We have known Troy for many years. As a homeschool student in high school, his first job was as a two-week temporary assistant to the most junior employee in the company. Troy was hired to move heavy archive boxes in the basement. Since this was his first real job, Troy determined to do is best regardless of how menial the tasks. Hauling boxes doesn't sound like an impressive start to a career, does it? However, it was amazing to see how God was working. While doing his work assignments, Troy was diligently learning the archiving system of the company. He also tried to perform each task quickly so he would be available to do other "little" things for his boss. (pg. 13)
Translation: Troy had the grunt-level go-fer position that is the best job that most high school students can aspire to. Oh, sure, it's been dressed up in nicer terms, but I had roughly the same job as a "bagger" or "utility worker" at a local grocery store. The job pays minimum wage and consists of doing random menial chores like bagging groceries, collecting carts out of the parking lot, and cleaning the bathrooms.
Troy may have been a Christian home schooled dynamo - but any ambitious teenager would behave the same way. While I was a bagger, I volunteered to learn any and all tasks that baggers could do. I used my strong memory skills to learn where items were in the store so that I could work as the floating bagger who would get replacement items when an item had broken in someone's cart. Additionally, my bosses knew that I was able to work independently on chores without goofing off. My work ethic and skills impressed my bosses and I was given more responsibilities like working at sorting returns (which is more complicated than it sounds) and sitting in on job interviews.
His temporary position was extended, and after a couple of months, he replaced his " boss" as archiving manager for the company. Throughout the next year or so, he completely redesigned the archive system from the bottom up. This included designing a new database and tracking system for more than 4,000 boxes of information. (pg. 13)
This paragraph made me curious about the size of the company that Troy worked for. The company has over 4,000 boxes of archived information - but Troy took over the archives department after only a few months on the job. Was Troy in charge of turning over the archival documents as they were not needed any more? Was anyone doing that - or is this 20 years worth of old financial records that are taking up space and being a potential security risk?
Designing a new database and tracking system takes a few hours to a few days of work maximum even in the old days of computer systems that weren't as easy to use as modern programs. The majority of the time involved in changing over an information retrieval system is coding the archives with the new system. It's tedious as hell - and assuming that the previous system was accurate - can be done by someone with minimal training for fairly low pay.
This is another area I have some personal experience. I took over a project for a professor that two undergraduates had worked on for several years. The undergraduates had had excellent lab skills - but their organizational skills were sadly lacking. On this single project, there were three separate and contradicting coding systems being used on different plant species, tissues and slides. Equally exasperating for me was the lack of any kind of organizational system for the pucks of paraffin wax that had the plant specimens. (There were over 300 wax pucks stashed in moving boxes.)
Sorting out the three existing code system took me around 20 hours total. Creating a code system that did not add any new contradictions while resolving the old contradictions took about 2 hours total. Planning the system to store the pucks and slides was less than an hour's work. Cataloging the slides and plant parts in the paraffin along with assigning a code for relative quality of the slide or remaining part took several weeks of full-time work.
What level of work was Troy doing? Was he sorting the plant bits or archive boxes into the right area - or was he reviewing the material and determining its value? The first example is a low-paying job that can easily be replaced; the second is the type of skill that can build a career.
Computers have always interested Troy, and he found himself helping various people in the company with small projects in his spare time. While not an expert in formulas or the financial aspects of spreadsheets, his desire to learn enabled him to create, fix, and modify spreadsheets. Thus he began to be used in the process of the converting the company spreadsheet from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel. After a while he was doing spreadsheet and database consulting full-time. He completely redesigned the company's largest financial spreadsheet (which was made up of 17 inter-working spreadsheets) in a 3-month long development project.
Troy began working for minimum wage, and while still in high school his hourly rate had climbed $25 per hour. Our experience has been similar. I have seen that if a young man is prepared properly, he will excel in the workplace. (pgs. 13-14)
Troy began working for minimum wage, and while still in high school his hourly rate had climbed $25 per hour. Our experience has been similar. I have seen that if a young man is prepared properly, he will excel in the workplace. (pgs. 13-14)
The important bits of a spreadsheet are those formulas that help a company keep track of those financial aspects. If Troy wasn't able to correctly translate the formulas from Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Excel, that means he was doing basic data entry. Anyone who can type can do the data entry between two programs - and nowadays there's probably an online file converter that can do the data entry in a tenth of the time.
I'm confused by the statement that Troy "redesigned" an entire company's financial spreadsheet when the same paragraph states that Troy's not an expert in business finance. He may have successfully changed programs or simplified the design somehow - but I'd be very hesitant redesign an entire system in an area that I know very little about.
