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The shrimp are naked.

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One last thing for the listeners. Please submit your stories for the storytime. Episode four. We want user submitted stories about your extreme, funny, hilarious, devastating stories in the aquarium hobby. Submit them to aquariumgeyspodcast.com. On the website, you'll find our information for our email address, telephone number. You can leave us a text message, voicemail, submit a YouTube video, anything. We need those stories now. Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Jimmy.

Why am I smiling? I figured out my problem, a problem I've had for six months, and I've got it figured out. Wait, dandruff, no.

Oh, okay.

And it's not and it's not ed either, so don't bring that up, okay? Adam, shut up.

Adam doesn't know what real problems are in life.

Yeah. The father of four. No. This summer, I put in my pond, and I was not happy with it because it was not clear all summer long. It wasn't green. It was just muddy. And when you have one of these problems and you go, I can't figure it out, I can't figure it out, and then six months later, you go, God, that was easy. So I figured it out. My wife was cleaning out the closet. She brought down the koi food from that we fed them all summer long, which they love, right? I threw it in their 40 gallon aquarium and came back 2 hours later, and it's the consistency of dark coffee.

It was the food the whole time.

I just want to shoot myself. And so I thought, oh, it can't be the food. So I threw it in a tank full. I gave, like, four or five little pellets, too. I have a 30 gallon tank full of sailfin mollies, and I threw, like, four or five pellets in there. I came in there the other day, I went, Where are my sailfin mollies? You can't see three inches into the aquarium. And when you come up to the aquarium and you knock, they all come up front going, change the water, jerk. This is that high end pellets that we got when you and I were down to Minneapolis.

What brand is that?

It was some crazy stuff. We went to a koi show. It was a that where I gave you the endlers. Yeah, same place.

The fish love this food. It smells good. And every time I went out there, I'd feed it to them like they're chickens because it's up on my front door. And I changed water, what, a thousand times last summer and never did see my fish until I took all the water out and took them out of there.

Well, I mean, these people were having their fish in like 40,000 gallon ponds.

They weren't going to see their fish anyway.

No, they're seeing their fish. They just have multi thousand dollars filtration system.

I've never had any food in my life mess up a tank so bad so quickly. I mean, 15 minutes if you can't see whatever they didn't eat just dissolved into dog poop that just floats throughout the tank.

Well, I'm pause you there. I'm Rob olsen.

I'm Jim colby.

And I'm Adam Mountain shire.

And today we have with us the wonderful crew from watercolors Aquarium Gallery podcast. They have YouTube channel, but again, they are a store in Grand rapids, Michigan. I'd like to introduce Amy. Go ahead and say hello.

Hi, everybody.

Ben, how's everybody doing tonight?

And Charles.

What up?

Hey, guys, thanks for coming on the podcast. I just want to do that so we have voice association for people. I really do appreciate you coming on. And today's subject is going to be essentially their store.

Love talking about ourselves. So it's great.

It's going to be a party for sure. Their store is very interesting business model. I think more stores should become like theirs. So I can't wait to get an interview with you guys.

So we're going to steal all their good ideas and start a store.

Not steal all the good ideas. We're just going to up the game, raise the bar, you know what I mean?

Go for it, guys. We're here to share.

All right.

Open field. You can pull it off. Go for it, right?

Absolutely.

More stores like us. The more stores like us there can be.

They know how much work it takes and they're like, bring it.

Go ahead, listen to our Quarantine episode if you want to hear how much work it takes.

There you go.

If you guys want to give us your social security numbers are in the air too.

That's great.

Yeah.

I got to get financing somewhere for this new store.

Sure.

Okay. Jimmy, you had a quote unquote crappy week of food. We have a lot of responses back from the Mcgrib jokes, and they're just concerned on how much weight you've gained over the season.

Oh, they could all suck it.

All right. So curious as to how much weight the fish gained. Yes.

The Mcgrib came back in December. My record before was four before I felt sick. Not like four in one day. Like four days in a row of eating mc ribs.

Yeah.

And I made it three.

Three.

So I must be getting older. I only made it three days this time before I had bathroom issues in the bathroom.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it wasn't and we're just we're just proud of you, Jimmy, that's all.

From a mc rib. That's shocking.

We're not even sure what's in a mc rib.

There are better ways to make yourself sick. You know that, right?

Tequila is one of my favorites.

At least you'd have fun.

Yeah, well, the last time I had the tequila virus and that we're going to blame Scrap, it was this summer. Yeah, it was the summer Scrap came up from Ohio. Our editor and our friend dab and we had a little bit of a party in my basement, but we were all 6ft away.

You quarantined yourself due to the tequila virus, you said the next day.

It was about day and a half. Yeah.

Nice.

