My guest today on the Join Up Dots free podcast interview is Richard McLemore, a man who in his time has worked for the Man, Uncle Sam, and as a entrepreneur, building three businesses from scratch. Starting his adult life in the Special Forces, he served his time under the tutorage of Uncle Sam, before entering the corporate world and looking for his thing. And it’s fair to say that it took some time before things started going in the direction he wanted. As he says in his own words ” After my first position I moved from Oklahoma to Houston, Texas as credit manager, and within one year got promoted to Zone Credit manager covering four offices. During that time I kept on going out with the HP sales engineers, and could see that these guys had great technical knowledge but never returned with an order. Watching this time and time again, I started to believe that I could do the sales role, and after discovering they were paid twice my rate made active moves to transfer across. However the management were less than keen on this movement, saying no one from finance had ever moved into sales. After a year, I did, and things started to come together for me. I trained for 1 year, won 3 President Club awards – 2nd year, sold more than half of the worldwide inventory of HP LaserJets, even though I didn’t know how to actually turn the self-demo on” And what makes this guy fascinating, and is truly it seems the piece of the puzzle that brings everything together is his understanding that bridges are there to be built. He can see how the joining up the dots of knowledge is the key to success. Building bridges between areas of expertise, allowing the big picture to be viewed in the quickest way forward. And now he has set about building those bridges in the spiritual home of connections LinkedIn, where he has become a recognised expert in how to develop your network for maximum effect. So is there a piece of the puzzle that people miss as they try to create their own track of success? And does he look back and see his dots joining up, or has it been an eclectic group of stumbles and falls? Well lets find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only entrepreneur himself Mr Richard McLemore