Introduction to the Reptile Entrepreneur show

Welcome to the Reptile Entrepreneur! This is a show for anyone interested in starting a business in the reptile world or has a business and wants to hear from others what they are doing. Most of what I go over is applicable to any niche venture, but I will be focusing on implementing these principles within the reptile community. Although, when I talk about the reptile market on this show I am not talking about reptiles in the scientific sense. We will be covering any of the various odds and ends that end up being under the reptile umbrella to the general public. If it is at a reptile show it will be covered in this podcast. Reptiles, amphibians, spiders, invertebrates, carnivorous plants, vivarium plants, and everything needed to care for and to put together a home for all of these. This is about the industry. And, for the purposes of this show, the word Reptile is an umbrella term. All odds and ends are welcome and celebrated. The more unique the better. So when you hear the word reptile you know this means you too. But, honestly, you can apply these concepts to any small business starting up!

Between my experience and the guests I bring on, we will cover all aspects of starting, maintaining, and growing a niche business in a specialty community.

We’ll talk about how to come up with product idea, prototype, and test it out. We’ll talk about manufacturing and basic business management. What if your business is content? Video, audio, the written word… Yep, there is a need for good solid information on YouTube, Instagram, or any other social media site. Yes, even that Tik Tok thing!

Product development, Business management, Marketing, and just surviving the entrepreneurial grind.  – These will be nuts and bolts discussions about how you can start a business in the field you love.

To be clear, this isn’t a get rich quick approach. I will leave that kind of promise for self-made gurus with better hair cuts than mine. I just know the slow and steady. A business in this field, for most of us, is a passion project. We do this because we love it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t or can’t make enough money from this that we can make it worth doing part time. Or even full time. The community is big enough and it is growing. More than just a personal project, the more business and healthy commerce we have within and from our community the stronger we are as a community. Not only will the products, services, and education be better, but our community will be stronger if all of that comes from within. Someone will be providing products for that growth. It may as well be, and should be us. So there is a deeper purpose to making sure you are successful. It is better for us all.

Where to find the Reptile Entrepreneur show

The Reptile Entrepreneur is a show that will be produced as a podcast and a YouTube video channel. The center point will be the reptileentrepreneur.com website which will be built to be a business resource where anyone starting a business can go there and find the guidance needed to get themselves off the ground. And if you want to expand areas of your business it will help you do it from the perspective of someone else doing it in your field.

Who is Bill Strand?

My name is Bill Strand. In the podcast world you know me as the host of the award winning Chameleon Academy Podcast which is in its sixth season. In the Reptile market I am the founder of the Dragon Strand chameleon caging company which created a new category of mid-range hybrid cages for the US chameleon market. I invented the patented Dragon Ledges that allowed users of screen cages to give chameleons a proper environment. Outside of the reptile community I graduated an electronics engineer. I designed printed circuit boards and programmed the microcontrollers that ran them. I went on to earn an MBA and, with those two disciplines, I led the product marketing functions for consumer electronics companies. Product Marketing is the practice of treating every product as a business of its own with a development, active life, and end of life cycle. I will combine the classical professional skills of that discipline and the hand-on experience in the reptile community to bring you insightful perspectives.

What is the benefit of a show like the Reptile Entrepreneur?

The primary purpose of this show is to inform and encourage business within the reptile community. The more members of our community that serve the community the stronger we will be. We are coming out of an era where there was question as to whether you could even have a successful business in the reptile community. Sure, you could sell things, but was it big enough to be more than a hobby business?

We are now big enough as a community that there are many opportunities even for entrepreneurs who are focused on species level products. The era of social media has exposed an unprecedented number of people to the reptile world and they are responding in a positive manner. Reptiles used to be thought of as edgy pets. But they have become firmly planted in the mainstream with all the pros and cons associated with that position.

We are also going to talk about how we move forward. It is not enough to simply grow. We need to grow the right way. How can we do this with a greater emphasis on the welfare of the reptile. And what exactly does that mean? In actionable terms? This is part of our exploration and discovery that we will do here. It isn’t enough to talk in flowery terms. Those of us who want to make a better community need to step up to the plate and not only describe what we mean, but prove that it is possible.  We are in the process of building our next generation community. We have a chance to not only build a business that has a positive ledger balance, but that has a positive effect on our community, reptiles in the wild, and the environment. Okay, maybe I am not going to save the world with my Dragon Ledges that let people mount potted plants to a screen cage panel. But they will increase the quality of care chameleons receive, increasing their health, which increases the enjoyment of the keeper, which inspires them to learn more about the chameleon world which leads them to find way to donate to environmental concerns in Madagascar. You know, the Amazon does not start out a raging river 40km wide! It starts as raindrops in the Andes Mountains. But what those raindrops do is work together. And, honestly, we in the reptile community are not the best at doing that. So, we’ll be regularly discussing how we as entrepreneurs can conduct ourselves in a way that is healing for our community. But, I am realistic. We will have a healthy number of discussions on how to be an entrepreneur in a hostile world. Sorry. I hope to inspire you here, but you’ll survive only if you are prepared for some of the not so positive things that are about to hit you. We will be brutally honest here. No sugar coating. But that means you’ll be ready for it and you’ll make it out the other side.