All right, so for questions we have hello, I am a senior in high school. I recently started listening to your guys'podcast. I have a twelve to 13 inch ghost knife fish that is outgrowing my 80 gallon tank. I really want to make sure you guys got a good home and wondering where you guys suggest to look or if you guys might be interested in. I'm based in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for answering my question. Well, number one, start with your local fish community. You can post and make sure that someone has something that, hey, I have this fish to give away. See how that works? You can bring it to a lot of local pet stores. They have, I wouldn't say all of them, but a good majority would have at least a couple of different areas to keep them or at least connections of where that fish could go to.

It that larger size.

Those by far the best places to start with. Otherwise, if you really can't find something, you can contact Ohio Fish Rescue.

Those guys are nuts.

I mean, you are in Los Angeles. Yes, but maybe someone can donate some money to ship it to Ohio. Regardless, they're connected with people. I mean, if they get someone in Minnesota, they call us. If they get someone in another state, they got people there. So they have quite the network.

Yeah, if you can get a hold of that. What's that, Adam?

Go ahead, Jim.

I was just to say if you.

Get hold of Richard and Josh, they travel the nation. Really? I mean, they travel all over the place and you never know, they might be in the La or you don't know. Hey, we got I mean, if you want to see something really cool, go on their YouTube and watch him go over to shaq's house shack the basketball player. Yes. And put in his fish in his pond. That was pretty cool.

A lot of fun.

I was thinking if you throw a ghost knife in that pool, that indoor pool, that'd be really cool. How big it would get that.

Yeah, that would be quite the size. For those that don't know, they have converted an indoor pool into a massive predator pond. And they have all kinds of stuff there from massive peacock bass stingrays. They have about a five foot arapaima.

That sounds amazing.

Oh, it's it's a lot of fun.

Crazy set up. Seen their stuff before?

No, I haven't.

It's really amazing. They do some good work.

Yeah.

Great, guys. Rob was there probably six, nine months ago.

Well, when I was there, they're like, hey, we should do some content, because they're always pushing content out to their YouTube channel. And I'm like, I don't want to do the same old, same old like everyone else. Let's do fish enrichment. So what they didn't realize is I stole josh's rod and reel, put a bobber at the end, no hook, and then just cast it across the predator pond. And sure enough, I was able to get, like, the bass to jump out of the water catching it. It was a lot of fun. We even had, like, alligator guard hitting it. All kinds of fun.

You should have went skinny dipping.

I did.

I swam with them pretty naked.

I mean, I'd make sure to tuck some tidbits in and make sure nothing was there as a food. It was a lot of fun, though. Go check those guys out. But again, local pet store, check your fish groups, even aquarium clubs. Who would help you out now? Next question from Ryan. Hello, aquarium guys. Hope Jimmy is still digri doing. Haven't heard that stuff in a long time. craving it. It hasn't been requested yet, but would you guys be able to do an episode on geofeggish species? And something else amazing? Maybe even mantis shrimp? And Rob, are you too big to ride roller coasters? Figured Jim and Adam could bug you to encourage you to stop eating all those mc ribs of gyms. Peace, guys. Still loving the podcast. Been a fan since episode four.

Well, it took that long.

I love how you're the mcrib guy and yet I'm too fat to fit into it.

You are too fat.

I can't even ride him.

So you can't ride Rob. I think you and I both could ride Rob.

No. Adam says he looks like a terrorist, so they won't let him.

I can't ride roller coasters.

And why is that? Because you're a pussy.

Motion sickness.

Motion sickness.

I'm not warning you that's part of the roller coaster.

Yeah.

I can't even see a merry go round spin. Then I just like, yeah, I want to puke.

And yet you drink.

Don't feel bad. I'm the same way.

Yeah, I know.

I can go, like, the whole fast roller coaster. I can't do spinny shit.

I can do the roller coasters. We did Universal and all the big ones, the ones down in Tampa. Which one was that?

You tried to get me to go on the one with seaworld. And that was not kosher.

That was shammu. I was trying to get you to.

Ride we have pictures of that. We rode shamoo. Whoever.

I can ride roller coasters, but where I have the anxiety, as when you're going up, click to the top. That's what I have. The anxiety. Once I'm rolling down, I'm fine. But if you want to see some great pictures, we rode the Tower of Terror in the walt Disney World.

Oh, hell no.

And I had to apologize to everybody we wrote on because I said the F bomb about 3000 times because I.

Was scared to death.

And we've got some great pictures that we got from Disney of me, I think, soiling myself, actually, what I was doing.

So how was the wild thing at Valley Fair?

The wild thing is easy.

Is it?

Yeah.

Tower of Terror.

Tower Terror. Yeah. That's a little bit for me anyway, wasn't it?

I'll have to ask for the video. Maybe we can put on the podcast as a bonus.

Jen'S got it.

