About

As you know my name is David Coakley. I’m 39 and born in May of 1959 in Fort Benning Georgia where my mom and dad (Bernice and Jack) brought me into this world. Yep, dad was an Army Ranger and Ft. Benning is where they get indoctrinated, which is why I spent my first year of life there.

Some of the chapters of my life since that first slap on my ass include:

- Grew up in Fairfax Virginia and Munich Germany (1970-1972) mostly with the bulk of my youth spent in Fairfax. I graduated from WT Woodson High School in 1977 and went to George Mason University starting in 1978.

- I majored in Business Management with a minor in Small Business Management. I chose this major because I had been entrepreneur-ing from the time I was just 8 and I wanted to continue down the path of entrepreneurship.

- I met my wife Kathy during my time at George Mason. She was attending James Madison College, but she bailed out of school to marry me at the ripe old age of 22 years old (I was 25).

- After graduating from GMU I spent some time working for Federal Express as a courier and it turned out to be a great place to gain some experience, as well as meet a lot of entrepreneurs working from their home offices.

- One Federal Express customer who I visited at least once a week was in the computer business and when he mentioned he was relocating his personal computer (PC) repair business (Impact) from his home into an office in nearby Manassas Virginia I persuaded him to give me a shot as “office manager”. So I took a major cut in pay and switched things into high gear in the PC industry. This was in 1985 right about the time PCs were flooding into businesses across the country.

- It turned out to be a great avenue into a high growth industry for someone who didn’t even know how to work a computer at the time. After a short time in the PC industry I ended up going to work for some Chinese businessmen who were amongst the first to start importing PC clones (generic IBM computers) from Taiwan. This is where I learned how not to treat customers and how not to treat staff.

- When they owner flew in from California and decided to cut my pay (straight commission) in half (just as I was getting to the point where my wife wasn’t rolling her eyes at me) I decided to jump into the PC wholesale business for myself.

This is where my “career” path started to get interesting….

On January 10th 1986 Comstor was born. Comstor was fueled by several things including; my burning desire to succeed as an entrepreneur, aggressively providing excellent customer service, and aggressive buying and pricing. By the end of 1986 we had sold over $3.5 million worth of PC stuff. Wild growth continued for the eight years I ran it right up until I decided to sell my baby to Sage Technologies, a public company.

After selling Comstor I moved my family over to Kula Maui Hawai’i to try something completely different. It was. Beautiful place to live, but difficult on an entrepreneur as the business climate there is not “warm” at all. I opened a small Hawaiian food restaurant named Tiny’s of Maui with two Hawaiian brothers, Pani and Boy) as partners. Although the food was ono (delicious) and the locals loved it we were in over our heads and we closed it down after less then 6 months of operation.

Not long after that we high tailed it back to Virginia.

I found work as a consultant for Network Solutions back when they still had a monopoly on domain names. After that short stint I partnered up with three great entrepreneurs that were trying to sell a business they had built from the early days of the internet.

more coming…