Okay, story time.
This #ThrowbackThursday goes back to the first class we ever taught, held in 2008. The picture below is none other than Stan Poole, our very first student.
Before we got our office in Royal Palm Square, Dave Larson and I operated out of our condo in Heritage Palms. We had only one computer at the time, so we would switch back-and-forth who manned the phone and who worked the laptop.
This basically amounted to one of us staring at the silent phone while the other constantly hit refresh on our online registration page.
No matter how many times we hit refresh, the number of registrations for our first class stayed the same: 0.
Then, on a Saturday morning in late September, 2008, just weeks before our first class, it happened. After months of constantly seeing that pesky 0, I hit refresh on the registration page and saw the magic number: 1.
The man who registered was, of course, Stan Poole.
We hollered out in excitement. We wouldn't have to teach to an empty classroom! (Not that we would. Our policy has always been "If there's at least one person registered, the show must go on." This happened in our first state exam prep course, when Carol DeBonis was our only student.)
Rick Larson, our dad and mentor, happened to be with us in the condo that morning. In celebration, we opened a cooler full of Miller Lites leftover from a party the week before.
We cracked the tops and sipped the lukewarm beer.
From the moment Stan stepped into the LarsonEd classroom for our first Course 1 on November 10th, he had his sights set on teaching for us.
He finished that real estate pre-licensing course in November. In December, he observed our second class. By January, Stan was teaching.
And he's been teaching for us ever since.
I raise a can of warm Miller Lite to Stan Poole, our first student and longest-tenured instructor not named Larson.
Cheers!
Larson Educational Services
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