I hope I’m wrong, but I’m pretty good at recognizing a pattern.

It’s just been so busy that I haven’t been able to write.  Yesterday I spent the entire morning with JessAnn from Group Nine and Mary Beth from the Dodo to let them capture slo-mo footage of our cats to promote Samsung’s new phone camera.  Group Nine is the company that pays us for ad revenue share on our YouTube channel and The Dodo and El Dodo have been working with us every week to provide two LIVE shows for them.

 

Rebecca Chaiklin and Eric Goode returned with a crew on Tuesday (4/3/2018) to get pick up shots, they said, at the direction of CNN.  When they were here before (they’ve been filming this thing for 4 years) they wanted me to trash talk Joe Schriebvogel, but I told them I wouldn’t stroke his ego by even saying his name.  They came back this week saying they just needed to film me filling in a few gaps in their script and to do some overview shots of the sanctuary.

 

They spent the entire day asking about Don, Jamie’s father, my relationship with Don’s kids, my family, and just kept trying, in about a dozen different ways to get me to say that all the lies the backyard breeders and dealers tell about me is hurting my feelings.  It doesn’t.  I couldn’t be any more clear about the fact that I am not defined by anything anyone says about me.  They were so Hell bent on getting me to say it that I’ll be interested to see how they edit the footage to get what they want.

 

Interested, but not concerned.  No matter how they portray me, if the documentary airs it will only be good for the sanctuary.  Any press is good press. I told Rebecca that I can’t imagine why CNN would have any interest in the tabloid trash questions they were asking.

 

Meanwhile...

 

It’s Spring Break and a dozen of our people went to India with Jamie to film tigers in the wild at Ranthambore and Sariska (3/17-3/27).  That left us short handed while dealing with more guests than ever before.

 

I hired Mojca Mars to help with the Facebook ads for BigCatRescue.biz about 6 weeks ago and her success has meant that I have to create more ads and deal with more sales, and sales related issues.  I interviewed Andrew Swearingen, from Merkato, about handling the ads and listings for our Amazon store but he wants 7200.00 a month to do it plus an ad budget of 3k per month.  Those kind of numbers made me spend days really diving into what’s happening there financially, and it’s barely break even.  Here is the letter I sent him:

 

Dear Andrew,

 

After putting a pencil to this, based on my current margins, I'd have to generate more than 30,000 a month in sales (and maybe a lot more like 145k a month in sales) because the stats I used, from Manage By Stats don't calculate my actual cost of goods, in order to maintain the same mediocre profits.  Given that I'm currently only generating about $4500 per mo. via Amazon sales, I just don't think the products we offer have high enough demand, outside of our loyal fan base, to make this work.

 

If I were selling even 30k a month it would require staffing to ship out 6 times as many products as we currently do, and that would mean having to hire more people, which eats further into the profits.  Volunteers are great for doing cat related things, but they don't want to be in retail.

 

I'm sure you could grow our business, but I just don't think we could handle the kind of growth it would take, for this to make it worth all of the time, money and manpower when there is lower hanging fruit.  Our biggest driving factor to getting people to choose us for Smile, is via our social posts, mostly LIVE videos, where I tell people about it and how to do it.  I don't think ads would have as much effect on our warm audience and probably very little effect on those who don't know us yet.

 

I do really appreciate the time you spent and it was valuable to me to know that outsourcing will be much more costly than makes sense for us currently.  If you are ever in Tam