Meet Kevin

May 01, 2007

Posted by Kevin Lofgren.

To those who have yet to meet me, I'll warn you now: I'm a bit verbose (in case the text overflowing your browser window didn't clue you in).

I grew up wanting to be a professional musician. Now, if my family had stayed in eastern Tennessee, I may have ended up as the second coming of Earl Scruggs. But we moved to Duncanville, Texas, and I ended up, well, I ended up starting Farstar. In high school I started a band called VOX (all caps were cool, trust me) – I was the drummer and co-lead vocalist. Generally speaking, I sucked. But as a 17-year-old, I rocked. Hard. I even wrote and recorded "The Class of '88" (almost available on iTunes), produced a video for it, and sold VHS tapes of it to my classmates. I donated the proceeds to the class fund, which is pretty much the only reason I became remotely popular in high school.

After dominating the Duncanville music scene, I headed to Baylor University. Since I was destined for rock stardom, I chose what seemed like the easiest major: Radio, TV and Film. In case you've already forgotten, I now run a technology-based marketing company.

While at Baylor, I was recruited to sell books door-to-door during the summer for Southwestern Company. I did this for five summers (infer what you will) and was in the top 1% in sales in the country. It's a delightful story that actually impacts Farstar today – you can read more about it here. Suffice it to say, I learned how to effectively persuade people to take action by helping them see the benefit to themselves that taking said action would bring. Just read the whole story and it'll make sense.

Selling books is also, oddly enough, where I was first exposed to the internet in 1992. We were told to include Prodigy in our book bags to sell. It was a DOS-based online portal (it wouldn't let you onto the actual World Wide Web until 1994) and very basic, but the exposure obviously triggered something in my brain that would manifest itself years later.

Eventually, I earned my degree and entered the real world. Which, sadly, did not include the reality of me being a rock god in the vein of Steve Perry, Joe Perry or even Perry Como. And after earning what I did selling books, low-paying gigs as a roadie just weren't going to cut it. By now the web had started taking off, so I learned HTML and Photoshop and started designing web pages. Were they awesome? By today's standards, no. But back then, they were better than most.

I then managed to fake my way into Texas Instruments as a contract IT support guy. Instead of telling the folks I was helping to "Move!" I would drop a bug in their ear that I wasn't really an IT guy – I was a website designer. After three months of this friendly harassment, I managed to snag a job as a webmaster (remember that term?) in TI's nascent web division. I stayed there a year and soaked up all the knowledge and training I could.

Early in 1998, I landed at the place I had been receiving my TI training from, WorkFlow Designs. Mike Reyher was one of the partners there, and he became something of a mentor to me. I was there for about a year and a half as a UI Designer/Information Architect until the company was purchased by an evil corporation who shall rename nameless. But during my time there, I learned most of the workplace cultural philosophies that we embrace at Farstar – and most of those I learned from Mike.

I then went to join my friend Kevin Dahlstrom – whom I had met at WorkFlow – at an internet start-up he had co-founded called iChoose. I acted as the Director of Creative and Usability Sciences (fancy!), which meant I was doing stuff for the website, the software application, the marketing collateral, sales demos, etc. with a team of eight creative and technology folks. To be honest, we were pretty dang good. Even though we had our own ad agency of record (The Richards Group/ClickHere), we rarely used them.

Now we get to the part about Farstar and how it came to be. It's really a story that's suited to its own blog, so here it is: How We Came to Be.

Outside of Farstar (yes, I do have a life outside of Farstar, I think), I spend as much time as I can with my wife, Shari, and our daughter and son. I'm also an avid photographer, music geek, video production aficionado and, surprise, tech nerd. As a small business owner, I firmly believe in giving back to the community.

Finally, my dreams of rock godhood have not completely faded away. I play guitar on Rock Band with my band “The Salsa Bravos.” Sean is the bassist and the drummer is ex-employee and still good friend, Hai.  We are currently auditioning lead singers.

And for the record, I can shred.

kl

Kevin founded Farstar in 2002, proselytizing his own unique take on marketing. Today, he finds converting new followers easier, but no less rewarding.