Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / The Evolution of an Entrepreneur with Caryn Martinez
Transcript
- Marci: Welcome to Marci Talks Money (and Life) and I am thrilled to introduce my guest today, Caryn Martinez. I have known Caryn for many years and she has always been an entrepreneur. Truly a serial entrepreneur, because I don't think I know all of the businesses she's created throughout the years. She's an editor and ghost writer, has been a piano, guitar and dance teacher, done horse and tennis photography, published a creative writing and photography magazine, had an entertainment agency, done social media and web development, and is now the creator of Peppy Paws Play yard in Mesa, Arizona, which is a dog park and space for dog training. And I'm sure I missed some things, but please welcome Caryn. Caryn: Thank you for having me. Marci: I'm so thrilled to have you here, because, as you know, this is a podcast has to talk about money and life. I think the various things you do fit in here so well, talking about what made you create the businesses, what made you decide when the businesses had reached their conclusion, and what you are doing next. And I'm excited to hear everything you've got to share with us. Caryn: Where would you like me to start. Marci: I don't know. If you start at the very beginning, we might be here a long time. But how about how about you give us a synopsis of what lead you to become an entrepreneur. I know you've worked for other people at various times, but what led you to wanting to mostly be creating these spaces and being your own boss? Caryn: You know, I think throughout my life a lot of people have always said, Ooh, I don't know if I could have my own business or be an entrepreneur. I think it was a lot easier for me to envision that because many members of my family owned their own business, so I had the model of entrepreneurship and business ownership my whole life. So it didn't seem unusual to me to do that at all. And as a matter of fact, my brother also owns his own business, so the family does that a lot. Marci: And I'm going to try and talk him onto coming onto my podcast as well, because he has different businesses than you do. Caryn: Yep, yeah, very different businesses. So I think the two things that would be the most important to share are the business that grew organically out of my experiences - that was my entertainment agency, and then the business I most recently opened. It kind of grew out of my daughter's experiences, but this was truly a business that we started from scratch. So comparing those might be helpful to people, you know when they're thinking of doing it. So when it came to my entertainment agency, I actually started as an entertainer. I was a professional belly dancer. And when I was not doing that for a little while, I had to take some time off for health reasons, people would still call me for jobs. Examples of the sort of jobs would be weddings, showers, parties. I never did restaurants, but restaurants would call me, that sort of thing, and I would recommend my friends who are also professional dancers. And one of them said to me one time, ‘you know, you're like an agent. I should actually be paying you for sending me on these jobs’. And I thought about it, and I said, I am like an agent. I mean I was just there helping out my friends, but I am like that. And I already had a website set up, the sort of thing where I was putting down where we. and we, I mean me and my friends and my musician friends were going to be on the weekends. I was promoting people in different kinds of arts just for the fun of it. I had that already set up. And this is when the internet was just invented. We're still in the late nineties when it was just starting to grow. So I said, all right, this is how I'm going to set up my agency, and having worked with agents before, I knew what I did and did not want to do, and redid my website and I started to get calls from out of state. At this point, I was just doing Middle Eastern dance and music, nothing more, and I'm like, why can't you find somebody in Los Angeles? Literally just shout out your window. But people wanted to book online. They, way even back then, they wanted to do it. So I kind of was able to ride that wave, like surf that wave as it became and with me making more and more connections in different parts of the country with different types of entertainers, I ended up having a super wide variety, particularly in certain cities. I'm from Michigan originally, so actually in Michigan and Arizona, where I'm from, and California, where I knew a lot of different people, but also in other places it well. So we had every type of music, every type of entertainment that we had, and that's you know, just I guess I could say I was jumping on the web at the right time. But it was I've really noticed that people wanted to do that. Anyway I had, that's how the business grew out of things that I had already been doing, both professionally and just socially. Marci: Yeah, I remember, because I think there were a couple of times where friends had asked me if they knew, if I knew of somebody or did something that I recall. I was like, I know you're in Arizona, but, and you were able a couple of times to help me look like I knew what I was doing, hooking someone up with whatever entertainment it was. And that was fascinating to me because the Internet was still so new. I think that was that was AOL, not Facebook and the things, and not LinkedIn, not these other sites that have continued to make the world smaller. Caryn: It was. It was