Cooper Jackson

Melissa’s work:
As for Melissa, she jumped into small business ownership early on in the middle of college, owning 50% of a technology start up. CIT, short for Corporate Information Technologies Corporation (long name -wasn’t my idea) is a computer networking services company for small and medium businesses in the greater Charlotte area. Lawrence, Melissa’s business partner, asked Melissa to create a nondisclosure agreement, since she was the only business major he knew (they went to UNCC together). She created one, and hopefully CIT is not still using that agreement, since it was created by Melissa as a sophmore college student who copied and pasted from other nondisclosure agreements found online!

Together they grew the company from a college job to a mom-and-pop type shop to a viable small business that was doing projects with scopes of work way beyond what should have been feasible for the size of the company. The company was started out of Lawrence’s crappy college apartment, with his chubby roommate wandering around in nothing but a small towel. Lawrence doesn’t remember this, but he was at customer sites all day, while Melissa was in his apartment talking to customers and looking at fat naked roommate!

They got an office and expanded, coped through the .com burst, and grew the company into a business with technicians, salespeople, admin, the works! After all that work, Melissa felt the ‘burnout’ effect and decided to cut’n'run. Just kidding, she sold out to Lawrence, who is now growing the company even bigger.

After spending seven years at CIT and “selling out” , Melissa is into real estate investing, financial planning, and technology consulting. Currently she splits her time between buying/selling real estate and commercial real estate underwriting. Melissa Cooper Jackson real estate business is over at yourkingdomrealty.com.

Lateef’s Work:
Lateef’s first official position that was paid was as a lawn mower. Lateef’s last year in High School was probably his most influential job which he still blabs on about for hours to this very day which was at Stone Wall Farm. In college, Lateef’s main gig was working in the Venture outdoor program as a kayak and backpacking instructor.

Before Lateef graduated from college (yes most people who graduate from college that take as many years as Lateef did are called doctors) Lateef started consulting for Melissa’s company, doing mainly tech support and a little programming. Eventually, he voluntees his programming services in the fall of 2001 to create an entire ticketing system in PHP which is still used today at the company. Over the next 4 years Lateef consulted off and on for them doing system administration and reporting.

Lateef’s first job (outside of Melissa’s company) was to train Java programmers, which lasted for a few months until the .com bubble burst. Then Lateef got a job at socialserve.com at which he worked from July of 2001 to July of 2006 with only a 6 month break working at Wachovia. At Socialserve, Lateef managed the systems, developed in PHP, Java and Python. Many good times programming late into the night.

For half a year Lateef worked at Wachovia bank in the foreign exchange technology department integrating FX with a new reporting system and Lateef also wrote some software for the marketers on the the trading floor. It was a great experience and really have to say that not only the company of Wachovia treated Lateef really well but also the people were excellent there.

Lateef currently “works” if it could be called that, at a private equity firm. The other partners are Bill, Jonathan and Wes. In one sentence the firm tries to figure out ways to make money. Lateef’s technical background combined with the business experience from owning property and being involved with Melissa’s company have been the greatest assets. It is an amazing learning experience working with such brilliant business people. Most days Lateef thinks it is too much fun to actually be called “work”. More work information can be found at Lateef Jackson’s tech site hackingthought.com.
Our Shared Work: Among many things, Real Estate
In the Fall of 2001 Melissa bought her first property, a one bedroom condo in uptown. Melissa had been saving all though college for a house and with her job at the time only paying 25K, she was still able to afford a pretty nice place. Most people can’t imagin how that is possible but that is Melissa for you. In the spring of 2002, Lateef bought his first place. The first rental property, a quad-plex, was purchased July 1 2003 and the wild ride went on from there. All of those properties that have been mentioned above have now been sold. The current portfolio consists of 3 single families, 2 duplexes and the Victorian house (Leslie House) we are renovating.

We’ve got to pay for this Leslie house somehow, so we are always interested in new, exciting, and lucrative opportunities. So click here for the resumes/experiences of Lateef Jackson or Melissa Cooper Jackson.