Beyond all of my abilities and talents, my most coveted has been seeing the greatness in others and using all of my means to further the amazingness of these individuals and sharing them for the world to hear, see and witness.

Everything began for me as a 9 year old boy obsessed with business and advertising or what I saw at the time…artist who not only got their “drawings” on TV and in magazines but were also paid for it. Over several years and plenty of failed ideas my experiences chasing that dream career eventually lead me to my life’s purpose which was the unwavering focus on leading talent, companies or organizations well beyond their short term goals.. all I had to do was build a company that had the pieces to accomplish it ALL, and since then, there has been nothing aside from family, 5 and God more important to me.

The “BIG” is for, BIG VISION !

In 2002 I started a company called Independent Broadcast Network, constructed out of the idea of building the first national user submitted video based entertainment news platform. With no technical training, lots of incompatible software programs on my Windows 98 computer well outside of its capacity , I tried for a year to figure out how best to make it easy for 50 different participants in different major cities to upload their “MTV news styled” music news and art video segments to my database server all the way to my office in Virginia and then somehow auto upload on my website for the world to be able to see. Though it would take nearly an hour to upload 5mins, I was making it happened… AND THEN this thing called YouTube launched in 2005,… and this might not make sense now but back then, - I was devastated! Yes, you might think now that this should have been a relief for me, but I looked at it (at the time) as ..if someone had beat me to creating MY idea! Sadly , not for one minute did I considered how it could could be the tool that would help me accomplish my core idea which was creating a national independent media brand, simply because at the time YouTube then was waaay different then the social media powerhouse, video sharing, creative platform we know today :

What YouTube looked like in2005 then & Now

Around the same time I launched a subsidiary digital marketing company and created- Quezt-Lynx (Lifestyle Navigation) , which was the first entertainment and social event mobile text (sms) advertising platform in the Virginia- Hampton Roads 7 cities. Aside from only being able to send ‘event notifications’ to no more that 50 mobile phones at a time via an AOL email address and once again- software not used as intended, IT WORKED, and the 120 people (a lot for that time) who did eventually signed up- loved it. But in order to service more venues and more end users, I needed a lot more tech than I could afford at the time and though the venues could see the benefit for them, it was beyond their understanding thus not worth them paying for it up front. In the early 2000’s, mobile texting was limited to160 Character, no video!, no photo!, no audio! and a very small black& white screen...extremely primitive compared to todays phone standards (2 years prior to 1st gen iphone release which few could afford) once again, I was thinking bigger than the technology that existed.

All these years later, I have learned greatly from these and many other “near misses” of an idea completely materializing, is that, how important it is to see things through- beyond what others around you seem not to completely understand. I have also learned that in our age (pre A.I.) everything is constantly evolving at a much rapid pace because of technological innovation and how important it is to evolve your ideas with these changes because the missing piece to your puzzle could come into existence tomorrow. Youtube WAS the puzzle piece, advanced smart phones were my puzzle piece…or someone else you know may have the ability to take your idea to new heights,…I was and am always thinking bigger than the world and restrictions I have before me.

Today… I search for those people and I create those puzzles and all their pieces and we make dreams and celebrate our successes together and cultivate the future ourselves.

Jimmy T. Raiford

(IBN) SuperBig™