Anderson Schoenrock and the business hiding in the garage

The new camera did exactly what it was supposed to do. It took photographs, put them on a computer, and made the future look pleasantly simple. Then Michael Mothner’s mother asked about the past. What about all the photographs in the garage? The question would eventually pull Anderson Schoenrock into a business where customers sent him things they could never buy again.

It was the 2006 holiday season. Mothner had given his mother a digital camera, and her delight soon produced a practical objection. New pictures were easy to organize. Older prints remained elsewhere, waiting for someone to solve a rather less glamorous problem. The camera had upgraded the present. The garage had declined the invitation.

Mothner brought the idea to Schoenrock, a friend from Dartmouth College, at a New Year’s Eve party in San Diego. On a balcony at the Torrey Pines Hilton, they began discussing a service that would turn those older photographs into digital files. ScanDigital took shape in early 2007. By June, it had launched.

A banker meets the family album

Schoenrock arrived with a different sort of training. After graduating from Dartmouth in 2001, he went into investment banking at Lehman Brothers. Commercial real estate followed. He helped establish Zietsman Realty Partners, then left that world to build ScanDigital. The change brought him from financial transactions into a service whose raw material might be someone’s only photograph of a grandparent.

The old job had prepared him for the hours. He described working fifteen or sixteen hours a day in banking, a schedule that made startup work feel familiar. He said long hours and hard work no longer fazed him when he founded ScanDigital. Endurance traveled well between industries. Knowing what a customer needed required fresh attention.

By May 2011, ScanDigital had digitized more than nine million photographs and videos. That number gives the move out of finance some perspective. Each conversion still concerned an individual customer, but the task had accumulated into millions of pieces of personal history. A service conceived around a household backlog had become an operation with a substantial backlog of its own.

There is an appealing mismatch here: an investment banker setting out to rescue the holiday photographs. Yet the underlying work has familiar demands. People entrust something valuable to a process they cannot supervise in person. They expect accuracy. They want the promised result. And they are entitled to ask what happens between handing it over and getting it back.

The parcel carries the promise

In July 2008, the young company had nineteen employees. The founders had invested $350,000, and revenue for 2007 had been $200,000. At that stage, expenses were still ahead of revenue. The business was close to breaking even one December, then added equipment and workers to protect turnaround times. Faster service had a cost before it had a payoff.

Repeat customers and referrals accounted for more than half of revenue at the time. But persuading people to part with their originals remained a challenge. ScanDigital let customers follow orders through a fourteen-step fulfillment process. Digital files had off-site backups. Schoenrock also ordered fire-resistant cabinets after a fire at another scanning business.

Those details deserve a place beside the financial figures. A business can explain its margins and still fail to answer the question the customer actually brings: will my pictures come back? For this service, the parcel was part of the product. What happened inside the facility mattered as much as the digital file at the end.

There was commercial work, too, including an agreement to scan, edit, and archive fifteen thousand slides for Pasadena. Family memories and municipal records put different demands on the same operation. Both depended on careful handling. The company was learning to make an intimate service repeatable, while keeping the particular contents of each box in view.

The listening took time

In a May 2008 interview with his younger brother Kendall, Schoenrock described reaching out directly to customers. Some people questioned how he could spend so much time gathering their feedback. He answered that he could hardly afford to give it less time. It is a useful sentence from a founder whose business depended on strangers trusting his staff.

“I am not sure how I can afford not to!”

Anderson Schoenrock, on making time for customer feedback, 2008

The early customer base sent him into unexpected settings. He attended a craft and hobby convention, a funeral-director trade show, and planned to exhibit at a scrapbooking convention. A schedule like that is a small corrective to the polished mythology of entrepreneurship. Sometimes finding customers means learning who else cares about old photographs and showing up where they gather.

People’s responses also supplied a measure beyond volume. Schoenrock spoke about the pleasure of hearing from someone who had seen slides again after thirty years. That reaction explains why a scanner alone was an incomplete answer. The point of converting a photograph was to bring it back into use, where another person could see it and remember.

