about

In 1990, after finishing my service in the Marine Corps reserves, I moved to Baltimore with every intention of enrolling at Towson State. A summer job at a music wholesaler had other plans for me. Something about the work, the inventory, the customers, the whole ecosystem of a small business oriented around something people actually loved, got under my skin in a way that a classroom never quite had. I never did enroll.

By 1997 I had worked my way up to general manager of a three store chain. A friend suggested we open our own place. I had no idea where to start, so I did what anyone without a business network does: I walked into a SCORE office. My mentor looked at the idea and told me it was a bad idea. I thanked him, took the templates home, wrote the plan myself, ran the financials, and opened DC CD on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, Washington DC.

DC CD was never just a record store. We let anyone unwrap any CD and listen before buying. We gave away promo records the labels sent us rather than selling them. We held live performances in the back, ran ticket raffles just to give people a reason to come through the door, and kept the lights on until two in the morning on weekends. A writer who visited us in 1998 described the feeling as walking into a friend's basement. That was exactly what we were after. We were not trying to extract value from the neighborhood. We were trying to belong to it.

That experience reshaped what I thought was possible and who I thought could do it. I went on to study economics formally and earned an MBA, not because business had become abstract to me but because I wanted to understand the systems underneath what I had already lived. People were often surprised to learn I was a small business owner. That reaction told me something important about how most people understand the barriers to starting something. My experience had been different. The hardest part was not the work. It was seeing the path clearly enough to take the first step.

If you can see it, you can build it.

That is what Endogenation is built around. Not the belief that starting a business is easy, but the belief that the primary barrier for most people is not capability or even capital. It is visibility. The opportunity exists. The need exists. What is missing is the moment when it becomes real enough to act on, and the support to move when it does.

I now teach economics at Crafton Hills College, mentor entrepreneurs as a SCORE volunteer in the Inland Empire, and am completing a doctorate in Educational Justice at the University of Redlands. The question running through all of it is the same one I have been sitting with since Adams Morgan: what would it take for more people to clearly see what is possible, and to believe they are the ones who get to build it?

Endogenation is my working answer to that question. Not a program or a service, but a long term commitment to making opportunity visible and building the kind of local economic infrastructure that grows from within, one person, one business, one community at a time.