Bitten by the entrepreneur bug

SELMA — The path to small-business owner was thrust upon Michael Sneed. 

“I was kind of thrown into entrepreneurship,” said Sneed, 51, of Clayton. “I went to school, and when I graduated, I was an engineer at a company called Nortel.”

But then the dot-com bubble burst, Sneed said. “That’s when all the technology companies kind of went down,” he explained. “I was unemployed, and I was looking for something to do.”

After a lot of searching, the answer found him.

One day when he was grocery shopping with his wife, he picked up a small-business magazine, Sneed recalled. “I was reading as we were shopping, and the magazine had the top small businesses to start from home,” he said. “At the very top of the list was appliance repair.”

Sneed knew a little about that. “I had been unemployed, and I would help fix my friends, families and my neighbors’ appliances for free,” he said.

Sneed pretty much became an entrepreneur that day. “We left the grocery store and went to OfficeMax,” he said. “I printed out some flyers. … We just went out to a neighborhood and I put the flyer on everybody’s doors and mailboxes.”

The results were immediate. 

“By the time we got back home, I had enough work on the answering machine to go ahead and work the whole week,” Sneed said. “And that’s how I started my appliance-repair business.”

He ran Sneed Appliance Services for about 20 years.

After the business took off, Sneed began offering appliance-repair classes in hopes others would have the same opportunity he had.

In particular, he reached out to some high school students he knew and asked them if they wanted to become apprentices of sorts. Sneed figured that would give him some help and the young people a skill.

Most of the students he knew were football players. “I asked them what day they would work, and they told me on Sundays,” Sneed said. “So I said, ‘OK, on Sundays come down to my shop, and I’ll teach you how to work on appliances.’ My goal was to get one of them after high school to come work for me.”

Sneed had also been flipping houses, and one day, a YouTuber reached out to him. “He and I were talking, and he wanted to come out to record what I was doing for his YouTube channel,” Sneed said. “I told him that I had to get back because I had these kids that I was teaching appliance repair.”

That piqued the YouTuber’s interest. “He wanted to tag along to watch the classes,” Sneed said.

The YouTuber taped a class, posted it online and soon reached back out to Sneed. “He said, ‘A bunch of people want to come out to take your class to find out how to repair these appliances,’ ” Sneed said.

That prompted Sneed to begin teaching in-person classes out of a building he rented in Pine Level. But as the classes grew, so did the need for space, which led Sneed to purchase two storefronts in downtown Selma. Those storefronts would become Appliance Boot Camp and Old Fashioned Ice Cream.

“I started the ice cream parlor because I have an autistic son, and I was looking for something for him to do after high school,” Sneed said. “We found a school in Florida … where you learn to make ice cream, so he got to go down there.”

Together, they built Old Fashioned Ice Cream at 124 N. Raiford St. “It was a labor of love, but it’s been fun,” Sneed said.

With two successful businesses, he could have rested on his laurels, but Sneed continues to build his resume as an entrepreneur. “We’re also making homemade kettle corn,” he said. “We’re venturing into that. We sell most of that kettle corn online.”

Sneed has this advice for people like him. “If you’re thinking about starting your own business, I would say just go out and do it,” he said. “Don’t think you’re gonna have everything perfect, because it’s not going to work like that. You can write out how you think it’s going to look and how you think things operate. It is going to change.”