When East Brainerd resident Randy Goodner founded GPS Protect earlier this year, he was remembering the horror he felt during the search for college student Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
"I don't know if she'd still be alive but I know we'd have been able to find her," he said. "I decided I just wanted to sell these for safety."
Goodner said 2,300 kids go missing in the United States every day, counting abductions and runaways.
East Brainerd resident Randy Goodner, owner of GPS Protect, sells global positioning system devices that can track the location of children, young drivers and people with dementia every two minutes and pets every five minutes."To me, that's an enormous amount," he said, adding that times have changed. "Twenty years ago I couldn't have sold a single one of these, but today ... ?"
Goodner is a distributor for Phoenix 5 Global Tracking of New York. Devices can be used to track points of travel of children, cars or people with dementia every two minutes. They use cell phone towers and satellites to work anywhere in the world.
Goodner said parents could put one in a young driver's car to monitor driving speed and location, though the car title must be in the parent's name to do it without the driver's knowledge. Parents can also draw a perimeter around a location, like the house or the mall, and be alerted by text message when the device leaves that boundary.
"I might have a lot of kids mad at me," Goodner said.
The appliance can be charged like a cell phone in a vehicle's 12-volt outlet or permanently installed at a car's fuse box.
Young children's devices have an emergency panic button they can push to immediately alert parents.
Goodner said baby boomers whose parents have Alzheimer's disease are ideal candidates.
"I'm fortunate that my parents don't have Alzheimer's," Goodner said, "but if they did, I'm getting them one of these."
A new water-resistant box clips to a pet's collar and will monitor its movements every five minutes - different from the recent chip that only identifies the dog once it's been found, like a dog tag.
"Pets, I think, is going to be huge," Goodner said, adding that pet stores have already begun calling him.
Customers view tracked movements on a website, which connects to satellite photos that can be zoomed in practically to street view.
"If you're a private investigator, you can catch some people red-handed," Goodner said.
This fall Goodner said he hopes to make presentations to parent-teacher-student organization meetings and to companies with fleets like cab companies or home repair businesses.
Goodner owns exclusive rights to sell within a 60-mile radius of Chattanooga and plans to hire six to eight salespeople soon.
"There's no way I could cover this by myself," he said. "One person could handle Ooltewah and never run out of leads."
Goodner said he left his steel career last year when the company was shut down and he moved on to GPS Protect.
"I want to market something that will help people," he said.