Can we create new standards for the community?

Now, one thing I’d like to make clear. I will be talking about how we should be changing our business practices for the good of the reptiles and the community. A number of these things will be different than what businesses are doing right now. Makes sense. Moving forward means change. But how we make change is as important as the changes we make. None of this “ends justify the means” garbage. We need to prove that those changes are realistic. Do we think that we can run a successful breeding business with naturalistic enclosures instead of sterile bins? Sounds progressive, doesn’t it? But is it really realistic? Before we tell breeders that have been building their business over the last ten or twenty years that we have a better way we need to put our time and money where our mouth is. You are listening to an Entrepreneur show. That means we are in the business of envisioning things that do not exist yet and creating them. And we know that we are not going to bring about a change in how things are done by sitting back and flinging mud on the people who have gone before. Sure, if someone is being unethical, we need to say something. But if we want things to be done differently we are the ones that will show the world that it can be done differently. Example: Most chameleon breeding businesses raise groups of chameleons in group bins. For those who are not familiar with chameleons, they hate each other and stress each other out if forced to live together. You can get away with keeping them together when they are babies not because they enjoy living with each other, but because they are not able to do physical damage. But they will bully each other, the weaker ones will grow slower, and if you keep them together long enough they will be able to physically hurt each other. The ideal situation is to raise babies separately. But the expense, time, and space required to do that is exponentially greater. This is one of those life decisions where you balance ideal husbandry with real world constraints. But, why not do it right? Why not keep them individually? Well, instead of me going around complaining about it, I or anyone else who believed this needs to step up to the plate and prove that it can work as a business. And that is what I will do…Although it actually has already been done.. so all I am doing is amplifying the practice and informing the public that this is now something available. See, it is more expensive to do it this way. It will be difficult for the majority of Breeders to switch to this method until the buying public is willing to pay more for an individually raised baby. If they switched to individually raising babies now, they will be out competed by breeders that don’t go though that added expense. You see how the consumer is the ultimate decision maker on what survives in the community? So those of us who have a vision need to present it in a compelling enough way that the consumers demand it.

The burden of proof is also upon us to prove that our new grand ideals are correct. Right now, bio-active is all the rage. In my home community, chameleons, you see it pop up all the time. Now, I can tell you, chameleons don’t need a bioactive substrate to thrive. They live in trees. Bioactive can be a positive addition, but it is not necessary. I can guarantee you that sooner or later we will have a fresh batch of experts popping out of the woodwork saying it is the new thing, the better thing, and anyone without is has substandard husbandry. New trends are tricky. We get excited about them. Then we wrap our egos up in them and they become personal campaigns that we need to win. So what is the difference between a true forward step in husbandry and a self-delusion that we are so immersed in that we can’t see it? The results. Not words or fancy logical gymnastics as to why you being right is the only option. But demonstrable, repeatable results. If we want to change things, the burden of proof is on us and we need to take that seriously. It needs to be so right that others can repeat what we believe is a step forward and see the same results.

You see how we will come at these problems in a completely different way than the people complaining and telling others to change? We will literally create the change. And that is our power. We can have whatever change we can create. And, in case you missed it the first time, those of us with the vision are the change element. It takes coordination and it takes honestly pushing towards what is best for the animals. If I get enough breeders on board with individually raising baby chameleons, for one example, and the consumer base is educated enough that they demand it and see it as something worth extra money then we reach a critical mass and the community changes. But you can’t make that kind of change by making something up that isn’t true. It is true that chameleons are best raised separately. Undeniable. Repeatable by anyone who wants to try it out. And so this is a valid direction for us. Me trying to get the world to increase sales of veiled chameleons by doing a marketing campaign presenting them as dog tame is going to fall in flames. Anyone who knows Veiled Chameleons knows that 90% of them have what we would call, fiery attitudes. We cannot move the community forward except with truth that is for the animal’s benefit. Because that is the one thing we will all be able to agree on to work together. We cannot agree on or move forward on opinions derived from a single experience regardless of how prominent that person’s voice or how many people mindlessly follow. If it is not right it is not right.

Now, I may have businesses interviewed here that do things differently from whatever ideals we want to create in our community. That is because creating that new community is our job. But for us to build whatever new vision we have, we need to be able to put it into practice. We need to learn from those who battled their way to building a business that has survived to today. Excepting those who act unethically towards reptiles in treating them like expendable commodities, of which there is no excuse, businesses have done the best they can in the circumstances they were developed within. And we are in no position to look back on their choices and judge them until we have been in that situation ourselves and have shown how a different choice can be made. Oh, it is so easy to judge other people while eating chips from the safety of our sofa. They built this city that we are walking the streets of. We will respect that, acknowledge that the world is not black and white, and our new businesses will benefit from the lessons they can teach us. Learn from the past and prove your vision with actions. Leave the words for people who are not hard at work building. I am not saying their words are not important. But, if they are, that is their job. We will enact change in a different way. And we will have greater success if we learn from the experiences of those that worked through the challenges we are, inevitably, going to face.