So - at about Troy's age - I was in college taking an instrumental chemistry class. The labs for that class often took a month's worth of lab time (and lots of outside of class time) to complete. To keep track of the data that we collected required spreadsheet documents that contained 20-30 separate inter-working pages. The main difference is that the spreadsheet was the final project for Troy; for me, the spreadsheet was a tool used to analyze an experiment and make conclusions. I bring this up because there is a huge hole in Troy's business plan. He is extremely vulnerable to being replaced by someone who has Troy's computer skills AND business experience as well.
So ends the parable of Troy. The next two pages are about how nervous parents are about raising sons and how hard it is to make choices about how to educate their sons - but Maxwell has a lot of answers in this book!
The chapter wraps up with a bunch of character vignettes based off of people Steve really knows. Three of them stuck with me:
Larry tried college after high school but then quit. He worked in his parents business for several years until it closed. His income averages $100,000 a year as a self-taught programmer. His wife is home full-time with their large family. They give everything that he earns over their needs to missionaries. (pg. 16-17)
This - without meaning to be - is a mirror to what the average CP/QF student faces - and hopes for. The percentage of Americans who have earned a bachelor's degree by age 40 has been stagnant at around 33% since the end of World War II. The change has been that far more women and people of color now receive bachelor's degrees than was the case in the 1950's. Another change is that far more people start - but never finish - undergraduate degrees.
Many home school students are well-prepared for college - but many CP/QF students face major educational hurdles as well. Extreme sheltering of teenagers from "controversial" or "humanist" literature means that these students have far more reading to do to keep pace in English or humanities classes. All of the CP/QF approved science curricula I have seen are lacking the depth and rigor that is expected of a college-prep science curriculum. Far too many blogs have very detailed explanations of why their kids don't really need advanced math during high school; that kind of thinking leads to students needing multiple remedial courses in college.
This is the first place that noted something about family businesses; roughly 50% of new businesses close within the first five years. The Maxwell Family has redesigned their business model once and has one defunct business; that's better than the average business odds since they have at least three working businesses by my count.
I'm very curious about how Larry became a self-taught programmer. Was it something he studied on the side while in college and working in the family business? Did he take classes? Did he use his local library?
I'm also have lots of questions about Larry's business. How long did it take Larry to reach a point where he averaged $100,000 per year on programming business? What's the range of his yearly income? Is that income net or gross? $100,000 of income sounds like a lot of money - but my total benefits package when I was a teacher was estimated at $64,000 because of the cost of health insurance for my husband and I. A large family could easily reach $30,000 a year in health insurance costs alone.
I find the mention of giving their "extra" money to missionaries grating. There's no reason to go telling the world how a family chooses to give to different non-profits.
Eric had his own graphic design business for 2 years. He loved throwing his heart into making it successful. Unfortunately, he would have starved had he not been living with his parents. His father wanted to teach Eric programming, But Eric only had eyes for graphic design and wasn't interested. (pg. 17)
Pretty sure "Eric" is Steven Maxwell's second son Christopher. From what I've read on the Maxwell's blog and books, Nathan does everything correctly while Christopher does nothing right. Nathan transitioned smoothly from home school to a career to a business of his own; Christopher refused to follow the exact same path and hasn't been as successful career wise. Nathan (and eventually Joseph and John) managed to save up enough money to buy a home within walking distance of Steve and Teri's house in their early to mid-twenties. Christopher put off buying a house until the geriatric age of 29! Near as I can tell, the only thing his parents have approved of is his choice of wife who has provided them with about one grand-kid every 18 months since they married.
Steve has an electrical engineering degree. He spent 20 years in good corporate jobs. The last three years of his corporate work, Steve's oldest, homeschooled son, who have not gone to college, earned a significantly larger salary than his father. (pg. 17)
The effect Steve's story is supposed to have on a reader: "Wow! My kid can out-earn an electrical engineer right out of college if we follow Steve's advice!"
The effect the story had on me the first time I read it: "What the hell happened to Steve's career? Something went seriously awry for him if his degree-free kid was out earning him..."
In the last post, I laid out what I think happened based on information available online. Steve Maxwell worked for an aerospace company that lost a major defense contract. By the time Nathan graduated home school, Maxwell's employer was in a death spiral. It's completely possible that Steve Maxwell wasn't working full-time by the time that Nathan started working at Western Auto; a part-time compromise would have saved his employer a great deal on salary and benefits while allowing Steve to start his fledgling printing and computer forms business. With Maxwell's experience and contacts, starting a business in the Kansas City area would have allowed his growing family to avoid another cross-country move. Being self-employed would also burnish his growing credentials as a leader in the CP/QF movement. (I can never remember if the Maxwell's are ATI, Vision Forum or independent....)