a really fun business to have because it was literally my job to go to music festivals and arts festivals and find new people. So I can imagine for my business, I have to spend the weekend at the jazz festival. Oh darn you know, it was really great. I got the most wonderful, We spent a week at the Venetian Festival in Charlevoix, you know where they have like three or four bands every single night. That was like, got to do it for the business. So but speaking of that, you've talked about social media. So I owned the business as the various social platforms were starting to open up. The first one that really opened up that was of consequence was MySpace because if you'll remember, the original MySpace was a place where musicians loved to share their work. And that was a really good place to connect with people that I didn't know before, you know, to find different musicians. That was the first one. Eventually Facebook opened up, and I actually have to say that as I learned these things, I was helping other people to learn how to do them as well. Facebook started to get big around the time that I went on hiatus from the entertainment agency and I'll tell you that story. But when I decided not to reopen the agency, I continued on with the expertise that I had gotten about social media and continue to teach that. So there were several years when I was doing workshops, taking out clients one on one to help them, and attending and speaking at conferences about social media marketing. So that grew out of knowing it from the entertainment agency. Marci: It's amazing how one thing builds to another. I mean, that's one of the things I tell people is as you find a job, you may find it doesn't suit you any longer, but there are skills that will help you find the next, whatever that next is, for you. Caryn: Yeah, it really, it really did that. I had for a while, do you remember on when they're used to have Twitter chats. Maybe you don't if you didn't do it. I had for a while, the most popular one. It was called Ask Angel. My name in the entertainment world was Angelique, and so it was ask Angel and it was about social media marketing. And it was big. It was a great chat that we had every week. So that was again a while ago, because they don't have that sort of thing anymore anywhere, I don't think. Marci: I imagine everything exists somewhere, but it's a matter of if it's the right space for you, you may or may not find it as easily as, you know, especially if you're not looking for it. It's not what you're looking for right now, so you're not going to find it. Once you look for it, once you do it. In fact, possibly because we just spoke about it, now, if you have any devices listening with AI, the next thing you know, you're going to get five ads for it. But that's just where technology is taking us. So you don't design websites anymore. Caryn: I was doing that, okay. So here's something that I do actually right now is I keep people's websites going. So there's so many people they're at the end of their career or their business just doesn't want that site to go down. They can't afford to redo their site in the way that would be wonderful to do, but they don't want it to go crashy crashy. And right now I don't have, I don't think we specifically said that I had been doing web development through my company, Clamshell Communications. That's what came, you know, social media and then web development along with it and everything. So right now I don't have time to do that sort of web development thing. But I have no problem because I have a little team, you know, I'm not doing this all myself. I have a little team and I can keep people's sites, you know, going for them, so that at least they won't be embarrassed that, oh no, my site is down and I really do need at least some kind of presence. Marci: Okay. And then and then you created Peppy Paws, because that's a passion project of yours, taking your dogs and horses and showing them and competing. Caryn: What happened with Peppy Paws Play Yard, which I'll explain, is a private doggy playground we’re in Mesa, Arizona. This is the first business I have ever had that was confined to a location that's brick and mortar. Even we have no bricks or mortar because we're completely outside. Everything else that I've done, you know, editing for people, which I still do. I mean, this is what I actually got my postgraduate degree in, was editing and publishing, editing for people, entertainment agency, obviously helping people with social media. It didn't matter where they were. I usually didn't meet people face to face that were my clients, you know, in person. This one is really like truly hyper local, and we live on an acre of irrigated property. So although we're in Arizona, we have lots of trees and grass, a lot of fruit trees, gardens, that sort of thing. Our house is right in the middle of it, so our backyard is a full, fully fenced half acre. So we already had that. We also already had dogs, and we're agility competitors. And by we, I mean my daughter Lia has been doing this for many years and I have been doing it for about a year. But we also had the yard set up for dogs, and we had we were collecting practice equipment and everything. And my daughter was the one that first had the idea of a dog care business in some way. And at first she thought of, you know, like a daycare sort of situation, but that didn't work for us. First of all, we're in Arizona, so half of the year it's, you can't. We're not going out there. Marci: Okay, So basically nine hundred degrees and dry. Caryn: Yes. And also another