Hello my name is Harlan Mathews and I have lived in the Boulder, Colorado area for the past 30 years.  I was born in Blue Island, Illinois, which is a south suburb of Chicago.  After high school in Blue Island, I went to college at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, IL. where I got my two bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and physics.  After I graduated, I got a job out in Boulder with IBM and never turned back.  I had been a practicing engineer for 28 years until I got laid off in 2004.

I enjoy traveling and have been in the Caribbean, Europe, Thailand, Fuji, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala Morocco, and Mexico.  One of my hobbies is photography where I specialize in black and white landscapes of the Colorado mountains and Utah canyons, as well as figure photography, having my own darkroom to develop and perfect the images.  I also like camping and backpacking in the mountains, always with my camera.  My other major hobby is woodworking, building furniture and wooden bowls, some of which I sell in a local gallery.  I have built household furniture such as coffee tables, bookcases, end-tables, and even a pencil post bed, all from my own design (except the bed).  A Japanese style lamp I built was featured in the premier edition of Fine Woodworking's "Home Furniture" magazine in the winter of 1994.  I also collect antiques and am always up for browsing a new store or flea markets.  I like museums and art galleries as well, and appreciate impressionist and modern art like Monet and Miro, but there's nothing better than watching a sunset on a beach.

For fun I go shopping for antiques, watch movies, surf the web, golfing, do woodworking,  do photography, or go camping.  I love music and listen to such eclectic bands as Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, B. B. King, MC 900 FT Jesus, B52s, Weather Report, Miles Davis, and Lightning Hopkins.  I also love animals and am a vegetarian.

My Career

I have an electrical engineering degree that I got at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, IL.  My first career job was with IBM here in Boulder, which led me to disk drive engineering that I continued throughout my career until now.  I have worked at Storage Technology Corp. in Louisville, MiniScribe Corp. in Longmont and Maxtor in Longmont, CO.  I had many good years in this field, having achieved 16 patents and a good salary.  However, it came with a price.  Disk drive engineering was very stressful and uncertain, as the marketplace is highly competitive, new companies come and go, and layoffs are common.  I survived all this until the summer of 2004 when I got laid off myself.  It was devastating to my self-esteem as well as my pocketbook!  I sincerely reviewed my career choice and my future outlook.  I did not have a pension, only a 401k account which would last only 3 years or so.  Indeed, I heard that only 2% of people retire financially secure, and of those, 75% have their own business.   I decided at this point to join them and have my own business. 

I started out with Liberty League International.  They have an excellent training program and support, however the "prospecting" required you to be on the phone a lot, calling people from lists or whatever, and following a script.  This involved dealing with rejections and developing a good "posture" to come across on the calls as a confident business person.  I found out that I am not good on the telephone.  I could follow the script, but it didn't sound natural.  As a matter of fact there were always names at the end of my lists whom I didn't call because I could not bring myself to do it.  I am just not comfortable on the phone.  So I quit and started searching for other options.

Enter Coastal Vacations.  Coastal has a call center which takes the calls of interested parties for you, so you do none of the selling!  This sounds too good to be true, but it is.  I joined them in the beginning of 2006 and am very satisfied building my business.  Do yourself a favor and visit the Coastal Vacations call center.

So that's what is going on in my life.  It was nice meeting you and I hope you can check out my "Perfect Home Business" on the Home Page.