About 13 years ago I followed my passion and opened my first business. I had a childhood obsession with all things horror and monsters and thought:
“Wouldn’t it be awesome to be surrounded by the things I love and talk to people that are into the same stuff every day?”
Monster Motivation: My Entrepreneur Journey
So that’s what I did. I opened my shop and loaded it with all sorts of my favourite things. T-shirts, posters, dvds, action figures, comic books, pins and stickers. All of these products featured heroes and villains from my favourite movies. Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, Pinhead, Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. They were all there!
I soon discovered running a business was hard. I made a lot of mistakes along the way. I screwed up a lot. I bought products that I thought would sell that didn’t. I invested in expensive radio advertising to bring customers in, they never came. I rented a location in an old, low-income part of town to save on rent, big mistake.
It wasn’t all bad though. Those mistakes were valuable lessons. Lessons that taught me things in a real-world environment, lessons that I could never have learned had I not jumped in and started my own business. Because of my lack of budget to pay for advertising, I needed to learn to do it myself.
I learned to create websites, forums and implement email marketing software out of necessity. While none of these things made me rich I learned something incredible. Through my DIY business marketing education, I realized that I really enjoyed building websites and would love to do it full time as a career.
I put my ass into high gear and worked my butt off studying web design, graphic design and development through courses on Lynda.com, buying lots of books on Adobe products and later Teamtreehouse.com
I was fortunate enough to land a job running an entire web design and marketing department all by myself for 9 years! Being a jack of all trades was a great experience. Learning on the job, on real projects for real businesses was amazing.
As happy as I was at my job that hunger and passion for entrepreneurship never dimmed. Even though I had paid off over $50k in credit card debt from HorrorMonsters, I still needed to be in my own game.
Monster Workshop represents that for me. It’s a collection of experience based on success and failure, lessons learned on what to do and what not to do…like starting a business based on passion and running it without solid direction or know how.
My goal is to share my information and knowledge with you.
I want to help you avoid the pitfalls that I encountered 12 years ago at my little shop of horrors.
I’m going to show you how to get set up with a website, increase your online traffic, leads, customers and ultimately…your revenue.
Each week I’ll send out another piece of content that you can apply to your business immediately and start seeing positive results from.