Excellent. All right, I think that catches up for at least for a couple of questions this week. Guys, just a bit of a note. What we're trying to do is we started the podcast and we did each episode evergreen to a topic. And you guys heard us do tangents. Well, you guys wanted an episode of Nothing but tangents, so we did Story Time, and that's been like our most demanded episodes that you've asked for. So we just finished storytime three not too long back. We want to do storytime four, but we want to do it a little bit differently. So what we're asking is that you submit to the podcast your stories. And what we want to do is select through the best of stories. And whoever gets our fan favorites, we're going to send a prize to. Adam gets to pick one, jim gets to pick one and I get to pick one. Whatever stories we feel are most deserving, we'll send you some prizes. So certainly go to aquarium. Guys, podcast. On the bottom of the website, you will find their contact information. It will have an email address, phone number to leave a voicemail. We'd love you to tell us your stories. Also the text message. So send us your stories, whatever format you want. Video. If you want to send us, just text and you wrote it out. However, we just want to hear the goofy things that have happened to you in this aquarium hobby.

And the grand prize will be a bag of clown puke.

We could do that.

I still got like 80 year old mixed clown puke from a closed down fish store.

There we go.

So triggered right now.

For you watercolor people, right?

We know we know clown puke here.

Oh, yes. But do you know how to use if you have your friend, right, and you want to prank him, you just grab one little pinch or clown puke and throw it in his scape and just see what happens. Just one pinch.

Or I could give you some of this coy.

Good way to lose a friend.

I was like, that's not a prank. That's that ending of relation.

That's how you get cut off from my life forever.

So this is how Amy cuts people off. All right, now we know clown pew.

Pew is the herpes of aquarium supplies.

It is.

No doubt. It shows up everywhere unexpectedly.

I think I have a new every time I come over to rob's house, I'm going to drop two coy pellets in his aquarium.

Oh, that's a new one.

I'm going to do this every third day or so. Eventually.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, his fish will be swimming in coffee and you'll be going, what's going on? I'm losing my mind.

It'll literally be less invasive than if you just took a dump in my aquarium.

Speaking, I just want to know how much food you are putting into that koi pump. Typically, if they eat it, it doesn't discolor the water. Yeah.

Jimmy. No, jimmy's got his grandkid out there. Don't let him kid you. He's got a grandkid out there and they're just, like, having a time.

Missing link right there.

Oh, my favorite one was I had a buddy, and he set up a big, big fish tank, like 150 gallon, and his kid thought the saltwater fish were hungry, so she fed them chocolate chip cookies.

No.

Yeah, that was not a good mess. He comes home and everything's dead.

No, that's not good for them.

Wait, milk in the tank. Milk, milk, milk.

What did you think they were going.

To do with milk?

They'd get strong bones.

Supplement. Now dumps a gallon of milk in the tank.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah.

If you throw in some Viagra, then that really will help them grow, too.

Oh, new breeding method.

Please. I don't want to hear any feedback from people. Like, I tried the viagra thing. Didn't seem to work out.

I know people who have gotten that desperate with their tanks before that would try it. That's pretty good already.

All right, well, let's get right into the interview, guys. So generally, what we ask everybody to start off the interview is what got them into the hobby. So let's do a quick roundtable. Amy, why are you still doing this after so long?

Why have you not given up?

My story is I haven't really been in this that long. Working here is what got me into the hobby. I started here five years ago now, almost having just kept worked in a chain pet store and kept a beta tank for a year or so. But it's amazing what just jumping into keeping aquariums full time 40 hours a week will teach you over five years. So I sort of came into the hobby, like, learning alongside people that I was serving as customers. So I have a kind of weird sideways trajectory into it. And now I've got multiple tanks at home and have had to troubleshoot a lot of problems over the years.

Jimmy'S on the same thing, but with carbs. He's a bread guy, so he just can't help himself. But have bread every day.

Going to kick your ass.

Like, I've always been. An animal care and aquariums just make sense to me in terms of that. It's such a more whole habitat for an animal than, like, keeping a bird in your house.

Wonderful.

So what other pets do you have, Amy?

I pretty much just have fish tanks and cats at this point. Pretty much no, other things that I.

You'Re a crazy cat lady.

I have two cats. Okay, that makes you crazy. See Rob and a couple of others that I feed that stick around.

Yeah. Let's talk about your problem. It's time for intervention here. She's got 17 cats, doesn't she, guys?

As a person with two cats, all right, we're at least stable.

It's the urge, right?

You can definitely tell there are people you look at and think, that is a cat person. And, you know, those are the crazy ones. It doesn't necessarily mean everyone that has cats has that look. But there are those people that there's just no question that they're cat people.

Yeah. Our building is right next to a cat cafe, and we get a lot of people watching them.

Is this where you can go have coffee with cats?

I'm not going to lie. I would pay $9 for a coffee to sit down with strangers cats that I don't have to clean their litter box of. Oh, so you're going to go you're.

Going to try to pick up somebody else's cats right at the bar?

My cats are worse. Their cats are great.

I care from getting in the coffee.

I don't care.

I still drink it.

I just think other people's cats are the best kinds of cats.

Yes, they're the best. Just like children.

Just like children, as they write.

Just like children.

Exactly.

