s for noise abatement for all the homes. And we were going south, and I heard this huge crash on my car. I thought I hit something. So I pulled over and stopped, got out of the car, and I didn’t hit anything. Something hit me. Someone threw a cinder block over the concrete wall aiming for my windshield, and they missed. They hit the top of the car, two inches behind the windshield over my wife’s head. It threw it over the wall, and I blew a head gasket. I knew immediately what it was. I got in my little minivan, my little four cylinder, punched it, and I drove all through that fast. I’m speeding through the neighborhood. I’m looking for those kids. I was so pissed. It was such a violation. And I never found them, thank goodness for me, and for them, because I probably would have broken the law had I found them, because I was so mad for three reasons. Number one, I didn’t have enough money to repair my car. The windshield was cracked. I couldn’t fix it. Had it gone through the windshield and hit my wife, I don’t know what I would have done. And had any of us, even myself, had to go to the hospital, I didn’t have the money in the bank for the copay. I didn’t have any money. And I was stuck with a broken minivan with my family, and I went to bed that night, and I’m laying on top of my bed, and I’m thinking about 20 years prior, I had a beach house on Alki Point. I had a race car. I was a director of a software company. I was traveling the country. I was single. I had an unlimited bar tab, any place I wanted to go, and 20 years later, I was making less money, and I was in a position to where I just couldn’t get ahead. For better or for worse, I was going through my mind, and I’m thinking, I’m going backwards. I’m going backwards. And I’d been secretly looking for jobs for a year, because I knew that I wasn’t making enough money. And if you’re gonna work in a network operation center, you’re gonna make a certain amount of money, and you’re not gonna eclipse that. You’ve gotta get out of the NOC and get into engineering. You’ve gotta get into product implementation. You’ve gotta get to another place. And I didn’t have a way to do that, because I didn’t have the skills, and I didn’t have the college degree that we talked about. So I told my wife, I said, “It’s time to leave. “It’s time to go.” So I decided to stop looking in Las Vegas, and I started looking for jobs in other cities. I was looking at Texas, was looking in Missouri, was looking in Arizona. And I found a job, the current job I have now with, excuse me, with DirecTV out of Dallas, Texas, paid a lot more money than what I was making as a technician, a full travel job. And so we sold the rest of the stuff we didn’t need, and we packed up. Nine years ago this month, we packed up our bags and moved to Texas. Was there three and a half years, and then somebody retired in our division, and I moved up to Kansas City in the Midwest. And we love it there. So nine years now at DirecTV.

Manuel: It’s crazy, right? We always have those moments, right? And to your point, right? It could have easily have gone probably the other direction, right? Like you said, you could have broken the law. It could have gotten a lot worse, right? Let’s say you do find them something happens, and now your wife’s got to struggle and go through that. And you had the, I’m gonna say the clarity to kind of sit and again, it was after the fact, right? Because at that moment you didn’t, but sit back and say, okay, hey, I gotta reassess this. Like you could have easily, even at that point, this is where I’m at and continue to go in a different direction and spiral down, but you didn’t. And you mentioned it was fear, but even fear, I mean, I’ve talked to people, fear could have paralyzed you or also brought you that way, but it was a fear, but it was also seems like a motivator.

John: A driver.

Manuel: A driver.

John: Yep.

Manuel: When you took this other position, did you see it as not only good for the moment, you talked about the diversification, but did you see there’s growth here? I won’t be just stuck here in this position.

