Good evening, welcome the Thursday meditation for the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast. And since this is the first one I feel I should explain. The Monday episode is all business. There you will get some meaty interview or help setting up a business. That is more the episodes that are the core where I want to take this podcast. Every other Thursday, though, is just going to be whatever I feel like. I may talk about my thoughts on how we conduct business. I may talk about what I think about a product. Maybe product comparisons? Maybe thoughts on topics that are important to us as a community. Bottom line is that the Thursday meditations are free for all. So we’ll just see where they go.

Though, I would like to start this off and share what having a side business in the reptile community has meant for me. I really didn’t start the Dragon Strand chameleon caging company with the idea of it being a significant side business. I definitely was going to set it up to bring in a profit, but starting a hybrid caging company in a community that was still saying chameleons can only live in screen cages is not the easiest route to riches. But it touched a chord. Now, I had the advantage that I had been involved in chameleon community education for over a decade at this point and I had been using hybrid cages for 20 years by this time. So not only did I know what I was talking about, I was highly qualified to talk about the nuances of chameleon caging. But me starting a company did not come from me seeing an untapped market or realizing I was on a gold mine. It came from the simple desire to provide better enclosures for my chameleons. I was just hoping to sell enough to pay for my cages to be professionally made. And they took off. I followed it up with a product I called the dragon ledges which allowed us chameleon people to mount horizontal branches and potted plants on the walls of screen cages where chameleons needed them. It solved a real problem. I got in contact with a very good patent attorney and was able to patent the product. The business grew quickly. And, here is where it changed my life and provided something more valuable than just a side income to have a nice vacation, or, like many of us do, buy more reptiles. It gave me freedom. And for this I’ll tell a story.

I was the director of product marketing for a well known consumer electronics company. And I felt trapped. The atmosphere at my company was accurately described as soul crushing. Leadership was weak, politics ruled the day, we had some good people, but they didn’t last long. My job search wasn’t going well. What I was finding required moving the family which wasn’t in the cards  at the time so I was stuck.

I don’t suppose any of you can relate to this feeling.  Any of you feel trapped? You know, the kind where you can be abused and bounced around in some sort of sick Hunger Games type corporate office where every day is a battle to figure out who you can blame so you aren’t blamed and the most vulnerable people are the ones actually doing the work so they don’t have time to defend themselves?  

I was being paid well enough and the benefits were valuable to me so I didn’t feel like I could just walk out the door. Changing jobs was difficult as I was consumer electronics and the industry around me was medical and software so a move to silicon valley 400 miles away might be necessary to continue in this field. But the details are not that important. What is important is that feeling of being trapped where you dread going to work. My chest tightened every morning commute as I drove closer to my personal hell. I loved the work, but the atmosphere was putrid with politics.

The greatest feeling was the day that I walked in and gave my resignation. They asked where I was going. Nowhere. What company are you going to? I am going to do my own thing.

You see, I had been building the Dragon Strand chameleon caging business for a few years. It was nowhere near the size I needed to be able to replace my day job, but it was big enough that if I cut my personal expenses to bare minimum, I could pay the essentials. Yvette, my wife, hated to see the physical and emotional toll that workplace was taking on me and she gave her blessing to trading the money for happiness. And so I resigned to do chameleon cages. As I said, the income was not enough to be considered a permanent solution. The plan was that it would give me a break from the diseased atmosphere and that would give me the time to rest and look for another job. Now, you may say, why not dedicate full time to the caging company and build that? Well, that is what I did. But I kept my options open. See, as cool as the word entrepreneur is, I have no deep inner need to call myself that. There are significant advantages to working at a larger company. Even in the crazy world of consumer electronics as a salaried employee which is expected to work until the job gets done I was working longer hours self-employed. There were good medical benefits attached to employment including a 401K matched program. So there are pros and cons to both worlds. This current crop of die hard entrepreneurs may scoff at me and say I am not a true entrepreneur because a true believer couldn’t accept anything else! Okay, fine, I really don’t care about the labels! What was gold to me was that I could choose which life I wanted to life. I had the freedom to leave a toxic workplace when I had had enough.

Think about where you are right now? Are you happy with your job? If so, then I hope this podcast gives you the inspiration to design products or content streams that enrich the reptile community. If you hate your job and the stress is taking hours off your life every day then I hope this podcast has a deeper meaning for you. I hope that it is the catalyst that gets you started on making a business which will give you the freedom to be happy. I didn’t say rich and I didn’t say quick. The reptile community is large enough that it can support business, but not so large yet that it will be easy to hit it big right away. If you do, then good for you. Two thumbs up. But I am talking about building businesses that are more reasonable and likely to happen. More probable. You could, conceivably, build a business in a few years that would support a humble, but reptile filled life. Depending on what you choose. That is a reasonable goal if you start now and are smart with money. The community is in a state of growth so opportunities are going to going to come up.

