LOOKING BACK ON THE PANDEMIC, AND MORE.
It’ll now be a total of 16 months since the pandemic first started, and 8 months ago since I last wrote The State of The Coldest (you can read about that at the world ending at the bottom lol). But I believe many of us saw the silver lining emerging. After writing that previous email below, many of you wrote back describing your struggles through it, but also the encouragement meant to push through it. Your words encouraged me as much as mine may have.
So one of the biggest secrets I’ve kept till now, was that The Coldest for the past 6 years, STILL worked out of my backyard. Literally my backyard! Initially, it was out of a 1 car garage in Naples Park. But when I ran out of space and we grew some more, we moved to a bigger property in the outskirts of Naples, that was pretty much in the boonies (for cheap land), but it gave us more land and space to operate. I had employees using my bathrooms, kitchen. The second bedroom was converted into an office. I’d wake up, and walk 10 feet right into a bustling business with 13 employees working at full pace packing orders, organizing the warehouse, doing customer support and sometimes just hanging out after work. It was non-stop.
As it grew, created a semi-truck entrance on the far side of the property because 53′ foot truck trailers couldn’t fit on the regular driveway. This allowed us to get way more inventory in versus smaller box trucks.
But keep in mind it was residential. So over the next few years and into 2021, my backyard ended up having over 20 forty-foot storage containers. (Good thing I’m not married lol) This strategy was genius in my eyes at the time because it would save us so much money storing goods. The land is insanely expensive here. However, by December of 2021, my neighbors complained, and the show was over. Collier County code enforcement was not happy about 20 containers in the backyard. For good reason. Can’t complain. I tried, I tried.
This is literally from Google Maps.
