Getting to Know Clarke Echols:
The Professional Side

A Unique Individual

People who know Clarke Echols well willingly attest he is a truly unique individual possessing many talents — who not only holds strongly principled positions on a broad range of subjects, ... but is quite able to competently defend them.

He possesses a rare, broad, combination of well-developed skills — ranging from the professions to the trades and beyond. His depth of understanding across an unusually wide range of subjects and topics leaves many openly asking him, "How have you been able to learn so much about so many things?"

Once, when Clarke was still an engineering-support technician at Hewlett-Packard, the department secretary was too busy to type up some procedure documents, so Clarke got a typewriter, sat down at his workbench and was putting words on paper at about 50 words per minute when the engineering group manager stopped as he was passing by, and with obvious puzzlement in his voice, asked, "Is there anything you can't do?"

To put the question in perspective, Clarke had been designing sheet-metal assemblies, working with printed-circuit layouts, and other projects usually assigned to experienced engineers, yet he'd had no formal education in mechanical engineering.

Much of this know-how came from his interests as a teen-ager on the farm, and his early interests in electronics and ham radio in his later teens, and his getting permission to be trained by an HP tool-and-die maker in proper use of machine-shop equipment such as lathes, milling machines, and also sheet-metal fabrication equipment.

One client — a real-estate broker — remarked, "The thing that gets me isn't that he knows about a lot of different subjects ... but that he has such a competent, in-depth understanding in every area, and they're areas that many people find difficult to learn, much less master."

But he declines to claim any talents beyond what anyone could themselves develop if they spent a lifetime asking simple questions like, "How does that work?" ... or, "Why did they build that that way?" ... or, "How is this supposed to function and why doesn't it work correctly?"

That ... and reading lots of non-fiction books and useful magazines.

So How Did He Get There?
What's His Professional Background?

Clarke has a complex, diverse background. He grew up on a small family farm ... attended a small elementary and high school ... attended a small college ... worked 30 years for a large corporation while owning and running various small businesses during his college and corporate years ... all while helping manage the complexities of raising a large family of nine children, 15 grandchildren, and a great-granddaughter (so far). He and his wife, Brenda, have been married 44 years.

Here are some highlights related to his current professional consulting and copywriting services:

Professional and Educational Highlights

(In chronological order)

• BA in Physics from Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado with graduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. Licensed in 1980 as a Registered Professional Engineer (license not currently active).
• 30 years employment at Hewlett-Packard Company: 15 months as electronic technician on complex high-resolution, high-accuracy voltmeter assembly lines. In nine months, he reduced test and turn-on time for one voltmeter model from 8-10 hours per instrument to only 90 minutes.
• Moved to integrated-circuits manucturing for 1 year as an engineering technician, followed by quick advancement to Test Engineer (TE)-I, then TE-II, then TE-III, all in an unheard-of less than a calendar year.
• Promoted to Member of Technical Staff as an electronic engineer for 7 years in R&D, production engineering, and tooling design engineering.
• Moved from engineering in 1980 to HP marketing as a Senior Technical Writer. Promoted after a few years to Learning-Products Engineer until his retirement in late 1999 following 30 years' service.
• Wrote a long list of user manuals for various HP products during the 1980s for both hardware and software. Included field service handbooks, technical white papers for IT professionals, tutorials and reference manuals for the Unix (HP-UX) operating system.
• From 1989 through 1992 was solely responsible for maintaining, updating, and continually improving the HP-UX Reference — HP's main reference manual for the entire Unix operating system. His skill and competence on that project was recognized world-wide within HP, and also outside among many HP customers.
• When the HP-UX Reference was transferred to another area in the company, he was replaced by ten full-time learning-products engineers.
• He then began work in 1993 on a new online help system for HP's Unix system administration software. He initiated an entirely new approach to designing help into a modular format and layout similar to what websites became in later years, but that were nearly unknown to most people at the time.
  His help system was later subjected to usability testing in Germany, and test results reported his work as excellent-to-exceptional in usability, usefulness, and content quality.

As Business Owner and Operator

While Clarke was in college, he opened his own electronic service business and found work repairing consumer electronics, servicing 2-way radio systems, and commercial sound-systems contracting.

