About Us:
We’ve been best buds since childhood and if memory serves we were about 8 years old the summer we first started hanging out. Since we’re both pushing 30 now that means we’ve been friends for over 20 years now. Basically when it comes down to it the only people who have been in our lives longer than each other is our parents and sisters (Andrew has 2 older sisters, Matt has one younger).
It was almost ironic that we were friends really. We attended different schools. Matt was into Boy Scouts, football and comic books. Andrew was busy with drumming, soccer and even dancing for a while. But weekends, school breaks and summers brought years of bike rides, sleepovers, movies and all that typical best friend stuff. In reality it was our differences that probably made our friendship that much better, because when we got together we could enjoy the things we both liked and talk about the other stuff going on our lives apart from each other. Our “daily” lives rarely crossed until around 2003 when some contract work opportunities for Matt became available at the company where Andrew was working. Believe it or not that was the very first time we had ever done anything together for any purpose other than enjoyment!!
During 2003, Andrew got a chance to move to California for some drumming stuff. Matt was actually on the heels of possibly moving to Kentucky for a business venture, but decided California sounded like a lot more fun. The Two Guys packed up a big yellow moving truck, all their personal belongings and both their cars (one on a trailer and one being driven), and drove cross-country from Chicago to California in January 2004. This would also mark the first time that we lived “on our own” (not using our parents’ addresses as our permanent residences) and go figure, we were doing it together.
They say never live with your best friend. Sure we may have had those moments … but most of the time we hung out, watched tv or movies, explored Southern California, and telecommuted to our job from back in Chicago. After a while we both ended up getting random jobs just for the weekly paycheck, and eventually when the telecommuting opportunity ended we both got real everyday jobs to pay the bills. But once we were established and more stable, we started doing tag-team web production from our apartment under the monicker 2guyswitha.com – which is essentially the precursor entity to reactionCONTROL today.
After having some various jobs, we both ended up working for a company in the real estate website business. Andrew was in New Accounts, helping agents put their websites together from the template system. Matt was in the search engine marketing team helping the agents get their sites top exposure online. A friend of Andrew’s had a job opportunity for an SEO manager at his company, so with a quick referral Matt made the switch. A couple months later when a position came available for Andrew at that company as a website designer, he also jumped ship. They worked well together as a team building agent sites and marketing them.
Matt moved back to Chicago in late 2006 (find out more in his bio) and Andrew is still in SoCal – but we leverage the power of the Internet as it was intended to collaborate on web projects and ideas. We use instant messenger, email, online collaboration tools and more to be able to work as a team even though we are 2000 miles across the country from each other. The Two Guys are still a team and probably always will be and we look forward to bring our years of experiences – both individually and together – to work for our clients with our casual-but-professional approach to putting the fun in functional web design and marketing.