They say that about everybody's, everything, though. I love other people's dogs, but man, you got to wake up at one in the morning to take them out one time.

And I'm like, maybe not see Jimmy ben. How about you? What got you into the hobby?

That was a long time ago, guys, so probably clown killyfish got me into the hobby in fifth or 6th grade, a library book that had a picture of a clown killy fish. I thought it was cool, and so I went to go try to find them. And trying to find clown kilifish in the early 80s in a pet store was not really an option, but that got me going into a bunch aquarium stores and ended up with a fish tank.

Wonderful. Just a random picture.

Yeah. Well, I was looking at it at a fish book because I was the geek who was in the corner looking at animal book.

Well, sure, but you just find that one that resonates with you, and you just know what you got to have.

National Geographic.

That's fine. It's still my all time favorite fish, and I still have some.

I didn't even know that joke until the other day when my mom dropped off a bunch of magazines, and sure enough, the naked stereotypes were in there. Jimmy, you were lying.

When I was in high school, in the 18 hundreds, the National Geographic would come in and the librarian would go through it first and tear out pages.

Oh, would she now?

Yeah, we'd dig out of the garbage.

Sneaky. Well, how about you, Charles? What got you into this wonderful hobby?

My mom and all of her friends kept tanks, and I've always had an interest in marine biology, and it just stuck.

There we go.

We call the two lifer.

Yeah, what we call the traditional lifer right there. Get stuck in my mom or grandma and you're just stuck forever.

Yeah.

Just depends on how many enablers you have around you when you're a kid.

All my role models had tanks.

Some people get a two pack a day addiction. The rest of us just have to get feeder guppies. Right, Adam?

I had a clown puke tank when I was that age. Does that count?

I definitely had the red gravel tank for a while. I had blue. I think all of us did, though, as kids, right?

No, I still got a blue.

I just set up a clown puke tank literally this week. I have a ten gallon, 48 inch long tank that I put clamp across just for Jimmy.

Oh, so you decided to ruin that tank for him?

Absolutely. Well, it's a fun story. A friend of mine, like I mentioned, that 80 year old gravel, he got a bunch of tanks. And I went to West Virginia to set up a recirculating system, and it was a closed down, closing down store that was open for, like, 80 years. And they collected all of their gravel, mixed it together, and then sold it in bags that literally they didn't label as clown puke, but something close. And if you look into it, every piece is something different. It's incredible. They got, like, cat eye marbles and all kinds of crazy stuff in it.

That's almost impressive. Well, you guys are fast food guys. It's swamp water, right? It's where you go to the machine and you just put every soda in your cup.

Right. What do they call that? The kamikaze soda.

We always call it swamp water. Water.

I like that better. Well, guys, I want to talk to you more about your guys'shop. You guys have watercolors? Aquarium gallery. Now, just the name intrigued me immediately, because what I've been trying to research is I'm trying to figure out a podcast where we can talk and get a good example of why keeping your pet store a destination store is important. And as I'm doing this research, trying to go through hundreds of different pet stores, I come across you guys and see this aquarium gallery. And it takes me a bit off guard because you always are used to the pet store generally, selling products is always the goal, and that certainly doesn't seem to be different from your store. However, you guys advertise yours as the destination hub as almost an art gallery. When did this business start? Where did the idea come from?

We are on our 6th year. Yeah, our 6th year. We ran a service company for, I don't know, like, 810 years before that. And it was just kind of something that was missing. takashi amano was certainly a major inspiration for it. But that idea that for an aquarium to be not just a glass box to keep things alive in, but a living, breathing work of art.

You guys just sat down one day and like, cool, I want to do it differently. And you wanted to make it artwork.

Yeah. And more than just a glass box.

More than just a glass box. You wanted to make an impression, to see, recreate the feeling that you do with fish. But for anybody that just walks in, just to be like, wow, if somebody.

Doesn'T say wow and they walk in, I feel like we're doing something wrong.

Wonderful. So six years, and did you do this alone?

Never alone. I mean, it takes a team to build a place like this.

Oh, for sure. But again, you were the visionary. You started up, you started hiring employees. And now we're here.

Now we're here. Fantastic.

So explain to me again, this is a podcast. We don't have a ton of visuals, but explain to me what makes your store different.

How would you describe it? So the the store is is not geared around here's. A bunch of products that lie around, but it's about here's. We have probably 15 different displays that show what an aquarium can be. And then we keep only the products that we know we would use in those displays we'd use in that set up. Our stands are not stock marine land stands, although we do have those sometimes. But our stands are made by a local woodworker who is more of an artist than just a furniture builder. Yeah. And we aim to inspire with everything that we do, even our display tanks or not our display tanks. But the tanks that we sell, a lot of those are all aquascape. Those are all done with design and intent.

I like to tell people that our retail space are exhibits that they can take home if they want to.

Yeah.

