Backstage Pass: October 2019

What a month!

There's so many ups and downs in small business. You try to enjoy the wins, but most of the time you are dealing with the L's and trying to bounce back.

October was really rough for us. We locked up a warehouse space for a move in date of October 1st, 2019. Here is photos of our move, which was about 80 hours of work.

I had a quick turnaround as I had to get a plane to go to Monterrey, MX to help out one of my closet friends Rick. I was in charge of assisting Jackson with anything he needed for his comic con appearance in MX. Here are some photos of Jackson at his appearance. Plus behind the scene photos.

Bonnie Aarons, Nicholas, and Jackson.

The hotel the convention put us up was beautiful. Great view of the mountains surrounding Monterrey.

Random selfie Jackson took on my photo when he took it to find games. Sadly I don't have any games installed on my phone lol.

Mexico was amazing so was dinner on Sunday night. Check out this presentation!

People asked me how do you get two people to sign items in bulk...well thats easy at the same time.

Next up for me was flying to Dallas, continue to fix the warehouse then get a on flight to Chicago for ACE Comic Con. Now when I got to the airport in Dallas to fly to Chicago, everything seemed fine.....then boom! Delay!

I could not be late or it was gonna set me back a lot. I had to call in a favor with JSA. The guys drove to my hotel, parked their vehicle, then wheeled all of your mail in items from the hotel to the show for me. Honestly, went above and beyond for all of you. Here's a great video of them laughing at Stephen do to crossing a busy street with no F's given! lol

Once I landed I took the slowest taxi to the venue. I ran inside and started to setup only to see Tom Holland cosplaying as Thanos...no seriously.

Here are some photos from ACE Comic Con weekend.

I landed at midnight Sunday night on the 13th and got 4 hours of sleep. I went straight back to the airport for a LA trip that consisted of meetings and another signing, this time with Peter Billingsley.

At this point I was so exhausted but once I landed in Dallas, again straight to the warehouse to help fix it up. There's so many boxes laying around that the goal is just to fix things so we can start processing orders as usual and just get a flow to be honest.

Here is behind the scene photos of Beth Phoenix appearance at Dallas Fan Expo.

Trish signing your Funko POPs and Matthew having fun at his first ever Photo Op experience. 

I decide that Sunday I am gonna take the day off and go see a Cowboys game with my friend Christian. Around half time I get a message from our neighbor at the tattoo shop that there was a leak and he thinks he can hear water in our space. I literally run to my vehicle 1 mile away. All I could think about was the customer product being damaged and how this can end Zobie. It took over an 1 hour to get to McKinney due to the terrible storm. I literally passed a 18 wheeler that was dangling from the highway on the verge of falling to the floor. Once I got to the warehouse I opened the door and heard the worst sound at that moment. Water hitting my floor. To be honest, I shed a lot of tears just writing this paragraph. It was the worst situation in that moment. Here is what I walked into.

Stephen from JSA drove through the storm to get to the warehouse to help us. My step-dad drove from Prosper, TX to help me. Adam left his apartment during the storm to go and help me. Wilson as well. If we hadn't gotten a call from Dexter it could have been worse. We still lost thousands of dollars. It was like someone punched me in the stomach and I never saw it coming, you know the hits that hurt the worst. I was deflated. Monday this is what we were dealing with.

The smell was unbearable. I quickly took action and found another vacant warehouse to move all of the items to. Yes thats correct. We moved again! This time we just tryed to move whatever we could as quickly as possible due to the terrible smell and weather. The goal was just to get back up and running because we had the Zobie Gamer Mystery Box going out that Thursday as well as prepping the Zobie Fright Pack. I was not gonna let this event affect our launches. I don't believe in letting that affect the trust you put on us to provide you a quality product. I honestly didn't want to let you guys down. What I saw in front of me was 80 hours of work per week since. Guess what? No delays. Most people who are reading this probably didn't even realize this was going on. I lost over 15k in this event. I am blessed in that no one was hurt, merchandise can always be replaced. No excuses, we put the work in to bring you the best product we possible can, no matter the environment. Your love and support means a lot to me period. Now in order for things not to be affected I needed to move forward with all of my plans which was attending New York for a Michael J Fox signing that we had scheduled 10 days prior.

Here's Frank and me in the worlds smallest elevator. haha Shout out to Frank for being a trooper and assisting me with this signing. Mentally I was gone, physically I was done. Emotionally I was a mess. If you notice there is a trend here with people around me who are there for me in my weakest and darkest points of life. Without the support around me I don't know where I would be.

Here a video of the amazing Kara Edwards doing a recording of the Doughbie voice over work.

I will end this blog with this. October was really rough for me and my family. I learned early in life that no matter the journey we have to embrace the good and bad and learn from it. We learn from our biggest L's in life. I embrace it. I embrace the grind and the long hours. I truly believe with all my heart that the hard work will pay off one day.

I love your guys support. Thank you for everything, believe me I read the emails and DMs. They help me get through some tough times this year and this month I really appreciated the lift me up messages.

Stay Strong!

Jayare