From Town Clown to Tech Titan in Jeff Burgess’s Hard-Earned Rise

It Worked for Me by Jeff Burgess

Jeff Burgess‘s It Worked for Me is a ground-level, candid and compulsively readable account of how one self-described “town clown” and college dropout built a company that became the world’s largest supplier of purpose-built video surveillance recording appliances. And it is all the more convincing for never pretending the road was straight.

A Turning Point That Changes Everything

Burgess begins at his lowest point. He is 22 years old, living with his buddy Gary in a Skokie apartment, nursing hangovers and drifting. When his father calls him over for a serious talk, Burgess braces himself for the worst — but what he gets instead is a loving lecture that changes everything: “You have a gift, and I cannot allow you to waste it.” That scene, rendered with warmth and honesty, sets the emotional DNA for everything that follows. This is a book about a son trying to be worthy of his father’s belief in him, and that thread gives the narrative a heart that purely tactical business memoirs rarely possess.

What follows is a masterclass told in anecdotes. Burgess lands a warehouse job at a scrappy computer peripherals distributor called Tek-Aids, and within weeks he is reorganizing shelves, renegotiating freight contracts and absorbing everything around him like a sponge. The chapters covering these early years are among the book’s best. Burgess has a gift for the vivid detail — the dusty concrete floors that told him no one was paying attention, the packing lists he read “the way a conductor reads music” — and he captures the intoxicating feeling of being young and realizing you’re genuinely good at something.

The lessons he draws from his mentors are worth the price of admission alone. Jud Beamsley, the maverick founder of Tek-Aids, dispenses advice that Burgess has carried for forty years: “First get the deal. Then worry about it.” It sounds almost reckless, but Burgess shows exactly why it works, and he’s honest enough to note where Jud’s ruthlessness crossed lines he himself chose not to cross. This moral clarity gives the book an integrity that many business memoirs lack.

Lessons, Leadership and the Cost of Ambition

As Burgess’s career progresses through sales roles, branch management and ultimately the founding of his own company, BCDVideo, the book never loses its energy. He writes with the pace of someone who genuinely loved every step of the climb. His evolution from warehouse worker to CEO is traced through dozens of well-chosen vignettes: a vendor meeting where he outmaneuvered a competitor, a crisis he solved with sheer preparation, and a sales philosophy built on educating customers rather than just closing them. “We offered solutions,” he writes of BCDVideo’s approach. “Our competitors offered servers.” The distinction between the transactional and the relational runs through the entire book as its animating principle.

Burgess is also refreshingly honest about his personal failings. He admits that during his mother-in-law’s illness, he was too laser-focused on work to properly support his wife Joanne. The confession lands hard precisely because it’s unvarnished: “I will never forgive myself for failing Joanne miserably during this worst tragedy in her life.” That willingness to account for the full cost of ambition is what separates memoir from self-promotion.

It Worked for Me is ultimately a love letter to the IT industry that gave Burgess his education, to the mentors and colleagues who shaped him, and above all, to his late father, whose early intervention set everything in motion. Readers looking for both practical business wisdom and genuine human storytelling will find them here, woven together with wit, candor and hard-won pride.