So important for people to understand what the finished product is supposed to be. I don't feel like traditional aquarium stores do a good job at selling aquarium. Why would I want that, like, bare thing with fish that look miserable and no decor and no eye towards the actual aesthetics of the thing? If you don't know you want an aquarium and you walk into a blue box tank aquarium store. Why would you want that? That's how I feel about it.

Yeah. where's the inspiration going to come from? Yeah, and how are they going to know? How is somebody going to know how to do it? Right? You know, the amount of times we have people come into the store saying, I want some of those, some of those kissing fish and some of those, those blue neon ones and I want to put them together. And how do they know unless there's something to inspire, to ask questions about? Certainly just scooping stuff out and putting in a tank for them.

So again, I'm going off of your website YouTube videos and it looks like that you guys are not traditional. So let's just paint for the listeners how most mom and pop stores like to do certain systems. Number one, they like to do different Mars units. Now, the Mars unit is explained as essentially a multitank system all recirculating together. And when they made these things, they never thought, how can we make this electric efficient? And didn't go with that at all. So most of these Mars units, like even like retired ones you used to get from like department stores, Walmart, when they shut down, they weren't really made to focus on energy efficiency. They their lighting was terrible and there was no way to really shut off aquariums and quarantine at all. So that's one way to capture it. Otherwise, a lot of mom and pop stores do just independent tanks with undergraduate filter systems. And again, everything is if they have an undergraduate filter system, great, or it's just bare bottom tanks in their eyes, the less maintenance, the more money they can do. And something is lost in there. So when you guys set up a tank, you guys said that you guys have fantastic stands. Are these tanks all independent or somehow still recirculating?

No, they're all independent. So I built the stands. Most of our tanks are 40 breeders, although I guess now we have a wall of 20s too. But they're all independent. They are running with air, so either underground filters or sponge filters, but they are all filtered, they're water changed every week. So yeah, independent. That's the short answer.

We spend way too much time and energy quarantining every single fish to put them in connected systems and get them all sick again, right?

Oh, for sure.

So we take the philosophy that if you can do it in Mass and you can do it as cheaply as possible and have 2030, sometimes 40% loss, or you can spend a whole bunch of money and a whole bunch of time making sure that absolutely every single fish that goes out is perfect and have two or 3% loss, and that money seems to be a wash.

Explain that idea because again, going into these pet stores, they refer to this as shrink. It's common to hear in grocery stores, especially if you work. In a meat market, there's always shrink that they acquire for. So if you buy something at $2 a pound, they sell it to you for $8 a pound. They're understanding that they're not making that full gap, that some of it is cut and lost to shrink. Either going expiring for expiration date, cut off because it's chunky pieces that they still had to pay the weight for, and they just, you know, equate. 20% of everything is going to be gone, and we have to make up for that difference, either jack up prices or keep our stock costs low overall. So you guys take that whole approach a bit differently. And you even mentioned, check out your quarantine episode. What does that look like for your business?

Every saltwater fish goes through a full four week quarantine process.

Four weeks?

Four weeks.

I just want to make sure I heard that correctly. Four total weeks. I don't even quarantine for COVID for that.

I'm the one that runs the quarantine department. That gives me the ability to run them through a cycle of Hypo saline and two cycles of copper treatment.

Okay, I need a tea time here. There's a quarantine department. Did I get that right?

Yeah.

So the store is 2400 retail, and the basement is the same size, and there's about four times as many tanks in the basement as there are upstairs.

And 80% of the space down there is devoted to quarantine. So it's basically half of our business space is devoted to keeping fish healthy.

Yeah. I was glad you used the word shrink, because we try to approach it from these are live animals, and to use the word shrink means that we are allowing a certain amount of expendability with these live creatures. We're taking responsibility to take care of.

That'S literally, the vernacular they use.

Yeah.

There's no such thing as an acceptable loss for livestock.

Right. Not that we don't lose some. It does happen, of course, but we've always every single saltwater fish that we lose, we sit down and have a little talk about how did we fail.

And we keep data on what we have successes with and what we don't and what doesn't doesn't work for individual species.

Yeah. I think I have up to three years of lost data at this point of, like, every saltwater fish we've lost in the last three years is a data point in our system right now.

Is that open to patreon subscribers for your YouTube channel?

Our quarantine episode, actually, when we did our podcast, was a decision that we spent four years and I don't even want to talk about how much money we spent developing a quarantine process that works in batches. And we had the decision about, are we going to make that public or that or not? Because it was a substantial investment, and the decision was, yes, make it public.

Make it public.

So make it public. So if you would like detailed information on how to properly quarantine a batch of saltwater fish so that your losses are run at about 4%. I will send you literally the detailed information on how to do it.

I am all ears for that information.

It's an hour and a half podcast.

So we can't get into, oh, I know we got to be precious of your time, but that is golden information that people don't know they can reach out for. So again, I interrupted the process because I heard the word quarantine department and my head exploded. So forgive me on that one. So let's go ahead and continue through a fish comes in, you said salt water. They go through a copper treatment. What was that again?