John: It was three things. My wife is born and raised in Las Vegas. So, you know, she’d been here well over 35 years when we left. I mean, this is her home and she never wanted to leave, but after that incident, it was when we both bought in to the, let’s go on an adventure. And our kids were old enough to understand that it was an adventure. They bought in to it. And the other driver too was that I knew that I could work at Hughes as long as I wanted. I could have a 20 year career working in that NOC. I was never gonna get let go. It’s never gonna go away. So I had all the time in the world to look for a new job. And I did, took the time to find the right job. And pay was a big deal. I wanted something to pay a lot more than what I made. And I obviously found that. And I think for me, you see a lot of people in the industry who move around a lot, especially in IT. And I think it’s really important that if you’re gonna decide to do that, which I think is good in this industry, because moving around is how you grow, it’s how you learn. You meet new people, you learn new skills, it makes you more valuable. But you gotta have buy-in from your family. They have to want it with you. And my wife never wanted to move before, but she was finally like, I’m ready. And then she looked at the housing prices in Texas and they were like half of what Las Vegas was, which is half of what it is now. So it was really good. So when we sold our house, we did make some money on it and it definitely helped us become debt-free, helped us buy another house, getting us enough money for a down payment to buy a house in Texas and basically start over completely. And that has been a godsend for us as well, is to work on the financial future for myself and my family. And I had tried so many things. I really wanted to stay in Las Vegas, but every business owner I talked to in 2014 and 2015 was still reeling from 2009 because it happened in 2008. But it didn’t end until 2011. I mean, it was three years for the market to turn it right. I mean, it didn’t happen overnight. So people even in 2014 were still struggling, trying to look back at the days that could have been. I’m really glad I made the move because my biggest professional transformation came once I moved to Kansas City. Actually, thanks to the dreaded COVID-19 pandemic, it actually completely changed my business career because I was a corporate traveler. Like everybody, I got sent home for three months in 2020, but I was one of the first people to go back and to start traveling again. I was one of the first. When I started traveling in July of 2020, I was on the road, but I was buying McDonald’s through a plexiglass window and taking it to the Embassy Suites with no bar, no restaurant, no pool, no lights, no gym. You walk into this dark cavernous building, one person at the desk was also the room cleaner, was also the manager, and there was probably five people in the hotel. And you don’t get to talk to those people because of the distancing. They actually made us use separate doors. It was crazy back then, but as business started opening again, obviously working for DirecTV, I noticed that all the people that I knew that worked hospitality, hotels, restaurants, bars, the bars were open, the restaurants were open, but the people were gone. It was a wholesale change of hospitality staff. And I think anybody in Las Vegas probably saw that as well because there were a great number of people who just weren’t prepared to go back to work during the COVID-19 pandemic. It wasn’t worth it for them to mask up and glove up and go out and work hospitality and be next to people. And so the first thing I noticed was that DirecTV had technology in hotels, bars, restaurants, and no one knew how to use it. Because these people who were showing up were hired because they were willing to work a pandemic, not because they were trained in hospitality or cooking. A lot of restaurants had a bare minimum menu when they first opened up. That’s because that’s all the chefs could cook at the time. Somebody didn’t know how to cook a filet mignon, so you only got a sirloin. Those are easier to cook. So I started showing people how to use our technology because the remote is sitting there and it looked like a foreign object to them. And I started interacting with our customers and my boss found out and he’s like, “Well, if you’re gonna do that, “you better start sending me an email “and telling me who you’re talking to.” So I started doing a weekly email. And as the weekly email started getting passed around to the teams, I decided to turn it into a weekly blog. So I went to Blogspot. I just started a little weekly blog. Instead of doing a weekly email, I would just do a little public blog and anybody who wanted to look at it could look at it. But what happened that I didn’t understand at the time would happen was that more people who did not work for DirecTV were looking at it than people who worked for DirecTV. It was meant for my company, but other people were looking at it and they started asking me questions about DirectTV in a sales capacity. But I’m not a sales, I’m an engineer, but I know everything about DirecTV, so I started answering their questions. And I do it in a blog and it starts exploding, getting tons of traction on it and people are forwarding it out. And one of the things about Blogspot for anyone who’s used it is when you publish an article, a window pops up similar to LinkedIn. And it says, “Would you also like to publish here?” And you could do Facebook, LinkedIn, X. If it’s a picture, you could do Instagram. And I would do all of those. And then go back to Blogspot. And so after like eight months of doing Blogspot, I got an email from LinkedIn. And the email said paraphrasing, “You haven’t set up creator mode.” And we noticed you’ve never looked at your stats. And by the way, you should probably go and do that when you have a chance, Buster. And so I’m like, “Okay, well, let’s go look at it.” And I was averaging 8,000 views a month on a weekly column. And I wasn’t doing anything on LinkedIn. I wasn’t posting, I had no idea. The emails were going into my spam folder because at the time I thought, “LinkedIn is where you go if you need a job.” It wasn’t to communicate with other professionals, which is what I use it for. So when I really started honing down on it, I thought, “Ooh, this is a great platform.” So I sunsetted Blogspot. And now I’m a content creator for LinkedIn, around my work with DirecTV. And it’s more about general knowledge. Not sure when this will post, but in June of 2025, I posted a column about eight things you don’t know about DirecTV. Just simple things that people just don’t know. And I just put it out there for the, don’t try to sell it. Don’t try to give it away. I just say, “You may not know this, but here it is.” And stuff like that, I can get 25, 30,000 unique impressions a week, and it’s exploded. So now, on top of my engineering duties, I’m working with LinkedIn as a content creator, and I’m really enjoying that. Again, DirecTV, nine years now. I think they’re pretty happy with what I’m doing. I haven’t gotten in trouble. Okay, I’ve gotten in trouble a couple of times because all my columns are opinion pieces and not everybody agrees with my opinion all the time, but, and that is how I reconnected with you. Because I travel only by vehicle, because I carry tools and antennas and meters and probes, and I have to listen to something. And I saw one of your Career Downloads, and I thought, “Oh, Manuel, I know him. “I’m gonna listen.” And that’s when my eyes opened to what you’re doing. That’s, again, why I’m so grateful to be here.

Manuel: You bring up an important point, because similar to you, I did this originally, and we could talk about this later, but it was to provide value. Similar to you, to somebody else. I wasn’t like, “I’m gonna become the next Joe Rogan.” It was, “Oh, I have a need to fill.” Couldn’t find somebody else that was doing something similar to provide the information I was looking for for mentees and students that I would teach. And I was like, “Well, I’ll just do this.” Similar to you, not realizing the amount of people similar to yourself. Oh, hey, I see what he’s posting because we’re connected, and that growth from there. But I think part of why it happens is because you’re doing it to provide value. You’re not looking to, “O