We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Korky Kathman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Korky below.

Alright, Korky thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you have a hero? What have you learned from them?

My hero has always been my father. He was truly a renaissance man. He, like many of the parents of my generation, was a product of the Great Depression. He worked his way through college, but that life was interrupted by World War II, when he was drafted in 1941. He had been studying to be a journalist, but now served in communications and electronics, stationed in the Philippines. He would later be captured and spent 3.5 years a s prisoner of war, surviving the infamous Bataan Death March.

He survived on a diet of rice and green soup, sleeping on a bedbug and lice-infested bed and conquered multiple bouts of dysentery and a ruptured appendix. So here is a man that could have been bitter and angry about his life being pulled out from under him by external forces beyond his control. Yet, after being discharged, he married and resumed his life in the newspaper field. But, he also worked a second job as a TV and electronics repair man, combining the two skills he had diligently learned. But that wasn’t all. My father had a motto: NEVER STOP LEARNING! “When you quit learning you stop living,” he would say.

My father had, at a young age, learned carpentry, as his father (my grandfather) was a cabinet maker. Now, I can tell you, my Dad was a craftsman in every way. One morning, he was sitting at breakfast with us during a visit and (he was well into his 70s), and my wife was looking in the paper and saw a picture of a corner shelf on sale at a local furniture outlet. She commented that it would really look nice in our kitchen. Dad asked to see it and he told us he thought that the price was too much. Two weeks later he delivered that precise shelf to the exact size and specification that he’d seen in that picture. All handmade, from scratch in his workshop at home.

I can remember him trying to teach me his woodworking craft when I was younger. He was especially gifted at making custom speakers for audio systems. He constructed and built the cabinets out of solid wood (usually Philippine mahogany) and then design the electronics for the multiple speakers and the cross-over networks. When he was done, he’s always put multiple layers of shellac on the wood. Each layer would be meticulously applied with a brush, being careful not to introduce too many air bubbles. After it dried, which could take overnight, he would sue steel wool to rub the surface down and get rid of the rough feel, until it was exceptionally smooth. He would test it by taking a cotton cloth and toss it across the surface….if it slid easily across, then it was ready…for the next coat.

As a youngster, this seemed way too much. It looked great and sounded great! One coat was enough, I thought! It was there, however, that I learned that doing things “Just good enough” wasn’t going to cut it in life. You see, if you want to create something…to build something…you should be proud of it. “A job worth doing, is worth doing well,” Dad would say. So, I suffered through the multiple layers of shellac. Those speakers lasted me through my college days and well into married life. People would marvel at how good they sounded! They always wanted to know where I bought them. I told them, they weren’t bought, but crafted by hand and there wasn’t another pair of speakers like them in the world!

My father retired from the then Dallas Times Herald after 40=plus years of working there. When the newspaper was making its transition from cold type to computer-based printing in the 1980s, my Dad was the one that they tapped to go and learn about how to install, operate and program those brand new systems. Funny that just a few years before that, he and I had build my first computer from a kit. I’m not so sure that the bug hit us both at that time. I was a pre-med student at the time in college, but decided that I’d also take some new tracks in mathematics that were being offered in computer programming and design. My Dad went on to manage those computer systems at the newspaper for years.

After his retirement, he wasn’t satisfied with just sitting around, doing nothing. He was a very faithful member of the Scottish Rite and chose to serve others for the next 20 years of his life. He learned a new skill…cooking. Every week for that period of time he and a few others would make lunch for the underprivileged. He worked circuses that provided joy to children. And, he used computers, yes he had more that one, to publish mailing lists and newsletters for several of the masonic charities.

Never stop learning.

He built….yes built his own violin at 82 years old and learned to play it.

At 86, he built, yes build from scratch a greenhouse and learned everything about how plants grew. His backyard was a showcase of a perfect lawn and more tomatoes than he could possibly ever give away. Oh, yeah, he build his own compost and learning everything about it…I think that’s what made the tomatoes so big and tasty!

Into his 90’s he finally became an author and wrote about his ordeals during the war. He toured around Southeast Texas and New Mexico giving talks about it.

He passed away two weeks after his 95th birthday…but he never stopped learning before that.

Perhaps this is way too much. But in a world where new technologies are being introduced every day and the amount of information we process is exponentially growing, I think it’s probably a very good thing that I learned something very vital from my father….Never Stop Learning.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My life story is one where I think I was always encouraged by my parents to pursue things openly. As a child I suffered from a lot of food allergies and had severe eczema that caused a lot of challenges. But, as I’ve told my kids, challenges help us find our passions. I was always on the smallish side, taking after my mom who was barely five feet tall, versus my Dad who was over six feet tall. But my Mom was the dynamo… the Energizer Bunny if you will. She was the Room Mom, the PTA board member, the Band and Orchestra Mom. So I learned from a young age that you didn’t let your challenges get in the way, you learned from them and moved forward. I wasn’t a football player, but instead, because of asthma problems, i played the oboe in band and orchestra. That led to me picking up other instruments…piano, organ, guitar and other instruments. I co-authored a symphony for band back in my high school and college days, also. The point being…you learn, you grow and you find ways to allow your challenges to provide a channel for the expression of your passions.

