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South Florida CEO Randy Schneider |
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Wakeboarding = meditation for Full Spectrum’s CEO Randy Schneider
By Oriane Lluch
Randy Schneider wakeboards when he wants to clear his head.
Growing up in Wisconsin surrounded by farmland, Randy Schneider always
felt like a “frustrated surfer,” he says. It is part of the reason the
CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based Full Spectrum Media, a communications firm
with revenues just under half a million dollars last year, chose to
make South Florida his home. And Schneider is no longer frustrated.
Now, he wakeboards at least twice a week, and skateboards as well.
“I love board sports,” says Schneider, 32, who hopes to compete in a
wakeboarding contest next year. He says it is “truly time for me to
clear my head.” If you cannot find him in the offices of his
10-employee company, chances are he is hitting the water at a local
cable park, where overhead wires enable watersports enthusiasts to try
out different moves.
Wakeboarding is similar to a snowboarding on water while being pulled
by a boat, preferably in calm waters. It evolved from the techniques
used in water skiing, snowboarding and surfing: Wakeboarders strap
their feet to the board, hold onto a tow line, and ride on top of the
water behind a boat, getting enough speed to do tricks. “When I’m
behind a boat or at Ski Rixen, the cable park, there is no better
feeling than flying through the air at 20 miles per hour, holding a
handle and flipping or spinning your body,” Schneider says.
“The adrenaline rush is indescribable, especially when you learn a new trick. The high lasts for a week.”
Although Schneider still surfs and skateboards, he explains that since
he picked up wakeboarding in the early 1990s it has been his passion —
despite having “blown out” both of his knees and injured a rotator
cuff. He attributes these bodily sacrifices to his affinity for
learning new tricks. Today he owns seven wakeboards and dozens of
skateboards. Even though he practices yoga, Schneider finds his
wakeboarding hobby to be his real form of meditation. “Luckily, I’m now
in a position where if I wanna go, I go,” he says.
Schneider’s entrepreneurial instincts came as early as his interest in
boarding sports. By 13 he was selling skateboards from his parents’
basement. A self-taught businessman, Schneider decided to find a way to
turn his adult passion for board sports into a business, too, and
founded 5boards.com, a Web site that sells wakeboards. “If I love
something, I spin it into work,” he says of the site, which gets almost
200 visitors each week and updates fellow boarders about local events.
Anyone who contributes work to the site gets a share of its profits.
“Someday that site will be very busy,” he believes.
His ultimate goal, though, is to resemble a fellow wakeboarder who is
75. “He is in incredible shape. He loves wakeboarding, and it’s his
only exercise. I could only dream to be like that [at his age].”
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