thing about me is I'm a very chemically sensitive person, so having dogs, strange dogs in our home would be absolutely impossible for me. I have to keep my home in a way that is completely healthy for me. So, but when we talked about it, it was really the outside of thing, and we came up with the idea, which I found out while I was doing my research, was totally unique of a doggy playground where people came to interact with their dogs. So they came to play and or train their dogs. Bring their trainer. Some people like to run around with their dogs and everybody gets exercised, and they bring their kid, and some people they just want to sit in the shade and we are actually also very hands on if they would like us to be. So some people come and sit in the shade and we play with their dogs. They usually come for half an hour at a time, and we came up with that idea. This is the business for which we did the business plan and really researched it and laid out everything that we were going to do. And that's when we found out that there isn't anybody that we know that has anything like it and we were kind of learning as we were doing. So in the past year and a half that we've had it, we've dropped some ideas and added some new ideas. So that's how that started with that. Marci: And this is a lot different than community dog parks where you buy a tag and you bring your dog and maybe you go with a friend, or maybe you go and you hope that the other dogs there are friendly dogs, and you have no idea when you get there whether you'll have time alone or not. When people come to you, they are renting your space for whatever amount of time, and they might be the only dog there, or what are the restrictions? Caryn: And we actually consider ourselves a service. People are not renting the space in the same way they would if they were at a sniff spot. If you've ever heard of a sniff spot, it's a sniff spot is a network like Airbnb and Vrbo our networks, and this company has a special application people have on their phones and they rent out or rent truly, you're just walking into some person's yard that they set out for you, and that's different from us. It's too bad we can't be listed there, but we can't. It's a completely different thing. You're kind of working, you know, with that, and they set up how it is. We are a completely independent thing, our own place, our own rules, our own one on one scheduling with me, like you're always talking to a person, me being really strict about all the dogs being vaccinated, us interacting with the dogs for people. We show people, there are different things that we can do, show people what agility is like if they're interested in doing it. You know, handling the dogs with them, show some interesting things to do to the owners. We have a serenity space with sniffing activities for the dogs to have fun with sniffing activities, which is a calming sort of exercise for them. We have all this kind of stuff that we're hands on with. And now that I've explained that, I can't... Oh, you're talking about the difference between us and a public dog park. Yeah, about sixty percent of our dogs are reactive dogs who can't go to a public dog park. They've either been traumatized at the public dog park by the other dogs or other people that are there, or they were rescue dogs. We still have a lot of dogs that were rescued. Now they do it, but during the pandemic, and you know a lot of reactive dogs that they need the private space. Other people have perfectly social dogs, dogs that like other dogs and people, but they still want to come and have the private experience and not have the problems that you can have at a public dog park and they come and bring their friends. The best thing is and we have friend groups. I want to, I'm still trying to connect with a trainer. By the way, dog trainers, if you're listening, we need somebody that wants to train out of here, that will facilitate evaluating dogs for potentially being friends. Because when people come with their friends and the dogs play together, they do so much more playing and running around. You know, they really enjoy that. So we'd like to doggy matchmake and I would totally be doing that under the supervision and evaluation of a professional trainer. Marci: And of course you'd have to be somewhat local to Mesa, Arizona, Caryn: Yes. Marci: Because it would be a little bit of a commute for me in Michigan. Caryn: Well, if I become if I become a huge success, we could franchise. You can tell I watch a lot of Shark Tank, but which would be really great. But first this has to be success. Marci: And do many people rent out your space to work their dogs for agility training competitions? Caryn: Yeah, so that's a slightly different thing that we do. People that do agility usually don't have all of the space and all the equipment that we have, and when their agility clubs or classes that they're taking are on hiatus, or if they just simply need to practice because a meet is coming up, and especially if they need evening because we've just, we have lights. We didn't have it our first year, but now we have some lights for evening, which is important in Arizona when it's hot. Then they come. We've got especially long sessions for them, so it gives them time to move around the equipment, and we're very strict about that. I have to say is that nobody gets to play agility or play on the equipment except for the super safe stuff like running through the tunnel. But when it comes to the big equipment, you have the, not the dog, but the dog owner has to have gone through at least one