Five year anniversary

This is a very special day for me.

It is the day, five years ago, that I told my (hopefully) last boss ever to take their job and shove it, then went off on my own.

You probably don’t know this story, or forgot it as five years is a long time and I rarely talk about it, but the story of my last job did not have a pleasant end.

The year was 2015.

I had just run a successful Kickstarter campaign for Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter the previous September, but it would be five more months until the books arrived in my garage.

Baby’s first palette. Oh, memories. Now, I have three palettes in my garage and am waiting on the delivery of five more.

I figured it would take another 18 months from that point in January of 2015 to get enough traction to leave my job, but I was, actually, pretty happy with how things were going.

It was not always like that, though.

The previous months were Hellish at my job. I had to fire most of my staff as my bosses relocated our LA office to Texas.

These were people I worked with; people I called friends, and I had to hand them their walking papers.

It sucked, but it was done.

I had just closed our LA office, and I was working remotely managing a team in Dallas. My day started at 6am and ended at 2pm, which meant I had all afternoon for writing (and drawing) books.

Yes, I drew a book once called Gherkin Boy and the Dollar of Destiny. It’s…absurd, and hilarious, especially because I can’t draw.

It was kind of nice, my life, even though it was not without stress.

My bosses had even asked me to partner with them to start a Verizon dealership, so things were looking up.

I only asked them one thing…that they couldn’t change their minds in six months…

…which is exactly what ended up happening.

Here is what I wrote on that fateful day, five years ago:

“I spent 6 months building a new line of business for my bosses at work to be told yesterday morning they had to abandon it.

I was given a choice, buy them out of their stake and take over the business I built from scratch or go back to my old job…helping my bosses run a Sprint business.

I chose to buy them out, despite every bone in my body not wanting to return to the world of entrepreneurship.

So as of right now I’m still setting stuff up, but I’m freaking out a bit. I’ll return with more updates.

This has been a crazy week inside a crazy year.”

I had NEVER been successful as an entrepreneur. I started three companies in my 20s and they were all disasters.

We did make a little web series called Connections, though, which is not without its charm.

It made ZERO dollars, though.

At one point during the Great Recession, I was on unemployment for something like 99 weeks, and I EASILY made more on unemployment than I ever did at any of my companies…

…so I was not hopeful it would work out, but I had no other choice. I had no faith in my bosses, and without trust you have nothing.

I didn’t leave with nothing, at least. I had the same Verizon dealership I still have today, and I had a palette of books. That palette lasted into 2017, and the next printing lasted until 2019. We’re now on the eighth printing of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

Thank god for that Verizon dealership, because it saved my butt that first year…

…and that second year, as I ran a treadmill of shows and barely able to make ends meet, losing $2 for every $1 I made, and trying to figure it out.

I made $40,000 in revenue in 2015 between Wannabe Press and my Verizon dealership, and it was OVERWHELMING Verizon money that kept me afloat. The next year I made $56,000, with over 60% coming from Verizon.

Both of those numbers sound okay, but they were REVENUE, not PROFIT, and money was going out WAY faster than it was coming in. I was bleeding money.

It was awful until I figured out my business, our brand, and what I wanted to do with Wannabe Press.

These were all things I intended to figure out while I had a job. I no longer had that luxury, so I did it on the fly.

But I did on some level figure it out, and in 2017, I broke through with Monsters and Other Scary Shit, and then kept going with Pixie Dust and the first volume of Cthulhu is Hard to Spell.

In 2017, I made $125,000 in revenue. In 2018, I made $130,000. Money was still going out faster than it was coming in, but at least there was a small profit margin and more money to work with than before, and almost none of it came from my Verizon dealership. It was almost all from Wannabe Press, and The Complete Creative.

By the beginning of 2019, I had established myself as a well respected (in some circles) independent creator and something of a thought leader in the world of creative entrepreneurship…

…and because the universe is always ready to cut you down to size, I had my WORST LAUNCHES EVER at the beginning of 2019…

…so bad I was suicidal.

One night my wife came home and I told her that I’m glad we didn’t have a gun because I would have killed myself that day. I was dead serious.

I had spent two years on this book launch slate, spent $20,000+ on them, and I watched as everything I built fell apart in front of me.

Luckily, I was able to recover, both mentally and financially, probably because I failed for so long in so many ways that it was like second nature to me.

In the second half of 2019, I launched new issues of Ichabod Jones. I ended up making $120,000 in revenue in 2019.

I rebranded and relaunched those failed books from 2019 on Kickstarter in January 2020, and followed that up with a $30,000+ campaign for Cthulhu is Hard to Spell: The Terrible Twos.

After raising less than $2,000 in those first since months of 2019 on a $20,000 spend, I was able to raise over $50,000 in the six months between September 2019 and March 2020.

I’m still crawling out of that dark $20,000 hole, but the launch of my Summer Slate is helping me crawl back to even. If it makes $8,000 then I only have a couple hundred more dollars to recover on one book before I am at even, which will be a great accomplishment, especially without shows.

On top of that, I started new meds for depression and found ways to decouple my self worth from my success, which is one of the great achievements of my life.

Things have been Hell and Heaven, sometimes in equal measure, during the last five years.

2020 is not even being close to my worst year ever. I’ve had four businesses slip out of my fingers in my life. Watching a fifth one try to do the same is nothing new.

I’m not even sure it’s a top-five bad year, even though I lost 75% of my yearly projections in about 2 weeks.

2015 was a bad year. 2016, too. I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, but they were necessary to get where I am today, so I have made peace with them, as I will make peace with 2020.

I still remember that day when I left my old job with very little except that palette and a fledgling Verizon dealership…oh, and a table at San Diego Comic-Con, which my friend offered me.

This will be my first year not exhibiting at SDCC since that first year in 2015.

Lots of people think that I came fully formed out of the womb-like this, but it has been mostly struggle, and it’s still mostly struggle, honestly.

But I love it all the same.

Every yeard when June 12th comes around, I never think I’m going to make it one more year. Doing this work is so hard and few people are able to do it full time for even one year, let alone five. Many people much better than me have tried and failed, so every time I reach another anniversary it’s a pleasant and delightful surprise.

Doing this work is a gift. Having fans is a gift. I try to never forget that, even at my worst moment.

I get to basically make the exact thing I want to make, when I want to make it, for people who want to buy it.

Seriously, people buy the weird things that come out of my head. That tickles me so much.

It is harder than you imagine and more fulfilling than you can believe.

Five years of doing this thing that I love. Here’s to 50 more.