Indiana enters the picture

As the company grew, its location became another practical question. Schoenrock objected to California’s costs and business conditions. The search for a new headquarters considered eight Midwestern states before narrowing to three. Fishers stood out after visits to Launch Fishers and conversations with local leaders about their plans for an entrepreneurial community.

Memory Ventures relocated from Los Angeles to Fishers in 2015. The attraction included an opportunity to participate in a place still developing its technology-business identity. A growing company needs room, but its founder may also want a role in the surroundings. Schoenrock’s interest in Indiana joined those two ambitions rather neatly.

Twelve employees moved with him. In the year and a half after the relocation, he hired roughly thirty-five additional staff members, upgraded office space, and saw revenue increase. Those are historical figures from the early Indiana chapter, rather than a description of today’s workforce. They show that relocation involved people following a business across the country, then new colleagues joining it.

His wife was originally from Michigan, which helped put the Midwest on the family’s map. The decision also made him a participant in an unfinished local story. He described wanting to make a difference in shaping it. There is a distinction between choosing a place because it meets your requirements and becoming involved in what it might become.

What the warehouse learned

The company that emerged from ScanDigital acquired a broader name and a broader range of work. Memory Ventures now presents a portfolio including digitization, printing, coffee products, and fulfillment. ScanCafe, ScanDigital, Crema Coffee Products, and Victory Lane Solutions sit among its brands. The list is varied, but each business still has customers whose orders must be handled.

In a conversation featured by Inspired Insider in December 2025, Schoenrock explained that the logistics business had begun in 2017. Internal capabilities for shipping consumer orders and managing Amazon stores had become a service for other brand owners. He described two warehouses, in Indianapolis and Nevada. Work developed for the portfolio had found customers beyond it.

That arrangement puts him on both sides of a familiar e-commerce problem. His companies sell products, and a company in his portfolio helps other sellers fulfill orders. A website makes buying look quick. Behind that transaction sit inventory, storage, picking, packing, and the obligation to send the right thing. The customer is allowed to regard all of this as someone else’s problem.

Memory Ventures emphasizes shared resources and an operating system across channels. The appeal is understandable: several businesses can use capabilities that would be expensive to build separately. The hard question concerns the boundary. Which tasks benefit from being shared, and which require someone’s full attention to a particular brand? Schoenrock’s more recent reflections address that directly.

There are other ways Schoenrock spends his attention. He grew up in Junction City, Kansas, and earned his Dartmouth degree in history. His entrepreneurial activity began with a first business at fifteen. He earned a private pilot’s license in 2006, before ScanDigital launched. Basketball also has a place in his life: his team loyalties include the Kansas Jayhawks and the Los Angeles Lakers. The geography of his career has changed more readily than the basketball allegiances he brought along.

The questions change with the business

On September 14, 2026, Schoenrock appeared on The Harvest Growth Podcast. The discussion included the difficulty of centralizing marketing across multiple brands and lessons from acquiring Crema Coffee Products. It also addressed inventory and fulfillment problems that consume profit even when sales are rising. Growth supplies new responsibilities alongside new customers.

He discussed email marketing as his strongest channel for return on time and cost, and the importance of repeat purchases to customer lifetime value. These are workaday subjects, with little of the romance of a balcony conversation. They belong in the same story. An idea opens a business; subsequent decisions determine whether it can keep serving the people who buy from it.

His civic work has continued as well. Fishers lists Schoenrock as a mayoral appointee to its Redevelopment Commission for January through December 2026. The commission reviews redevelopment proposals and considers authorization of tax increment financing districts. Years after choosing Fishers for his company, he has a formal role in decisions about the place itself.

The garage photographs remain a useful beginning because the problem was so specific. Someone had a collection she wanted to use, and the new technology had left it behind. Schoenrock and Mothner built a service around that gap. Nearly two decades later, the questions encompass brands, warehouses, and a city. The work still starts with attending to what people need done.