course from an agility classer club that we recognize, and once you've done that, then you can use it. But we have to make sure that the dogs and the people are going to be safe. Marci: And I think it's fascinating the way you turned a passion project into a business and then what seems like a new, a new business model. So hey, people who are passionate about their their dogs, and dog training may want to want to look at this. But not everyone's going to have a half acre. I don't know. Caryn: We have a full acre. If we only lived on a half acre, this would not be possible. Marci: Well no, no, I meant a half acre available for training. Caryn: Yeah, to do that. No, not everybody does. Marci: But what a what a great, what a great idea. So hey, if you want to buy into a franchise, reach out to Peppy Paws. Have you considered franchising? Have you looked into it at all? Or you're still at a year old, you might be kind of young for this. Caryn: First we have to have the proof of concept, like we have no proof of concept right here. We have to like show, oh yeah, this will actually work. We'd be farther ahead, but as you know, here's something that people will find in their lives if they're trying to do businesses or services or anything like that... other parts of your life that must take precedence, you know, get in the way. And in my case, I was traveling out of state a lot for. you know, seeing my father at the end of his life and helping out my family and we were like doing that. It caused us to close down during the height of what would be our most busy time and closing on people. And I'm, you know that you have to restart each time. So now I'm restarting again pretty much. I mean, I'm not starting from absolute scratch, but people are probably wondering, you know, are they really going to be there? Are they going to be open all the time? And I have to re establish all the connections and everything so and start up the advertising again. So that's what happens sometimes. So if hopefully now we can you know, keep rolling and truly become successful. And then when you prove that it can be successful, then you can go on and you know have other people say, oh, I might be able to replicate that. Marci: That is very cool. as I said, I love that you could turn your passion project, and you know, that's what happened with the entertainment agency. It was a passion project of you dancing and then of helping your friends and then you know, it just evolved into a business. And this with Lia training and then I don't know if you opened up Peppy Paws before after you started training dogs yourself and it just kind of kind of blossomed from the things you were doing into a business model. Caryn: Now, I do have to say, here's an important thing that I want to say to all the people listening and everything. Doing that research and writing up that business plan was like, it's really detailed, but it's really helpful. I not only did it for Peppy Paws. We absolutely had to do it for Peppy Paws. There was you know, absolutely had to do that. It's part of getting your LLC and your business anyway, to have the business plan. But people were telling me this was coming out of, was it pre-pandemic or coming out of the, you know, the pandemic just seems like one really really long month, right. Marci: I don't know, I don't know how long you were in the planning phase before you open the door. You actually opened the door. Caryn: I'm not talking about Peppy Paws right now, but the entertainment agency people were telling me you really should reopen this. Now the people that were telling me this were entertainers number one and number two they were the people who used to get entertainment from me. So those are the two people that were like, hey, I know you've had this closed for a really long time. But we really, really, you know, despite everything that else is around, despite everybody and his dog have websites and social media and ways to connect it, we still needed agents. So they were telling me this, but I was like, I don't know if I'm seeing the need for it for sure. So I spent a whole year not putting money into it, except for buying a membership to one of the organizations, the national organization with local chapters that are for people who deal with events, you know, event planning. And it was kind of fun because I went to all their meetings for a year, which means that they had great food because the caterers were always showing off like a month or a year. But that really helped me, and I looked into it. That really helped me to know that it would not have been a good idea to try and reopen it because guess who was not wanting entertainment? The people actually having events. So some people wanted to have more jobs, but you can't like make people want to hire entertainment like they used to before 2008. And then it's a good thing I didn't open it. I just remembered now, this was pre-pandemic, because what happened right after I decided not to open it was the pandemic, right. So it would have been a bad time to re-open. Marci: So people wouldn't have had events and been hiring entertainers anyway. I did actually go to some online events where they did have some singers and stuff who were performing from their own space on the camera and whatever else. It was not obviously as engaging as being in person, but it was still so that there was an event. I went to actually a number of different things that had various types of entertainment or celebrity guests or whatever else. There were some not necessarily comic cons, but speakers and whatever else, and