Bruce’s with his invention.
Bruce has had a very creative and colorful life. He was born into a military family. His dad was a life time Marine, so they lived in several parts of the county. He went to 2 grammar schools, 2 junior high schools, and 3 high schools.
As a Marine his dad was always working more than one job. The military didn’t make much money back then. His monthly income was around $300. So they were probably the poorest family in the neighborhood. As a youngster, Bruce was always working with his dad. It was most likely his mother’s way of getting him out of the house. He did not like the having to work on the weekends, especially when you’re only 7 or 8 years old. His dad worked construction jobs, repairing cars and whatever else his dad could do to make ends meet. Bruce was always there to hand him the tools or whatever else he needed.
Doing this kept Bruce from the other things kids did on the weekends, like sports and such. But his training taught him to be an early entrepreneur. He has been called the entrepreneurs, entrepreneur many times in his life.
Because Bruce was not well versed in sports as a kid, and because he was always working, when he did get a chance to hang out or go to the park with friends he would find himself doing things the other kids didn’t have the courage to do. For instance as Bruce and the other kids would walk down the street to go play baseball or some other sport, he would see a lawn that needed cutting so he would go knock on the door and offer to mow their lawn. The first time he did that he was 8 years old when he finished cutting the lawn for a gentleman and was handed five bucks! That was huge money back then and he got hooked on work and started doing it more often.
Ten years later he realized that he was not shy. After going to 7 different schools, Bruce realized that being shy would get him nowhere.
He worked as bus boy in restaurants and worked on the marine base as a gas station attendant and at the Post Exchange stores. Then one day a friend’s father who worked at a leather store, like the Tandy leather company offered him a job. He started working and making things out of leather. One day someone saw this wide leather watch band Bruce was wearing and asked if he would make them one. Two weeks later he was in the leather business making belts and hand bags.
Then one day he was driving by a Saks 5th Avenue store. He was 19 years old; he walked in and asked to talk to the buyer, which he did, and he sold the chain a line of his hand bags and other women’s leather accessories. This went on in other department store chains for another 5 years then he sold that business because the competition got huge.
Next he got a job in the tile industry installing tile. The local union in San Diego only had 150 Union members and they were making $28 an hour back in 1975. That was more money than attorneys were making back then. So he asked a local tile contractor for a job. He said to get a job in the union you have to know how to set tile. So he told him that he would work for free for 6 months to learn how. He was hired after six months of free labor.
In 1978 he moved to Vail Colorado because while on a ski trip their, he saw that it had the worst tile jobs he had ever seen in public places. The town then only had 2000 residents. Bruce walked into the town office and asked how to get a tile contractor’s license. The person behind the desk said it will cost you $15 dollars. In six weeks he had 20K in the bank because he was the only trained tile setter in the state. After eight years living in Vail, he became tired of the 7 months of snow, and 3 months of mud. So he moved back to San Diego.
One day he walked into a Home Depot store. There was a young man giving a class on how to install tile. The young man seemed to have no idea how incorrect his instructions were. Bruce went home and said “I am going to make a series of videos on how to tile and sell them to Home Depot so they can sell them to their customers”. Six months later the videos were in all Home Depots sixty-three stores. They opened fifty stores a month for the next twenty years and his videos were on their shelves the entire time.
Because of Bruce’s video series he was asked by a TV network if he could make a TV show for them. It was the Discovery Network. They said they needed 13 shows per series. It took him a year to produce the shows in which he was the show host. The show was (American Home Repair). When he showed the series to the Discovery network they said they looked great but now they would only sign on TV shows who had a 26 week series in the can. So another year of producing the next 13 shows and he presented them to the network once again. They then said they were now only taking in programs that have 52 half hour shows in the can. At this point Bruce decided to discontinue making any more shows.
A month later, in 2000, he attended the “National Association of Television Produces” trade show conference. This was a show where cable companies come to buy TV Programs. He traded his 26 shows of the American Home Repair show to 37 cable companies. The condition was he would be able to have three TV commercials to drive traffic to Home Depot to buy his video series. His show was in 37 cities of 11 million households for 5 years.
Then YouTube came onto the scene in 2004. Selling videos became harder to do because of all the new free content.
After that, Bruce started producing a series of DVD’s on how to play guitar. He shot and recorded 23 DVDs of some of the top Grammy Award winning guitar teaches in the world. His website is called www.theguitarworkshop.com Bruce also started a company called www.casextreme.com because he invented an airline safe guitar case in addition to other airline safe flight cases because his guitar was broken on a plane trip. He has sold his cases to many well known bands such as Blue Oyster Cult, James Taylor, and Buddy Guy.
Most recently Bruce has been building apps and inventing new devices for water sports. Even though he is semi-retired, he just can’t turn it off. He is always creating something new and exciting.
Bruce will be involved in the video recording of our progress as we create Vuelosanto.