A year later, he purchased a corporation that owned a TV service shop and two cable-TV systems which he ran for two years then shut down when he left and accepted an employment offer from HP.

But nearly as soon as he arrived at his new job, he started another business in his home, servicing electronic equipment and TVs. He also did some additional sound-systems contracting.

In 1975, he began construction on a new home, doing all the work from concrete foundations and floors to framing, roofing, interior finishing and all other aspects, except laying carpet. The home eventually reached a total floor area more than 8000 square feet (1/5 acre).

Though inspectors tried hard, they found no building-code violations of any kind. One commercial building contractor who watched him build it remarked it's one of the most solidly constructed homes in the city. And after 33 years of heavy use, it's still in excellent structural condition, despite rain, snow, hail, and 100-mph chinook winds (though the interior shows some wear and tear from a third of a century of heavy use by a big family).

He then went on to engage in direct sales of consumer products, and did some consulting as a technical writer and as a business and financial consultant spanning more than 20 years.

After his retirement, he set up a home-based manufacturing business producing special equipment for woodworking, and tried a couple of other ventures before deciding it wasn't interesting enough to be worth-while.

While in college, he took courses in finance, marketing, retailing, accounting, insurance, advertising, and other classes. His reason: So he'd be better prepared to run his own businesses.

Though he found most of the courses weren't all that helpful, he strongly encourages anyone in college to take commercial finance and first-year accounting courses because they are useful in life.

Proof?: He does his own books, and has survived several IRS audits unscathed, including a complement from one auditor who loved how he does his books.

From Technical Writer to Marketing Copywriter

In 2005, after deciding other businesses weren't what he wanted to do, he stumbled into the field of marketing-copywriting.

Feeling a bit smug about his skills at HP (he was one of very the top-ranked technical writers/learning-products engineers in his department across the country), he signed up for what he thought would be an easy ride — a training course in commercial copy from American Writers and Artists.

He says it was a stunning surprise — a lot like a baseball bat right across the nose. He had no clue he was going to be taught by the very best copywriters in the world, many of whom are becoming his cherished friends.

He went on to learn from many other masters — Clayton Makepeace, Bob Bly, Daniel Levis, John Carlton, Don Hauptman, John Forde, Drayton Bird, Ben Settle, and numerous others. He says it's been a lot like drinking knowledge and know-how out of a high-pressure fire hose. It can make your brain hurt.

He describes the experience as being like a good brain surgeon deciding to become a heart surgeon. And it seems a good analogy. Technical writing is low-emotion, high-logic writing. Most advertising copy is rather opposite — more emotion, but still requiring good logic to prove the emotional promises.

It took a while to get his "sea legs" as a copywriter, but as he gained skills and experience, he found his rhythm, and the words started flowing again.

Then he made a brutal discovery:

One day — out of the blue — he noticed an important relationship:

When you combine the principles that make really good, effective online help with the principles that make highly effective advertising copy, you get gangbuster web pages.

That opened up an entire new array of services he could offer to business owners because at least 90% of the business websites online have serious mistakes in structure, content, and other aspects.

Mistakes that are costing businesses piles of money — and the owners are often completely unaware of them.

"Little" problems like home pages that take a quarter of an hour to load on a 56K-baud dial-up connection, or copy so unreadable that site visitors leave in disgust.

Or navigation that's impossible to figure out, ... or lack of useful, usable content on the site.

Such mistakes he says are commonplace, and they destroy a company's credibility with users. He insists that such mistakes can be fatal to online performance and profitability.

Yet business owners are left thinking it's "just the Internet" — not their site that's the problem. They don't know the site designer isn't even aware of these issues because most designers never learn about site usability and too many don't seem to care.

Yes — he does hold very strong opinions about what's wrong with a lot of websites and a lot of advertising and marketing communications in the B2B and the B2C markets.

And he's lined up his skills to help business owners close that profit gap and improve their bottom line by fixing the holes or implementing better methods for communicating a useful message to their prospects and customers that the prospects and customers will be interested in knowing about.

Reclaim Your Profit-Gap Losses

So if you're wanting to find the holes in your marketing picture and close them...

Identify your profit gap and close it...

And gain more loyal customers in the process...

Give Clarke a call at  (970) 667-6736,  or email him to find out how he can help you.