you'd have everybody's face on your screen as they'd talk about various fandoms and famous people that would come to some of them. So that was kind of fun because even when you go to a comic con and there are all these speakers, you can't get to all of them. Some of them are at the same time, some of the lines are too long, and online they could see thousands of people at a time to talk to them. So it was it was interesting that way. It was interesting to see how well we pivoted during the pandemic, but certainly for the type of entertainers and events you were dealing with, they probably weren't going to hire a remote person for entertainment. Caryn: There were a lot of cool things that were going on during the pandemic that kind of got dropped afterwards. Partly, I think because of money at the time, a lot of the places that were you know, doing you know, video chatting with each other and video meetings and everything had they're pricing really low for people. I was like really involved and started my own two in writing groups. A lot of people were home in a way that they you know, weren't going to be home later and had time for the things that they really had a passion out. So there's so many people that started writing their books and working on their things that they really wanted to do. Same thing with art as well. And you know a lot of that, and I actually ran the Everyone Write group. This isn't wasn't a business. It was just people that got together and wrote together and then at the end of an hour, you know, shared with each other. It was just an accountability thing to do it. But a lot of those different groups that were really big during the pandemic ended up, they didn't continue on afterwards. Marci: Right, because all of a sudden you can start going places, and well, life has places it wants you to go. Whether you're ready for them or not. I mean, you've had this fantastic career of following your passion. You've been very fortunate that that you've been able to pivot. But you also have multiple things you're interested in. So you know, I'm teaching dance, I'm being a professional dancer, I am finding jobs for other dancers. I'm, you know, created your website for yourself, and now you manage and maintain websites for other businesses. You know, even if it's as they're closing, it's still these things just roll one thing into another because you're paying attention and you're following the things that interest you and the things where you see opportunities. Caryn: Can I give some advice to high school and college students. I just thought it's going back from the beginning of my career. Okay, So I was at Michigan State. Marci: Go Green! Caryn: Yah yay, and I was a history major, and I was a member of the undergraduate/Graduate History Association and also the History Honor Society, and in those we put on events. In fact, what was unique actually about the history department at Michigan State, and I hope it's still that way, is that they had the most amount of events where students and teachers and professors got together and the other departments were really jealous and would say to the professors, how do you have that? And they go, well, our students just keep on the tradition. Anyway, that taught me how to host events of either bigger ones or smaller ones. I learned from the older students, and then I was an older student and we were putting them on. That skill helped me a lot out in life. So the advice is, you know, to actually get involved in some organizations and where you're actually volunteering and doing something, because some of those skills follow you through your life, you know that. And it started back when I was in college just learning the rudiments of putting on different kinds of events, and that just went on. Also, what happened is that you talking about editing and publishing. Oh, can I tell you this story? This is like a windy story and we might have to pick this up a different way. Okay, So, way back when I was a kid, for some reason, I wanted to be a writer. For some reason, my father always thought I'd be a really good editor. I don't know if he thought it would be a really great career, but he just thought that it would be. But I went, I thought I would be, I loved research and writing. I loved history, so I thought, I know, I'll be a history major. I'll become a professor. But when I came out to visit my friend, you remember Ray, right, she was... and Okay, so she was in the Air Force. She went to the Air Force Academy. She was in pilot training out in Arizona. I came out to visit her, and while she was doing her training all day, I took her car and drove around. I checked out the ASU campus and saw Editing and Publishing program Graduate certificate in Editing and Publishing. It was through actually, either the History or the English department, because people went on to get masters in those things. And I'm like, well, this is really interesting. And I told that to my dad and he goes, you should do it. He goes, yes, you should apply. You'll be like this, you'll be a great editor. I'm like, okay, but I'm here in June and school starts in August. I'm pretty sure this flyer is old. Well, sure enough, they accepted me into the program. There was a slot left, and they said, well, we're really sorry that there's no teaching assistant jobs for you. And I'm like, that's okay, because you know, I still want to go and you know, my father would help to pay to you know, send me in everything. And they and then one of the PhD students dropped out of the editing job that she had and they said, you