[Scott]: Well, a couple of years ago I was involved in working at a pharmaceutical manufacturing job working night shift, and I hated it. That job took me away from my wife and kids, it ate up all my time, I was always tired, and never enjoyable to be around because my sleep schedule was flopping around all the time. It was a miserable job for me and it wasn't fulfilling at all.

So, when I was there I decided that at some point I needed an exit strategy. I didn't want to work there the rest of my life and that definitely was not the life I envisioned after spending eight years on submarines in the Navy.

So I got into wanting to work for myself. Work from home, you know, that whole dream of "working for yourself" and "doing whatever you want" and "living free" and "living your best life" and all that kind of stuff.

So, in 2017 I filed with the state and Ledger Dredger Business Solutions was born.

I get the same reaction every single time I tell somebody the name: they're like, "why the goofy name?" So, if you break it down: "ledger": this is started out as a bookkeeping business. I found a course online to become a bookkeeper for small businesses and so the "ledger" portion is the bookkeeping, and then "dredger" is a ship out at sea that searches the sea bottom and pulls up junk most of the time, but the whole idea was to pull up the gold out of the bottom and so that's the "dredger" portion, kind of relating back to my days in the Navy, and then "business solutions" is what we do. That's what our work is and that's how we serve you.

So, that was the the logic behind the name. It's a mouthful and people look at me weird, but that's alright, because you know what: it's me. So, anyway it started out.

I went through the course, I had the skills to do the bookkeeping, and I could tell that it wasn't a job that I was going to love, but as long as it replaced my income, at that point I didn't really care. Because as long as I can replace my income, then I can get away from my job. Then if I want to later on I can move again to something else.

I have a problem with what a lot of people call "shiny object syndrome," so I move around to a lot of different things, even away from business. I'm interested in a lot of things. I want to learn other things and once I learn it and understand it I move on to something else. I've always been that way as a just a kid and an individual. So, this kind of went the same way in in business, and most of the journey so far has been finding where I want to fit in in the crazy world of entrepreneurship.

So, starting out I was a bookkeeping business and I went to market it. I got through the course, and like I said I went to market it to other small businesses. I realized that I had a problem. That problem was generating potential leads and generating clients and bringing people into my world.

So, I decided since it was an online business that traditional marketing was definitely not gonna work, plus traditional marketing is super expensive. All the businesses now are starting to, or have been having, more success as a smaller business with online marketing and doing everything digitally.

So that's where I decided to go. I got into a community of online marketers who were very much in the same position I was: trying to get their feet off the ground and trying to get everything running and and all that.

I spent a ton of time learning and consuming and listening and reading and all of that stuff trying to figure out where and how this whole thing fit together with my business.

Then I ran into an even bigger problem, and that was the fact that I enjoyed marketing way more than bookkeeping. That didn't lead my wife to believe that this entrepreneurship thing was that awesome. The course cost a thousand dollars and she agreed to let me spend it and to chase my dreams and now how was I gonna tell her "oh hey, by the way, yeah I don't think this is gonna work out. So yeah, it's uh oops my mistake."

So I started to focus on this marketing thing and I decided "Fine, I love it. This it, this is what's going to give us freedom. This is where I'm gonna make my money. This is how am I gonna become a millionaire and all that other kind of stuff. I fit in here and so I started meeting with people and doing some marketing and doing some odd jobs and everything for free.

Yet again, the same problem showed itself: the fact that I couldn't generate enough traction and leads for my free clients.

So, I'm back at zero and I'm wondering "what in the world am I gonna do?" At the time I was okay to fail because I still had my full-time job. Then all of a sudden I didn't. I lost that job, and oh by the way, did I mention that my wife was eight months pregnant at that point? She was getting ready to give birth to our youngest in literal weeks and days - like no time at all - so that added more stress to our life needless to say.

It wasn't all bad though, because my wife and kids noticed that my mood had improved. I was home to be with the kids more and I was able to take care of more things around the house that I'd kind of let go and whatever else since I was so tired all the time before. All that kind of stuff. So, it wasn't all bad, but to say that it wasn't stressful is an understatement.