Copper treatment and hypo saline.

That means low salinity.

And that's great for getting rid of flukes.

Yeah.

So the two main issues that we were trying to solve, of course, everybody knows that IC is number one, number 1, bar none. We all faced IC, and we all deal with it on a regular basis, and we all have issues with it. No matter what you do. We had to come up with a way to make it so that we were comfortable putting those fish into a 600 gallon, serviced, established reef tank and know that we could add a blue tank to it without causing a problem. So that's what the copper is for. The second big issue was flukes. And in small quarantine setups, flukes don't have time or the opportunity to really get established. But if you're trying to come up with an efficient way to batch quarantine, you know, an entire shipment of saltwater fish in a 350 gallon system, those flukes have a chance to build up over time. So hyposaline was the only way that we could come up with that was a surefire way to get rid of them. We used prozipro like crazy for a while, and that worked really great for a while. Then we found this crazy little article about a bacteria that eats Prazi pro.

Yeah.

All of a sudden, proze pro just stopped working and we did not know why. And that article, well, that's why.

That was why.

It's amazing for small single use quarantine, but in a continually rising quarantine system, it just wasn't a viable long term option.

It was a crazy thing to walk down. As I mentioned, they started doing this in the 80s. I've been doing this for a really long time, and to walk down to a system and see it cloudy, the first thing you think is, oh crap, there's a pneumonia spike in the tank, and you test the water and it's perfect. That was just horribly confusing. And we figured out that it was a bacterial bloom that were eating the prozipro. And so the prosy pro was ineffective.

Against the flukes, literally just feeding the bacterium.

Yeah, exactly. And that bacteria, it's a bacteria. It doesn't just go away. We tried antibiotics to get rid of it and kept them at bay for a little while, but it was not the long term solution. So then we had to come up with a long term solution to safely get a batch of fish from they came in at a 1.21 22. We have to bring them all the way down to one point eleven, keep them there for ten days, right, Charles?

Yes.

And then slowly bring them back up to 1.22, so they're available.

That is a hell of a process. So what are some of the most difficult species that you guys get in either salt or freshwater?

The one that's still raw in my heart was we recently made the dish decision to stop carrying, at least for the time being, until we can reevaluate Mandarin fish, because getting them to eat in a quarantine system is incredibly difficult and requires an incredible amount of time and effort, and the success rate was just not great.

So we chose that. Like I said, we're not going to cheat anything with acceptable loss, and the losses were just too big on that fish, so we stopped. Go ahead.

I apologize. I always go to this idea of shrink, and that's what pets orders off to have to do. They're sitting there, they're doing the math, they're trying to see how they can get this to work because accidents happen. So a normal pet store, and again, my listeners are going to be listening to this carefully. On average, in my experience that I've seen, pet stores go from up to 40% can be acceptable in numbers. Jimmy, you wholesale. What do you expect? Like, you've even told me, like, numbers from these old pet traders that used to say, hey, you get a fish in for $0.40, right? You sell it for $6. How many fish does it take to make sure your bag breaks even?

Is the goal.

And I guess it makes sense, but it hurts your brain and there's your acceptable shrink. So compared to, like, a 40% store, which that's not great, mind you, that's just what they're doing to cover their rear. What type of failure rates do you guys get? Not that you accept it, but that do happen on occasion.

Per shipment, our success rate is usually roughly 90%. I would say that's average. If we get a small shipment, it could be higher, but we expect 90 or above.

Jimmy, when's the last time that you've called a wholesaler? And I expect 90% on your shipment?

Yeah, we're just hoping to get there alive. You guys feel the same thing I do.

I'm very picky with who we work with, though, so that makes it way easier. When we work with wholesalers who are willing to work with us, our success rates jump up twice, right? Yeah.

I think the math works out. Like, you're either paying someone to quarantine it, or you're paying for losses, and it ends up being a wash. We.

Don'T take returns of dead fish. That just isn't a thing that happens to us very frequently. Maybe once or twice a quarter. We'll get like, hey, this died within the first week. Can I replace it? It's not common here.

Sure, they can always replace it if they bring out their checkbook.

No, we will cover a loss if a loss happens. But what she's saying is that we don't have to yes, save a lot.

Of money that way.

If you're sending home a healthy specimen and you've got a customer that moderately knows what they're doing, they shouldn't have any problem. It's not rocket science, to a point, but have people that come in and I want a nemo tank, and then you just roll your eyes and go, here we go. We're going to spend 2 hours educating this person, and they're going to walk out and order something online, and it's going to be a total deficit.

I love conversations like that, though, because those are the lifeblood of the hobby. We need new hobbyists coming in, and so whenever we get that conversation, it becomes framing. It in. All right, do you want corals in this tank, too? Do you want? X-Y-Z. And then from there you can work with. Most people are very ambul if you approach it in that way and are like this weekend I had a couple where they came in and they were asking how to do a pair of clownfish. And I worked out that all they wanted was a pair of clownfish in a fish only and live rock system. And I said, that's very easy to work with. All right, this is what you're going to need. And they're really excited about their tank.