Well, that's the end of the first chapter. Next chapter talks about the qualities that determine the earning potential of a job.
It's surreal to hear about young kids in their early twenties being able to buy a house. We live in the Vancouver, BC area, and housing prices are such that one bedroom condos often go for over $250,000. A small detached house is likely to be a million or more, unless you want to live far out from the bigger cities (and possibly end up spending several hours per day commuting). Buying a house for a large family is prohibitively expensive, and renting if you have multiple children can be a huge hassle since landlords are able to pick and choose tenants because so many people are moving into the area and need places to live. The CP/QF lifestyle isn't terribly feasible around here.
ReplyDeleteYeah it's definitely not a feasible lifestyle in most large cities. I think that's part of why CP/QF leaders often disparage large cities.
DeleteIt's different-ish in the middle of the US. Population density is lower because the population spills out into suburbs. This means that there are (usually) a wider spread of housing costs both because land is much cheaper and because neighborhoods move in and out of popularity so an area that was highly desirable 50 years ago slowly became low-income housing while an area that was low-income has become desirable.
DeleteI'm tempted to purchase a copy of the Maxwell book about buying a home - but I haven't been able to find a secondhand copy so I'd have to purchase it from the Maxwells. (I try diligently to not feed the crazy financially :-) ). Based on the pics on their blog, the Maxwell boys buy houses that are in the lower 25% of the quality in the area then re-furbish the entire house. This means that they trade a low purchase price (think <$50,000) for lots of "free" labor from their siblings - especially the three unmarried sisters. The PDF of the book available at the store included a person who purchased a ~800ft two bedroom house for $57,000 written up as if this was the bestest idea ever. Even in the Midwest, that's an insane over payment for a very small house.
Where I live realtors sometimes try to point out to buyers that they are often trading a lower price for a larger house very far out, for other expenses. If you live in a less expensive area outside my city, you have to own two cars as public transit is limited or non-existent. This comes with attendant costs of insurance, parking, maintenance, fuel etc. I live in a very small (by modern american standards) house in the middle of the city. I live two blocks from the metro, one block in either direction from several bus lines, have access to bike share, and can easily walk to my work. Our family owns one car which we use on average twice a month for weekend work. Once it dies, we won't buy another.....
DeleteI think the Maxwells are unusual in that none of the men appear to need to commute to jobs (its really very unclear to me what their jobs are....but its obvious that they do not have to travel to an office much less an office where they are expected to be in place and working by a certain time).
They also clearly trade a low-price for a large amount of work, work that they, unlike most people, seem to extract from their under-employed siblings. However, they would still need to pay for the supplies (cabinets, showers, toilets, tile etc.). I would love to see how much those costs add to the very inexpensive house price....
I should add that realtors also try to get people to factor in the time loss for a commute in my city. People who could get into city center in 20 minutes from the suburbs across the road if you calculate distance alone actually spend one to two hours on that commute during peak commuter hours. Also, in the twenty years I have lived here, peak commuter hours have gone from 7-9 am and 5-7 pm to 6-10 am and 4-8 pm. In other words, its almost impossible to hold a job with standard hours and avoid spending hours on the road if you live across the river....
That should read across the river, not the road....
DeleteI hear you on the trade-offs of locations! I grew up an old suburb of a city in Michigan that had a mass transit system plus a small grocery store and fast food within walking distance. My daily commute was 7 minutes to drive around 6 miles to the neighboring old suburb where I worked.
DeleteThen I moved to a rural location when I married. No mass transit. There's a small grocery store 6 miles away and a Dollar General in the same area; everything else is a 30 minute drive away. My HS teaching job was a 35 minute drive in good weather; well over an hour in bad weather. (The other teachers rearranged their plan periods so I could have a 1st hour plan that way if the roads were terrible I had from 6am to almost 9am to make the drive. Our school rarely closed since many of our students relied on the meal program to get breakfast and lunch.)
The Maxwell men work in a variety of self-employed businesses - and have had a decent number of businesses fail as well. Most of their businesses are completed through online methods like computer security, web page hosting and GIS agricultural designs - but Christopher also does some event photography and John has a realtor's license. I assume Christopher does meetings with potential clients out of his house or at a public location; John works with a realty company that has over 1,000 realtors so I assume he has access to an office space somewhere. I'll line it all out person by person and business by business in a future post.....