by Holly Rodriguez
Editor
Innsbrook Today Magazine
Tech Rotarian Starts Late, Finishes
at the Top
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Eric Sundin says he did everything late
in life – he got married late, started his career
late, and even later than that, started his own business.
But when it comes to his business savvy and commitment
to Rotary, Sundin is right on time – though he
admits it is no easy task to make it to an early morning
breakfast meeting once a week.
He joined Innsbrook Rotary in April 2000, and considers
his fellow Rotarians his friends – more so than
any other group of people in his life.
“The people in Rotary are like the Army at West
Point,” the husband and father of two says. “They
are good people, hard-working and smart.”
Sundin not only associates with people who possess these
qualities, he comes from a family of similar stock,
and duplicates those qualities in his life as well.
An Army brat, Sundin grew up traveling the globe with
his family. He lived in 10 places by the time he graduated
high school, and, decided to continue the family tradition
when he enrolled at West Point in 1971. After 11 years
with the Army, he got a job in Richmond with Control
Data, a software company, as a sales representative,
selling general application software.
“I decided to do sales because I was older, had
no master’s degree, was not into management training
and had no desire to become a financial guru,”
he says. “Sales gave me the opportunity to learn
about different businesses.”
From Control Data he moved on to Wang Laboratories,
and worked there for four and a half years as a sales
rep. As his time at Wang came to an end, he decided
to take the knowledge he’d gained from the industry
and pour it into his own operation. He sold property
he owned in Kiawah Island in South Carolina, and invested
the money into his own company – Internal Computer
Services.
“When we started, the idea was that we wanted
to work with small businesses because the larger companies
almost always have in-house tech staff,” he says.
These days, with Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard and
others selling computers directly to the customer, the
focus of his business has shifted from hardware to software.
Sundin handles sales and can set up computer systems,
but he has network engineers who handle advanced technology
concepts, maintenance and troubleshooting.
He carries his tech savvy into his role with Rotary
by hosting and maintaining the Innsbrook Rotary website.
“I’m in the middle of the pack – there
are people who spend a tremendous amount of time out
there, and I take my hat off to them,” he says.
“But the website is how I make my contribution.”
When Sundin attends the weekly Rotary breakfast meeting,
he says he really enjoys himself once he’s there.
Each meeting has a speaker, and he says the audience
learns far more than they can from reading about the
individual in the paper.
And, there is an opportunity to meet with friends and
draw inspiration from them.
“The people in Rotary are multi-taskers,”
he says. “Half of them are small business owners
[and] raising families, and they still make time to
donate to the community.”
When Sundin is not at a Rotary meeting or managing his
business, he spends time with his family. He is currently
planning a trip for the foursome to Goppingen, Bovaria,
Germany where he met his wife. “My wife was working
there for the [U.S.] Department of Defense as an American
schoolteacher, and that’s how we met – it
was the late 1970’s,” he says.
Winter weekends are spent at Wintergreen to ski, and
in the summer, they are off to Nags Head to relax in
the sun. The family also visits his mother’s home
on the beach at Martha’s Vineyard, where Sundin
says he’s seen celebrities such as Mike Wallace,
Carly Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
A man who has achieved through hard work and perseverance,
Sundin is not one to overly boast about his accomplishments.
He only takes credit for some of his success –
the rest he credits to fate.
“I’m not a rich guy or anything like that
... just lucky.”
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