After a year of working the caging business I got a call from a colleague who was putting together a team in silicone valley to launch a global product line for a new company. He asked if I would lead the product marketing function. And here was a huge decision point for me. What would you decide? One of the greatest feelings was making that decision based on how much I would enjoy doing the job. It certainly didn’t hurt that I wouldn’t have to be so frugal with money, but I would have to move. I always knew that was a constant spectre. But I knew this guy was one of the best human beings and there were three people I knew that I said if they ever called me and asked me to work for them the answer was yes. And he was one of them. So a new chapter begun. The point is that I had the freedom to choose. A month later I was showing product in Paris and finally looking forward to driving into work.

Such a nice happy ending, right? Well, life is not about happy endings. I moved to silicone valley and was having a great time traveling over Europe and China developing new technologies…until things changed. The president of the company switched things up a bit and suddenly this wonderful place that I had moved hundreds of miles to be at…wasn’t so wonderful anymore. In fact, it was disturbing that some of the same trends were happening as before.

Life is no guarantee. It is great and then it is not so great. After just over two years of working it I realized it was just going to get worse there. So what did I do? Well, this is the most valuable thing I have ever done – I kept growing my caging business on the side. So when things got bad, I resigned. I left to go back to chameleon cages full time with a larger business. Sure, that meant no more paid vacations, but to us reptile people, coming home is a vacation. How does it get better than this?

There will always be good and bad and I don’t recommend just jumping from one thing to another, but I want to relate the incredible freedom having a successful side business has provided for me. We may talk about how we want to build a better reptile community, but I also want to talk about how we can build a better personal life at the same time. And this is a strong motivation for this podcast. If you have the entrepreneurial spirit in you then this is possible for you. You can build a back-up business that can be there for you when you need it. It saved me from an early heart attack considering the stress involved. I had a friend at that first job whose doctor told him that he had to change jobs for his health. It was that serious. I wasn’t buying jet skis rich, but I was paying the bills and happy. But this is what I want to talk about on this show. My greatest satisfaction is if people email me after a year or so and tell me how much making a business in the reptile community has made their life better. If you all get rich because of this podcast then that will go on the marketing for the podcast! But if you are able to become happier in your life, if you are able to feel more freedom to make choices…then I will feel like I have passed on what I was given by the people who trained me. And I think that is what this is all about. Passing on what you can to allow others to make better lives for themselves. I like that.

You know what I want for my life? I love content creation. I love podcasting, making videos, and doing tutorials. I want to teach in this digital world.

I am excellent at Product Marketing. I kept a consumer GPS device business alive for about two or three years beyond the point that the iPhone should have made us shut our doors. It was quite the ride trying to come up with products that offered new features that the iPhone couldn’t do. And then the next year it had to be something else as the behemoth sucked up everything in its path. It was a frantic game of zig zag to avoid being stepped on. My job was to keep the consumer business alive long enough that the enterprise business that they were building could get off the ground. Because when Apple sits at your table and decides it likes your lunch the writing is burned into the wall with an Acetylene torch. I worked at Magellan GPS from before the iPhone when a GPS navigator was the vanguard of new technology until the bitter end when smartphones all but destroyed the category. In the end, I did my part and kept the consumer product revenue coming in to pay the bills until the enterprise business was established. Anyway, I am good at Product Marketing. And that is a career that has a great pay. If I were to go back I could be very happy. But for a variety of reasons, I am taking a break from that world.

I love selling chameleon cages. There has been a sense of pride that I can change my product line to give us the tools we need to implement the latest in chameleon husbandry theory.

But, deep down, my absolute passion is content creation. It is the podcasts and videos and websites and infographics. So, if I were to take my own advice, what would I do? I would take every minute of spare time into building up a content creation business on the side. And, that is exactly what I am going to do.

And here is where we come full circle to the whole side gig thing I am talking about. Dragon Strand is, at this time, profitable enough to cover the basic of bills. We are still working on that part about being rich. In the meantime, I am working on this podcast that I have always wanted to do (since before the Chameleon Academy Podcast, actually) and build it to where it can be monetized. After an adult lifetime of engineering, product marketing, and reptile community business experience I have some insight to offer. Let’s see what I can do with it. And I’ll be completely transparent on what I am doing and how successful I am! I mean, that is the whole purpose of this show, right? To build a business in the reptile community! So, you can watch me build my content business while I and the host of interviewees you listen to here all help you build whatever form your business takes.

So, that is what a Thursday episode is like. I’ll probably do this every other week, but that all depends on how much I have to say.

I don’t know when you are listening to this, but it is nighttime here. So, we will go with that. I wish you a good night, I encourage you to dream that dream of what you would like to be doing, and if it is something in the reptile world then stick around here and we should be touching on things that can help you get it going. And you are always welcome to let me know if there is a business question you have that I might be able to do a show to help out. If you are wondering about it, someone else probably is too. Okay, I’ll sign off now. But I’ll be back at it tomorrow morning at 4AM. I love working in the early morning and there is no better peace for me than finishing up writing an episode while watching the sun slowly chase the night away. The life of an entrepreneur is hectic, but it is moments like those, when the world is silent and most people are still asleep that we can be calm and meditate on the life we are building. Staying up late like this doesn’t bode well for the early morning wake up, but where is the excitement in always knowing what’s next in the story? Yep, edge of the seat thrills in my life every day.

  I am glad you are here with me. Take care. I’ll see you on the interwebs.