For the next six months after that we lived off of our savings and thankfully we had the ability to do that. We made it through the holidays and we started the New Year in 2019.

At that point it was down to the fact of "man, we're down to our last dollar." That's an awful feeling. If you've never been there be thankful. That's an awful feeling as a man, and as somebody who's supposed to be taking care of his household, his family, and security for his wife, and everything like that. So, I just had to go all-in at this point. I was at the point of no return.

Job interviews I went on didn't pan out for one reason or the next and whatever else, so I found a freelancing site and put up a profile.

Just prior to that, I had met with a friend of mine who works as a insurance agent. He originally got ahold of me to talk about marketing, and so I would show up and we'd have our mastermind sessions and stuff like that, and figure out how we could rule world and things like that.

So, we were talking and discussing marketing and all this. Well, at one point he had suggested this app that I had actually heard of, but I didn't know really what it was, and he asked me (since I had some familiarity with spreadsheets and things like that) if I could maybe help him out with it. I was like "yeah, sure, I'll take a look at it." Little did I know that that app was going to literally change my life in just a matter of days. 

I'm at home that night and I got a signed up for a free account, and started getting into it. I was like, "Man, this is amazing! This is it! This is what is going to change my life!" All the same feelings that I had about marketing and everything else. I had that excitement again.

So I was like "this is something that everybody needs," and I hadn't even heard of Airtable at this point. I had heard of it, but I hadn't had any experience with it.

So after that night I was like, "okay, this is something that literally every business owner needs from one degree to another."

The organization, the efficiency part of it, the management, the project management, the fact that you can replace your own CRM that you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for with something that's free is amazing! Literally something that everybody can use!

I came up with a daily goal sheet and call log for him, and automated that kind of stuff. I integrated it with other software to make it more efficient, to make it work better, to make it less tedious and manual. Less manual actions and all of this kind of stuff.

At that point I saw the value of what Airtable brought to the table (pun!). I saw the value in it, and that became my mission: to share this with the rest of the world. So basically from that point on I signed up for a freelancing site, because again I couldn't bring in my own clients (or I wasn't at the time) and so I needed to leverage some sort of traffic from somewhere. So when I signed up for the freelancing site, that gave me the ability to capture some clients and capture some traffic for free, and I didn't even have to pay for it.

So that was in in January or February 2019, and man, since then it's just been non-stop. I've had ups and downs, we've had more clients than we can handle at one point, had everybody wanting us to work with them, and wanting us to take care of them, and all of this. We had to really re-evaluate the way that we've done things this year and everything, but it's just been non-stop growing, it's been non-stop projects, and it's been a lot of fun above all.

That is our mission at Ledger Dredger: to serve other businesses, to serve everyone where they are, and serve everyone to the highest level possible. That is the mission. We use Airtable and Zapier, but at the most basic level is really to change the lives of businesses and business owners for the better.

Nobody should have to feel trapped as an entrepreneur. Nobody should have to own a job instead of a business. Nobody should have to do that. I don't want anybody to feel like I did working for somebody else, but I don't want them to feel that as an entrepreneur because I mean, you might as well just go back and work a nine-to-five.

That became very quickly the mission of our company. It was very apparent that this could be accomplished using Airtable and Zapier, and so that's the direction we started running and we haven't slowed down yet. As time goes on, you'll see us everywhere. You'll see us taking over the world.

So yeah, that's how I got involved with Airtable that's how Airtable changed my life, and changed how I run my business. I run everything - almost everything - through Airtable. Almost everything, but I could run everything if I really wanted to. There's some other things that are better suited for certain jobs, but yeah, I mean serving business is where we're at.

If you are interested in working with us schedule call and we'll get together and talk about it. I'll ask you to fill out a few things, a couple questionnaires or surveys or whatever, and that helps us expedite the process. We'll schedule a Zoom call and get on there and show you how we can use Airtable for your specific business, for your specific needs, and how can we can accomplish all those things using Airtable. It's not nearly as big of a problem as it may seem for you at this point.

We can help to alleviate some of that pain that you're feeling when you come to work every day, because your business is really owning you instead of the other way around. So get ahold of us, contact us. We'd love to work with you.