know, you'd have to do this job while you were learning. And I'm like, sure, that's okay. And I became the managing editor for two psychology journals at ASU, and I did it while I was learning. That was a great way to learn editing, Like, way better than just doing it in the classroom. Marci: You don't tend to dip your toe in the pond. You just fly off that pier and you're like cowabunga, here I am. Caryn: That was great. That was a great thing. So back when I had been at Michigan State, my friends and I had been thinking of a creative writing magazine and it was like, Oh, I always wanted to do that. I wanted to make that real, not just talk about it. Wouldn't that be great? So when I finished the ASU program, I did get a job editing, but I'm like, I'm going to start this and I did, and that was that was Expression Magazine. Marci: It's just I'm in awe, I'm in awe. I've known you through much of this, but just the fearlessness and you know, the following your passion and you know, and you bring along other people with you, like you have you have this company that still manages these websites, and you still have these people, whether they're part-time or you know, and this is just a side hustle for them, but you're creating jobs for other people as well. When when you're doing these things, you're looking for a trainer that would want to work out of of Peppy Paws. You're still running writing groups to help people with their passions that may or may not go further, you know, other than the writing group. And that's fine too. Caryn: I created the most jobs when I had the entertainment agency, obviously. Marci: Yes, yes, when your job is finding people jobs, you do tend to create a few jobs. Caryn: The creative writing magazine was a stepping stone for other people to get you know, published further because for a lot of people especially, things are different now with the Internet. But back then the publishing industry was very much like lemmings. If one person said yes, then the next one might and the next one might. So if you got something in an independent magazine like me, even though we are like who are we? I mean, we weren't even nationwide. We were in forty bookstores, which was pretty cool pre-Internet to get them in there. We were in the whole Borders chain as Borders was expanding, but still but the fact is is that I had the degree by my name said that I was an editor, and I had accepted them. So then when they went to go to a bigger magazine, a national magazine, they could say, well they liked me, maybe you should look at my stuff, and so they went on and got bigger published. Marci: Was there self publishing back then? Caryn: Not like there is now, because if you were to self-publish, let's say a book or something...there was self publishing of magazines. You know, for sure. It was expensive to do. But if it came to books, you'd be literally printing your own book. It's kind of like it was just wasn't as as it is now. I think it was a lot more expense. And now when you talk about self publishing, well, you can self publish for the entire world to read on a website, and that, that kind of reach they didn't have at all. To get that kind of reach, you'd have to be in a national or international magazine. So it's really in fact, when I first started, they didn't even have the word processing, so I couldn't have laid out my own, like the Expression magazine. I couldn't lay it out myself. I didn't have the soft ,That would have been a very bad financial decision to invest in that software because you could see how it was changing, changing, changing, So if I had invested in that, I would have invested in something that I didn't need a few years down the line. But that means I had to pay somebody to lay it out as well as to print it. Marci: Which was still cheaper than buying the software and the equipment to do it at that point. Caryn: Yeah, remember when we had resumes coming out of college. You didn't, like if you wanted your resume to look nicer, you didn't type it up yourself or print it on your own computer. You'd still go to a print shop and they had to lay it out and do that for you. Marci: Well, we had dot matrix printers, so it didn't look nice if you printed it on your own. Caryn: Well, I had a nicer printer than that. I had the daisy Wheel, so I made type. Marci: Yeah. Now you look at what we do with these laser jet and ink jet printers, and we can have eighty five different fonts. If you wanted a different font on yours, did you have to change the ball? Caryn: You know, I never did because I just used the standard one you made on my Flywheel printer. That it was just like a Times New Roman. That Times New Roman was more like that type look everything. I actually kind of feel like I had a nicer, by the time I was in grad school, I had a somehow nicer printer. But by that time they had laser printers. Marci: Right by that time, laser printers were out. And you could do all kinds of fonts when you had the dot matrix, but it was still a dot matrix printer, and so there was, you know, you saw the pixels. You saw the little dots that made up each letter. I think we still have some banners somewhere that we made on dot matrix printers. Caryn: Oh really? Marci: Well, they were much better for banners than printing it out on regular paper and taping them together. It's unbelievable where technology has gone in our lifetime and where it's continuing to go. Who would have ever thought the cell phone? Caryn: Oh that was, that would, talk about a childhood dream. Well, not only having a cell phone, but this modern – wait, where is