Alex Boston

About Alex

For over 30 years, my father has made a living creating custom finishes and murals for his clients. He is truly an artist, and I guess some things are hereditary because I am too. In my teenage years, I would go to work with him sometimes and I learned many things, but perhaps the most important skill I picked up was a strong work ethic. 10-16 hour days of manual labor was/is a normal work day for my father. In my early twenties, I started working for Chick-fil-a. This was a great opportunity to make friends and learn excellent customer service skills. After a couple years at Chick-fil-a, I got an opportunity to work at my grandfather’s business, Adaptive Mobility Systems, Inc. – a manufacturer of conversion vehicles, primarily wheelchair accessible vehicles and some recreational vehicles under the MAXVAN branding. My first job there was programming and operating the laser cutter machine. Along with this, I was taught how to use the CAD (computer-aided design) software to make drawings which the laser would cut out. In 2017, the company who had exclusive selling rights to our wheelchair accessible vehicles sold out to a competitor. With no dealer selling their products, Adaptive Mobility Systems rebranded to Adaptive Vans and began looking for new dealers to partner with. Going back to my artistic roots, I offered to design the newly-branded company logo using design elements from the original logos (credit to Jordan Boston’s original designs) which ended up being the new branding’s logo. As the business adapted to these changes, new departments were needed within the business. An opportunity arose for me to start the new customer support department. Here, I handled part sales and warranty claims for the conversions. The company already used a database system to manage vehicle records and a few other data points, but as the needs of the new departments grew, more was required from the database system. At first, the work of developing new functionality within the database system was performed by the original developer. I took interest in learning how to make small changes to the system to help me work faster and with more accuracy. After a little while, I was making all the changes to the system for the company. A couple of years later, the business hired a full-time salesperson to handle sales to the general public, where previously there were only sales to wheelchair accessible vehicle dealers. At this point, the business needed a website from which to sell inventory from. I had been learning about web development at that time, so I made a mock-up and presented it to my grandfather, who allowed me to continue working on this project during work hours. A few months later, adaptivevans.com went live. I continued to maintain and improve these systems until 2023 when I decided to start XZ Data Design to help other small businesses with their websites, databases, and graphics.