SELMA — The path to becoming a small business owner was set for Michael Snead.
“I was kind of thrown into the entrepreneurial world,” said Snead, 51, of Clayton. “I went to school and after I graduated I worked as an engineer for a company called Nortel.”
But then the dot-com bubble burst, Snead says. “All the tech companies were going under,” he explains. “I was unemployed and looking for something to do.”
After much searching, the answer was found in him.
One day, while grocery shopping with his wife, Snead recalls, he picked up a copy of a small business magazine. “I was reading it while I was shopping, and the magazine had a list of the top small businesses you can start from home,” he says. “At the top of the list was appliance repair.”
Snead knew a thing or two about it: “I was unemployed, so I was helping friends, family and neighbors fix their appliances for free,” he said.
Snead pretty much became an entrepreneur that day. “I left the grocery store, went to Office Max,” he says. “I printed out some flyers. … I went out to my neighborhood and put flyers on people’s doors and mailboxes.”
The results were immediate.
“By the time I got home, the answering machine was full to the brim and I could have kept myself going for a week,” Snead said. “And that’s how I started my appliance repair business.”
He owned Sneed Appliance Services for about 20 years.
Once his business took off, Snead began giving classes on repairing appliances in the hopes of giving others 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 an apprentice of sorts, which Snead thought would give him some help and give the young people some skills.
Most of the students he knew were football players. “I asked them what days they wanted to work, and they said Sunday,” Snead says. “So I said, ‘OK, come to my store on Sunday, and I’ll teach you how to use appliances.’ My goal was to have one of them work for me after high school.”
Snead was also flipping houses, when one day he was contacted by a YouTuber. “I was talking to him and he wanted to record me doing stuff for his YouTube channel,” Snead said. “I told him I had to get back because I was teaching kids how to fix appliances.”
That piqued the YouTuber’s interest: “He wanted to come along to watch the class,” Snead said.
The YouTuber recorded the lesson, posted it online, and soon contacted Snead. “He said, ‘We have a lot of people who want to take your class so they know how to fix these appliances,'” Snead said.
This prompted Snead to start offering in-person classes in a building he rented in Pine Level, but as the number of classes grew he needed more space, so Snead purchased two storefronts in downtown Selma that would become Appliance Boot Camp and Old Fashioned Ice Cream.
“I started the ice cream shop because I have a son who is autistic and I wanted something for him to do after high school,” Snead said. “I found a school in Florida where they taught him how to make ice cream, so he went there.”
Together, the two opened Old Fashioned Ice Cream at 124 North Raeford St. “It was a labor of love, but it was fun,” Snead said.
With two successful businesses, Snead could have rested on his laurels, but he continues to build on his entrepreneurial career. “I also make my own kettle corn,” he says. “I’m branching out in that business as well. I sell most of my kettle corn online.”
Snead has some advice for people like him: “If you’re thinking about starting your own business, just go for it,” he says. “Don’t expect everything to be perfect. It’s not going to work that way. Write down what you want it to be and how you want it to operate, and change will happen.”
