An entrepreneur at heart, I began my passion for small business in grade school by going door to door throughout Midwest City, Oklahoma, selling anything I could. By the fifth grade, I was one of the top-selling Grit newspaper boys in the state. There is no question I owe my passion for work and my work ethic to my father, Bob Standridge, who sold Prudential Insurance for forty years in the Oklahoma City and Norman areas.
In 1985, I did not think I wanted to go to college, but with an invitation from my sister, Lori, I joined her in becoming an EMT, training we received at Oklahoma City Community College. I also operated a landscaping company, Good Guys Lawn Service, which I kept until I graduated college. I was the first in my family to graduate college.
I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Pharmacy from the University of Oklahoma in 1993, but more importantly, I met and married my wife, Lisa Idleman, while working as a pharmacy intern at Noble Pharmacy. Since then, I returned to college in 2019 and graduated with a law degree from Syracuse College of Law in 2022.
In 1995, while on a Sunday drive with Lisa, we discovered a small pharmacy going out of business in Blanchard. I convinced the owner to keep the store open for a few weeks while I tried to obtain the money to purchase the store because I had no money. With the help of Michael Dillinger at First American Bank in Purcell, we were able to obtain an SBA loan for 80% of the business and carried the remainder with the owner, Don Woolley. Lisa kept her job at another pharmacy which paid the bills at home and helped fund the first year of the new venture. The Blanchard pharmacy would become Blanchard Drug & Gift, which allowed us not only the opportunity to own a growing business but also the opportunity to meet all the great people of Blanchard, a community that Lisa and I loved instantly.
A year later, I expanded Blanchard Drug & Gift into one of the first interactive online pharmacies, Cyber Pharmacy. In 2005, Cyber Pharmacy was transformed into Legend Care Pharmacy, a pharmacy specializing in the care and treatment of juveniles and the mentally disabled across the state. Many of the cutting-edge practices I developed for Legend Care Pharmacy have been utilized throughout the niche we service and have provided safer and better care for a very vulnerable population.
A few years after acquiring Blanchard Drug & Gift, I was told by a friend in Amarillo that if I could deliver a software program for managing a compounding pharmacy, he could sell ten copies a month for me. Between mid-1997 and January 1999, I taught myself to write computer programs and produced a program that met the requirement; that program was and is Compound Assist. Since that time, I have written several software programs, including a complete pharmacy management system, Script Assist, and numerous web applications.
In 2006 I began a startup technology and equipment company, Health Engineering Systems, HES. Since then, I sold HES to a Canadian company, and during that time, we grew the company, expanded it into several areas, and developed software programs to support some of the equipment we carried.
Lisa and I have owned several small businesses, and I have started and sold several companies over the years, but most importantly, Lisa and I are the incredibly proud parents of two daughters, Holly and Harper, and one son, Harrison.
It is because of my first child who, because of her miraculous arrival into my life, dramatically changed how I look at the world, causing me to run for public office. The future of my children still drives me to try to bring a very broken and fallen country and state back, at least closer to the narrow way. Sadly, on many days, I fear our country may be lost.
Since first being elected to the Oklahoma Senate in 2012, I have served for 11 years, most of that time elected to leadership positions within the Senate.
Legislatively, I have personally led the charge against mask mandates, drag queen shows in schools, child mutilating surgeries and drugs, forced vaccination, CRT, obscene material in schools, indoctrination in common and higher ed, and many other radical leftist ideologies, and currently, I am trying to dismantle DEI before I leave the senate. I believe in smaller government, lower taxes, and letting my faith dictate my direction, which is why those who know me understand my frustration in recent years. What started out as a senate tenure partnered with other conservatives and strong Christians, my last six years have seen the Senate Republican Caucus be the home of primarily moderates that work every day to find more government programs they can spend taxpayer dollars on and more harm to children that we can just overlook.
Unlike politicians who say they will be conservative and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to convince their voters they are conservative only to vote for new taxes while never reducing the size of government, I have never changed and have consistently voted to lower taxes and reduce government. A few years before my term limits were up and before my last re-election, I was one of only four senators who voted against the largest tax increase in state history, one of hundreds if not thousands of these types of votes I cast over the years.
I guess you could say I am a Constitutional Conservative as I have a deep respect and appreciation for our founding fathers and the miracle they accomplished in seeding the freest nation on earth. But as Benjamin Franklin famously admonished, indirectly, his fellow Americans, “…if you can keep it.” My admiration and love for our founders is only exceeded by my love of God and family. I feel strongly that our founders expected a day like today, where federal power has run amuck, in our case due to communist and socialist control, and gave us a constitution with tools to battle this.
Having intended to write for many years, I am proud to have just finished my first novel, 2084, soon to be published, and am well into my second, The Meth Cartel. As in other things I have done over the years, I hope to use my writing to inform while entertaining.