And that is why we won’t go into this arrogantly. That inconvenient burden of proof is on us and we must humbly accept that what we are trying to do is not easy. That is why we’ll share our big ideas on this show, hatch plans, and use this as a home base because we are going to fail plenty. We are not going to get it right the first time. My first businesess didn’t make it off the ground. The crash and burn was painful even though it was quick. And basing a business off of a better standard of care is not going to be smooth sailing. How are you going to feel when you are being out produced because your competitor is producing five times as much in his rack versus your naturalistic set-ups. The consumer demands won’t change until we show and make available superior animals from our grand idea approach. But that means we have to make the first move. Do we have what it takes to believe in it so much that we will weather the lack of appreciation until it can slowly catch on? It isn’t easy. Business is much easier if you take the customer sophistication level as the benchmark. You are burdening yourself heavily if you take on educating your customer base. Believe me, starting a hybrid caging business in a chameleon community that believed that anything other than a screen cage would kill your chameleon? It is not the easy route. But, here, on this show I hope to empower and inspire you to strive for a better community. The advantage we have is that most of us start as hobbyists and are more concerned about the quality of our work than the profit. Most of us start with other means of financial support so we can afford to be idealistic and look to a better future. It is a little easier doing that when you are not worrying about keeping the roof over your head.

And finally, I may talk about progressive ideas, but my job here is not to say where you or a community should go. I can speak to the chameleon community. I know it intimately and am qualified to be part of the group charting its next steps. But I will be mostly sticking to my job of giving you to tools to take your community to the next level. I do not intend for this show to say where we should go. There are excellent resources discussing that already. My job is to provide us the tools to create that new world. It is up to you to decide what that should be. It may be a messy process of trial and error. That’s okay. As long as we are moving forward. I’ll let the thought leaders of each community chart the course. I am going to show up with the running shoes for everyone.

As we start our businesses in this new day and age and we prove that we can build around new principles we need to build with an additional humility. The progressive ideas today will be replaced by better ones in 10 or 20 years. Will we be able to evolve with those better ideas or find ourselves trapped, unable to change course, with the size of our company – unable to adjust like the new entrepreneurs that, literally, have not been born yet? In my industry we call this the innovator’s dilemma. If you have not head of it, don’t worry, we’ll go over it. It is why the largest and most successful companies can’t switch to the new technologies even if they see it coming a mile away. And it is one of many warnings we will explore along the way. But that is for a future episode.

What is next?

Does all this sound good to you? This is the right time for a show like this. The community is in rapid growth and the combination of specialty communities coalescing, personal protype and production technology, and new senses of reptile well being make this a perfect time for us to create a community dedicated to talking about how to do it. And, a perfect time for you to consider joining this movement. We are crawling out of a global lockdown where interest in reptile keeping spiked. There aren’t any studies about that. But, those of us with businesses in the reptile world can tell you we were struggling to keep up with demand. And that interest is continuing to grow. I can tell by the increase not only in sales, but in calls from beginners wanting to start out. The reason for a show like this is that this is not just an opportunity to make money. It is that. But it is the opportunity to be on the ground floor of substantial growth and the community can benefit tremendously if that growth is from within. We are the ones who truly care about our reptiles and our community. We will always have overseas manufacturers throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, at Amazon in hopes of selling something. We will always have big brands deciding it is lucrative to have a pet products lines and slap their name on a handful of products they think they can sell. Yes, they smell money, but they don’t care about our community. They aren’t going to pump their profits back into the community and they won’t be supporting us in any political fights. All that money that goes to them disappears. Big picture talk here – support your reptile community businesses and if you have been wanting to be part of the community in a business sense then this is your time. If you have a product, video channel, podcast, blog, or service you have been wanting to create or provide then this show will help you get started. If you would love to be part of this but don’t know what to do then I will help focus your energy. In fact, the very next episode talks about what makes a good product and touches on how to figure out what to make.

The Reptile Entrepreneur show is just starting and, thus, you first listeners can have a significant impact. This show is available as a podcast and video hosted on Youtube. The central hub for show notes and resources is the reptileentreprener.com website. My social media outreach can be found on Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok. To find links to any of these just go to reptileentrepreneur.com and it will all be there.

Listen to a couple of episodes. If the show brings you value and you would like to help in its growth then now is the best time to subscribe on YouTube or submit a review where you listen to podcasts. This is when it makes the most difference and I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you for joining me here. Take care of yourself. Take care of our family. And let’s see what we can build.