People want it to be fun. So if you explain to them, hey, having sick and dying fish isn't fun, they're like, oh, yeah, you're right. It's not. Maybe I shouldn't do that.

Yes, we have those two hour conversations and we love them.

Yeah, it's worth it. It's worth it every time. Especially if it's like, you know, you had that question earlier today of that kid with the ghost knife? And I'm like, man, I kind of want to talk to that kid, because he sounds like he's trying to do the best and maybe he did screw up and he got the wrong fish, but that's okay, because he still wants to do it, and that's what's important.

When we started this podcast a year and a half ago, two years ago, it was kind of our thing that we wanted just to help educate people, but we wanted to get the young people involved because it's getting to be an old person's hobby. Shut up, Rob. I'm punching the throat.

It is. I'm not I'm not giggling for the sake of that, you know.

But I mean, if you go to your aquarium society, your local one in your town. I mean, you'll see that majority of people there over 40 years old, and the kids that are there is because their dad had a babysit that night because mom's up bowling or something like that.

No, you're not wrong. I can remember an old aquarium Fish International, and it's always stuck with me. This was back in 2008, and they had an article that was literally just titled, our Kids Not Getting in the Hobby. And that's always been on my mind.

I need to read that article.

I think I have that one collection.

Of magazines in your archives.

Yeah.

When I had my shop, all I did was I just got every book I could find, every magazine I could subscribe to, because there was so much in there, and the Internet was just starting up when I was doing my store. But even then, half the time you'd get, you know, somebody on there that would say, oh, this is how you do it. And I'm like, I don't kill it. And this is just you're just like, okay.

Yeah.

The wonderful thing about this podcast is everybody shares their secrets. I mean, when I started in the Hobby 30 years ago, I went down to Florida to visit all the fish farms, and they wouldn't tell you nothing. I mean, you could ask them all kinds of questions. They'd look at you and go, well, I'm not real sure that you want to do all this.

It's a lot of work, or it's confidential, right?

When we started this podcast, I think our Ground baking podcast, we had Ceber vicki on from Angels Plus, and he shared all kinds of information. And then it was the plea. King We've had a lot of people on our one after another. The people have come in and they've shared one or two secrets, and we get emails saying, man, that has changed the way I look at things. It changed the way I keep fish.

I'm going to say that my head exploded hearing this quarantine stuff, and I won't let it go. I need more info. So you went four weeks with quarantine this fish. You go through a rigorous process of low salinity copper treatments. Then the fish is A okay. Do you guys do things in batches? Whereas you have a completely empty tank, you move those up to the empty tank, or is it completely kosher after four weeks in your mind, to add those fish to an existing tank up in the sales floor?

We add them up to an existing tank up in the sale floor.

It would be mathematically impossible at that point for them to have any sort of parasite. And by that time, we would expect that any other issues like bacterial infections or something like that would present themselves. Works is a long time. You usually see pretty much everything.

And it's very precise levels of copper. And there's all these fish that we have read about that. People say, oh, that fish just can't survive copper. flame angels are a classic one, and leopard dresses that the copper is just too hard on them. And what we figured out is there's a level of copper that isn't too hard on them that is still therapeutic.

I have a pair of leopard rasses coming out of quarantine in a week, and they're solid.

They're eating pellet food.

I love it.

Just don't do it with your seahorses.

Yeah, seahorses are definitely one of the few exceptions.

There are definitely a couple of notable exceptions, but seahorses are always going to be in a separate system anyway, so they're functionally quarantined just by keeping them by themselves.

And I do have a small selection of, like, what we call hospital tanks here for special cases or something like that, where it's like, all right, I got to treat it differently.

Nothing doesn't get quarantined, though.

But we definitely figured out there are those fish that people say you shouldn't put through that kind of process, and we just realized they were wrong.

Who led us in the direction of the type of copper we use?

Ccm.

Yeah.

We worked with someone from Zeekum on nailing down. Okay, what is the best way to precisely dose and test copper? Because copper test kits are trash, for the most part. They're impossible to read. Copper is impossible to dose. And when you're aiming for, like, you can't be zero five off. You have to be exact. That's not good enough. So we definitely had to bring in some experts on exactly how to test and dose copper in order to really like, hey, what is the issue with copper? Is it that we don't know how to test it, or is it that it's dangerous? And we found out we didn't know how to test it, and now we do.

Yeah. So the Hannah digital checkers, that's the.

Test, which this is my way of bringing back. I want to bring it back around to sharing information, because I think the hobby has reached a crossroad where it's very important for everyone to be sharing the information they have, because the way with places like Hawaii are going, if that information is not available, we're going to lose the hobby.

Right.

What was your guys'problem with your Mandarin.

Golby's getting them to eat?

Do you want me to tell you the trick that I did when I had my shop?

This is share time Adam mc ribs, right?

