The following is just a bit of my small business start up story.
How Cazbah Got Started
Just about every fall for almost the past 20 years, I’ve made a trip with a close friend of mine up to a very special place in the Great White North of Canada. That place is Algonquin Provincial Park. The Park is located between Georgian Bay and the Ottawa River in Central Ontario, at roughly the same latitude as Montreal.
It’s the oldest and one of the largest provincial parks in Canada, comprising almost 8,000 square kilometers of back country wilderness. For comparison purposes, it is about the size of the state of Delaware. There are over 2,400 lakes and 1,200 kilometers of streams and rivers throughout the park. In my opinion, it is best experienced in person. And that is precisely what my friend and I do almost every year. We appreciate the great outdoors while we canoe, portage and camp throughout the park for about a week in late September.
It’s a pretty rugged trip which takes preparation and months of (physical) training. We travel between 175 – 200 kilometers during our week in the park. 80% of the time we are on the water and 20% of the time we are (single) carrying our gear and canoes between waterways. We use solo canoes and we each carry about 120 lbs of gear and supplies, including the weight of the canoe, when we portage. Both my friend and I are former military and this is our annual opportunity to see if we’ve still got it. For lack of a better description, this is Extreme Canoeing.
This year was special. It had been 10 years, almost to the day, since my first trip to Algonquin. It was equally special because it was during that first trip in late September, 2000 that I had the idea to start Cazbah. My friend Bob, also an entrepreneur, decided that on this, the 10th anniversary of my insane impulse to become voluntarily unemployed, we needed to go and find the exact spot where I had my epiphany to start Cazbah.
I vividly remembered the brainstorm I had about Cazbah and was sure of the terrain, a very large and particular rock, but not necessarily its actual location. We decided to repeat the trip that we took in 2000 to see if we could find the Rock.
Well, we did it. We found the Rock!
Since then, we’ve built the company into a true contender in the Small Business Internet Marketing industry. Cazbah is thriving with 100s and 100s of customers located all over North America. I am very proud and thankful to be surrounded by so many highly skilled and passionate people who come to work every day to serve the needs of their clients, earning their trust, generating radical results. Their stewardship is a model for how things should be done. Thank you all for helping me make this dream come true!
Where were you when you had your professional moment of clarity? Share with us we would love to know.