it? I can't say that. The Dick Tracy Watch! Marci: You're Dick Tracy. Caryn: You know when we were in fourth grade and we're like, oh, what if we could like talk on our watch and watch things on it? Of course, now you know you can't watch anything on your watch. Marci: But well that's just because our eyes are a little bit older than they were when we were in fourth grade. Caryn: That was actually, and you know, my father lived until he was ninety three, and when people would ask him, like, the greatest invention he actually would say it was the cell phone was the greatest invention, because it was the greatest invention for a lot of things. The greatest safety invention to connect you anywhere when you need help. It was like one of the things that was really great and the greatest way to keep in touch with people. That's what he said. Now, my grandmother always said it was the airplane because she saw that invented in her thing. It because you could just go anywhere so quickly. But... Marci: Yeah, no, I think I'd probably even, even with all the things we have. But the cell phone is only great because there is the Internet and everything behind it. Because we're talking a smartphone, not just, not just the fact that your phone can go with you anywhere, but that you have access to everything. Caryn: Yeah, the smart, having smartphones is really, really wonderful. Although the idea that you do have something that at least with voice, can connect everywhere, I think it was the most important thing. And then having the computer on your phone is that sort of thing. So I do that. I'm also not somebody, of course, maybe because I had my career doing that. So many people are criticizing, you know, social media, and I'm like, you know, the concept, you can't say that the concept is bad. It could be badly executed, but I also think that that is a fantastic concept. The people that I was friends with in high school and college are scattered everywhere around the country. The people and some people I've truly lost track of people that I had met when I was in graduate school and then they went overseas to do things, and I've... nowadays people don't lose track of people like they used to because of connections on different social platforms. Marci: And yet you moved out to Arizona, we'll just say a few years ago, and yet we've still stayed in contact, though it helps with your family still back in Michigan, you were coming to Michigan typically a couple of times a year. Caryn: You and I would have stayed connected anyway, and we don't really interact a lot on social, actually. You and I would have stayed connected. I'm still connected to my friend Ray who I mentioned earlier, and she lives out in rural Colorado where they don't, I mean, she's not on social because she's her Internet is crappy, so like, and I'm still connected with them. But some of my other friends from school, we can keep up with each other and be part of each other's everyday lives in a way that we couldn't have, you know, if there was if there were no Facebook. It is truly a great thing for people that are in different parts of the country to like be able to keep up with each other throughout the, throughout their lives, you know. Marci: And it allows for jobs and stuff that never existed before, and the potential of remote jobs that works better for editing than dog training. Caryn: Well, the Internet for sure, I mean I could help people. I mean I sent entertainers all over the country from Arizona. Marci: That's amazing. We should probably wrap up, but I have had the best time talking to you and catching up and talking about these wonderful things. And I hope the listeners enjoy it as well. And maybe this will give some people the courage to follow their passions and create the jobs, the businesses that they feel are lacking in their community, or are just the things that they would love to be doing. Caryn: And I would say too, I'm assuming that you'll put like somehow in the show notes contact information. If you know, you're a person. That just... Marci: Oh no, I'm going to hide you. I'm going to say never heard of her before. Caryn: Well, yeah, if they have questions about anything that I've said, you know, whether their somebody like our age that are like, well, I might want to start something or you know somebody who's you know, like ooh, I'm in college now, whatever it is, just you know, get in touch with me. I'd be happy to talk to you. Marci: Do you want me to use an email address or a contact to Peppie Paws or how would you like that? Caryn: Well, now that is really interesting because for most people I'd send them to the Clamshell Communications. But if they for some reason have questions about Peppy Paws, can you put two addresses or is that too confusing? Marci: I think I can do anything. I just have to figure out how. Caryn: Yeah, do the Clamshell Communications one and the Peppy Paws one and that way I can kind of, you know, because I have a feeling that it might be more people talking about Clamshell than Peppy Paws. By the way, everybody that's listening, Clamshell Communications is the name, the writing editing website, social media company. Marci: Just all encompassing. When you do a lot of things, it's all. Caryn: yeah, Marci: Well great, okay. I wanted to thank you again. I appreciate you being a guest, and who knows, maybe we'll talk in the future because you probably have more stories to share. Caryn: I do Marci: Okay. Thank you Caryn and listeners. It has been my pleasure to be talking with Caryn and to be talking with you. And you got this. See ya.