Find Wonder in All Things - By Karen M. Cox Page 0,43
with. Her father was stubborn enough that he wouldn’t take any advice from his children — the ones who were willing to give him any — and Laurel wasn’t sure how many more summers like the last the marina could take and still stay open.
She had learned to cope by separating her life from her parents’ for the most part, keeping her own company in the solitude of her mountain cottage. It was not ‘off the grid’ as Ginny liked to say — she did have electricity — but it was quiet there, and she could think without the distraction of everyone else’s problems. She had been squirreling away money too. As an artist, she was only a step above the poverty line, but Laurel had always lived a frugal existence, and that allowed her to be financially independent. Every week she helped her father with the payroll and made the obligatory check on her mother, but she never stayed long. On holidays, she went to her parents’ house and cooked family meals to give her brothers and sister some semblance of a normal family life. At those times, her mom often stayed in her room because the noise was so ‘discombobulating.’
Laurel had given up being angry when she realized her mother was truly ill, and she wondered sometimes if that illness played a part in her mother’s almost terrified insistence that she not move to Nashville when she was eighteen. It was hard to say, but Laurel Elliot took responsibility for her own decisions. She wouldn’t blame anyone but herself.
So, while she might wish for a different life, that didn’t mean it was going to happen. Laurel had made her choices — good and bad — and she was resigned to living with them. Unfortunately, the isolation of the mountain prevented her from broadening her horizons except for brief sojourns for business. Her natural reserve made it difficult and exhausting to meet people at the craft fairs she attended. And men? There were no single men around her little corner of the world — none that interested her anyway. There hadn’t been anyone, anyone since . . .
Unbidden, he came to mind: handsome, dashing and determined. The eight years of separation had softened any flaws she ever saw in him, and now he was almost larger than life to her. He had been right to believe in himself and in his ability to make his mark on the world. He had made it, too — perhaps not in the way he intended but still successful beyond his wildest dreams.
She still remembered the day she had discovered it. She had gone into the public library that February to see whether they had a new copy of her favorite art magazine. As she perused the shelves, she glanced at the latest issue of Forbes. The name in the headline drew her eyes like a magnet:
John Benwick, Eric Harville and James Marshall: From music toys to business with the big boys. A tale of three high-tech millionaires.
Hurriedly, she scanned the Table of Contents and flipped to the article. She felt numb all over as she backed into a wooden table and fumbled for the chair:
“I don’t know exactly how it happened. We met, we started talking and that led to working, and that led us to starting the company.”
Thus began the saga of one of the year’s most surprising business success stories. It’s the Cinderella tale of a company founded by three college buddies — a firm that developed software that has turned the music industry on its ear. ‘Easy Music Producer’, or EMP, is a user-friendly computer program enabling any technology-challenged layman to record and mix music tracks. Now, amateur musicians no longer have to beg, borrow or steal time in a recording studio, thus opening doors traditionally guarded by music industry professionals. Industry pundits speculate this issue might be the reason a large entertainment conglomerate, eager to get in on the ground floor of this major paradigm shift, purchased the rights to EMP for an undisclosed, yet reportedly staggering sum.
“We are lucky. No doubt about that,” says EMP front man Eric Harville, looking like the quintessential Nineties father, participating in this interview with his infant son in his lap. “We were in the right place at the right time, but we put in a lot of work too, and sometimes people forget that part.”
When asked how they came up with the idea, James Marshall speaks for the first time. Harville