At our company, we look at our end service as an exercise in creativity from start to finish. People may look at us and say hey you design websites that advertise or sell things. And they’re. right. There is a very definitive technical aspect to that for sure that is the product of learning new skills and using them properly. There is an analytic part to that process also as you look at target markets and messaging. However, throughout the entire project, creativity has a very major role in the translation and interaction of the analytic and technical with the vision of the service you deliver. You have to take into consideration color, design, human behavior and natural instincts. All of that is ruled by the creative, so I look at my background in music as a very pivotal aspect to my success as a provider to my clients. It was that creative part of me that not only benefits our customers, but also provides US with our own satisfaction of the end product.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

This might be one of those stories that sounds more like a resilience story rather than a pivot, but in either case I can look back and be very content.

For most of my childhood and adolescence, I had it in my mind to be a medical doctor. Maybe it was because I had a lot of doctors in my life, all very kind and competent, or maybe it was that my Mom was always kind of pushing me that way. When I went off to college, that was my goal. I enrolled in college and immediately assumed my major as pre-med. Now at this college, to be pre-med, you had to major in either Biology, Chemistry or Physics and minor in one of the other of those. That was never really STATED explicitly in the school catalog however, but was “traditional”. About this time, though, I had developed a very keen interest in computers. At our high school,, for instance, I joined a club that met after school that taught programming of various kinds using a teletype machine hooked up to a central computer downtown. We were given manuals and books to learn. No courses…all self study. By the time I graduated I had a pretty good knowledge of programming and computer basics. So, when I went to college I was just fine majoring in Biology, but I told my counselor that I wanted to minor in Mathematics and more specifically in computer math. There was NO curriculum for this yet. So, they told me that I’d need to pick from Chemistry or Physics. It seemed logical, seeing that the standard pre-med curriculum mandated 12 hours of Chemistry anyway, all I needed was one more course for the minor. But I persisted and said I wanted to pursue a Math minor also. I ended up minoring in both.

As most know, you have to have a fairly high GPA and do well on the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) to get an invitation to go to medical school. I had done well on the former, with a 3.8 GPA but didn’t score astronomically on the MCAT. I got a couple of interviews but ended up NOT being accepted to medical school. Interestingly enough, my desire to be a doctor had waned quite a bit during college, to the point that I actually thought about changing my major to music education. But I did stay the course and graduated with honors and entered graduate school. Such was my first pivot. I decided to enter a program where I could equally use my developing computer knowledge AND my Biology background. My initial graduate work produced, for instance, an interactive computer model that would allow for the diagnosis of bacterial infections from laboratory test results

I figured, well, there was a lot of satisfaction in creating something that was new and exciting, but at the same time very practical. I embarked on a second graduate path that would using recombinant DNA methods to study how organisms repair their DNA after UV-light damage, the foundations of which had great translation to the body’s cancer responses. My second pivot came while in the middle of this study (which by the way was under a Nobel=prize winning scientist). The grant that was funding my work got cancelled, which at the time, left me with no income. My wife was working as a teacher in a private school, so it was time to find something quick.

I worked through the placement office at the university and quickly found two opportunities. One was a research lab assistant, the other was a computer programmer at a company that provided services for municipal governments. Two entirely different paths,,,one completely sending me in a different direction.

I chose the programming job. Big PIVOT!

However, within a few years I’d done very well, secured multiple positions with other companies and ended up in, of all things, being a designer of manufacturing systems…a discipline that I had to learn quickly through a curriculum of certification.

It wasn’t too long after that my son, then a high school student, and I formed our company. We did it as a result of working with our church on their website at the time. We found that how much they were paying for third-party services and were appalled at how we felt they were being extorted. About that time we picked up our second client, a dentist, and found exactly the same problem. It seemed that small business owners were just being gouged for these rudimentary services,. We formed a company at that time and I guess that was our third PIVOT. We’ve never stopped our foundational thoughts and creativity since and never had an unprofitable year.

Any advice for managing a team?

We have had a very no-nonsense approach to management of our team. As cliche as it sounds, it’s just treating people they way you’d want to be treated. That’s right, the good ol’ Golden Rule.

In modern time, I think this message has been softened or renamed many times. It’s still a simple matter of recognizing the individual contributor where they are, giving encouragement and providing work that consistently challenges them.

We have a fairly large consultant pool that we work with, but when we look for people, we try NOT to put a lot of strict requirements on them. A good example is copywriting. Writing well, and with web dynamics in mind, isn’t nearly as easy as it seems. However, we don’t go out looking for writers, per se. I tell the story of one of my best writers that I found right within my own church choir.

Our choir had a program where we employed graduate college choral majors to come and sing with us on a regular basis. Though that program the choral students got to work with the music we sang, they honed their conducting skills and became a very close part of our group. One of these was a very outgoing young baritone that sat right behind me in the rehearsals. He and his wife both were in the program. I came to know him as very funny, very well read and of course, he was working on his Doctoral dissertation. As it so happened, he found himself without a job one summer. With his teaching schedule, singing schedule and other demands he was having difficulty finding a part-time job to supplement their family income. I approached him about writing for one of our client’s websites to see if he’d be interested. He was…and he turned out to be one the best, most conscientious and diligent writers we’d ever had! It took a little guidance up front and encouragement, but he went on to work for us for two years, part-time, while he got his PhD.

The point here, being that you many times have to recognize things outside the box to find a great team member. It’s not always about what skill you have, because many times, you can teach a skill. However, it can be an important team value to look at the meeting each member where they are in their own life. By doing that, you not only obtain a high level of product, but also, help the person, too.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.entdyn.com

Image Credits
I took all the pictures. Some of the pictures are of our staff at various functions (such as a cruise we took, or at the site of potential clients (wineries, for instance).