What I should call this page is My Failed Business endeavors. The fact is that I have tried to go into business for myself numerous times without enjoying a great deal of success. This is a sort of history of those failed endeavors:
1978 – 1992 – Realtor (Crown Real Estate, 1978 – 1980); (Century 21 – Hobby Realty, 1980-1985); (RE/Max – Stanley James Real Estate, 1990 – 1992)
With the exception of the period when I was with RE/Max, I had only sold homes on a part-time basis. Through out my career as a Realtor, I had listed 30 properties and sold a total of five. In prospecting for clients, it seemed that I was never in the right place at the right time, usually drawing the worst hours when assigned them to answer the phone. When I moved to California, I leaned that California and Illinois didn’t have the necessary agreement to allow a Real Estate Agent from Illinois to attain a license in California, unless I wanted to retake the classes.
1989 — Arseneau Mobile Locksmith “Home of the Keymaster.”
Inspired by a couple fellow Scoutmasters, I took a home-study course in Locksmithing through Foley-Belsaw, purchased and furnished a mini-van, and purchased a very expensive half-page color ad in our local yellowpages. At the time I would have been one of three locksmiths in the phone book, and having the sur-name Arseneau, I figured that given it’s prevalence in Kankakee and Iroquois Counties, I would have no problem getting steady customers.
So I had one of the most recognized names in the area, I also had invested in the largest locksmith ad in the phone book, and best of all, only two competitors.
Except that that year five other locksmiths, besides myself and the two older ones, suddenly appeared in the phone book. And a couple of them had full-page ads. The phone very rarely rang, and after three months I was forced out of business, ad I could not afford the $700 / month payment for my yellow pages ad.
1992 – 1995 — Video Magick
This is a business I started with wife number 2 (“She whose name is not spoken”). We were a video production house, specializing in commercials for local cable. Mostly what we did were “art pieces” and weddings. At that time in video production, weddings were the bread and butter. The problem was that my partner did not like to shoot them, and so I ended up shooting and editing a lot of these on my own. Investment wise, I had sank a great deal of the inheritance I I still had that I had received from my father in 1990, and this was my last chance to make my fathers money work for me. Video production equipment is expensive, and due to rapid changes in technology, has a short shelf life. We just couldn’t generate enough business to keep up with the technology (not to mention make a living) and ended up calling it quits after only three years.
1999 – 2003 — Rogue Valley Celtic Society
Ceridwen and I produced Celtic music shows, mostly at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Ashland OR. This basically came out of our pocket: renting the concert space, booking the entertainment, producing brochures, posters, programs as well as buying advertising in local publications. Of the exactly four shows we produced, only one of them made a profit, the rest (luckily) broke even. In a couple of cases we lost friends over this.
2004 – TODAY — Avalon Risen Collective
This is an online store selling art, ritual supplies, jewelry, books and other items of interest to the Pagan, Wiccan, and occult community. Between March 2004 and Yule 2009, we did pretty well, making about $500 / month in overall sales. The bottom fell out as a result of the demise of the Sequoia Pagan Alliance. Ceridwen used to work on our Avalon site during slow periods while managing Pathfinders, an occult bookstore once located here in Eureka CA. Business was slow a whole lot of the time, since the owner didn’t believe in advertising. He believed that creating a couple of Golems and stationing them at the door of the shop that these demons would draw customers into the store. As a result there was little to no business, and sometimes Ceridwen would spend the bulk of here time on the stores PC working on Avalon Risen. The day she was fired, she left the store leaving behind automated in roads onto Avalon Risen’s web site. Since WL (Pathfinders owner) and his best friend believed themselves to be hackers, they went online and shut down Avalon Risen, a fact we didn’t discover for almost a solid week. It took Ceridwen and I about a month to get Avalon Risen back up and functioning, and we lost a lot ot time and apparently turned off a lot of customers.
We actually never recovered, and the only reason we keep the site up is that it is host to a number of sub-domains.