No, it's not Mcgribs. So whenever I get Mandarin gobies in, here's what I did. I found out that a lot of the times they're sprayed with cyanide, even though they say they're not right. And so what I did is I take a 20 gallon long, and I had it set up for salt water. Completely bare bottomed. I know it nothing in it. Just bare bottomed. Nothing in it. Then I would take methylene blue and make it so dark methylene blue in there that you could almost not even see in it with the salt water. And then I just do daily water changes and I'd make it a little bit lighter every time I'd take out maybe like 510 gallons of water out of that. And then I would throw in frozen mice's shrimp and frozen brine shrimp. And you know how mandarin goldies are always picking at the bottom because they're like a scooter blendy, so they're just always picking at the bottom. Eventually they would just pick something up and eat it and even the little tiniest bit of food, and they would eat at it. And then they'd like, oh, that's food. But the methylene blue removes the cyanide out of their system. And I would get mated pairs. Like, I would bring them in all the time. I'd have people coming from the cities four and a half hours away from my Mandarin Golby's. But if you're Mandarin Golby's, the bellies are sunk in to the point where I don't know how to explain it. The sides are touching.

Yeah, I know that look you're talking about.

Yeah, that really pinched in look. They're not going to make it. But if they've got just a little bit of a belly on them, even I've been able to get them. I've only had like three die out of, I want to say 2025 that I did.

But that's what I did.

And I actually found that trick out from somebody else who told me that you just got a messy blue the shit out of them.

Sorry.

So it's methylene blue, supposed to absorb the cyanide, then removes the cyanide out.

Of their system and then the water changes. Remove it out of the water. I don't know how it works.

Yes, it works.

Okay.

And we've definitely gotten, like, plenty of individuals through and individuals to eat. It was just that, like, if it's one out of four, or even if it's two out of four, it wasn't worth it. So that was definitely what's ryan yeah.

We'Ll give it a shot, for sure. I appreciate that.

Definitely.

You're welcome.

Yeah, because I like mandarins, and mandarins are hard enough to find as it is.

That's why it was so hard for us to make that decision. We all love mandarins.

They're amazingly fish.

I mean, not that we don't care about the fish we don't love, but that's what made it such a hard decision. Like, if they were easy, every reef tank would have them, right?

Right.

I would probably have one if they were easy. So we're definitely going to keep working on it. But that's one, that's real raw right now. It's such a tough decision to make.

Try that messing blue trick, because that.

Yeah, we'll get a shot for sure.

And then one of the pairs that I got going, I sold to one of my customers and they had 150 gallon tank and they were spawning every night in their reef tank and he just let his coral eat it because he thought that was free food. I'm like it's. Mandarin eggs.

Yeah, they're pretty tough to raise, but that would be very cool.

What was the idea behind it? It's one of those saltwater fish that is doable. They're not the easiest fish to breed. They're probably a little harder than clownfish.

But not they're probably the easiest talking with Matt patterson. They're probably like the easiest of the pelagic spawners to work with someday.

We've had Matt on this program several times and he's just a wealth of information.

He's so cool.

He's a secret designer clown gentleman. Don't ever tell him that, by the way. We have a few different people asking different questions in the past about rope fish and potentials of using chemicals like cyanide. And it's more in the hobby than people think when they do rope fish.

Rope fish.

Rope fish. So apparently what they do is they breed these out in different environments, whether it be ponds or otherwise. And instead of taking the time to net and catch, rope fish are extremely difficult to do. They essentially dose the water with cyanide, making them come out of the water and catch them at the top of the surface.

How rude is that?

Chemicals like cyanide. So there may be other exceptions to this, but the problem is that they're showing that a lot of wholesalers will have stunting long term effects to outright death before even gets to a box store. And even a lot of places in the UK just outright stop doing rope fish because they couldn't find enough reputable suppliers to keep a stream to fill the demand that wasn't being dosed in such a method.

It's definitely a fish that I remember seeing on lists commonly years ago, and I don't see them very often anymore.

They're few and far between.

Just spend an extra hour and catch them.

Yeah.

Who knows when the wholesalers are getting cents apiece for them? It doesn't feel like they're worthwhile. I'd rather just see the price go up.

Yeah, definitely.

Well, now that we got the dirty out of the way going more into these systems so I'm trying to picture myself going into a store again because I'm only seeing the content on your website and the videos. So you say that they're individual systems, you guys make the stands, which fantastic, by the way, that you're able to do that, and someone can walk in and say, hey, this looks great. Can I just buy this whole stand and system as is and then you guys will go install it. Is that correct?

Yes.

That is like the dream. Like, not only do I walk in, I'm like I like those fish, I like those corals. I just want it all to make it happen. That's the shopper's dream. But there must be tanks in your store that you had a wall of 20s now, is that stacked as an individual rack or do these all have individualized stands you make for them?

No, it's a rack stand that I made. So it's sort of like a like you'd have in a traditional store that had 20s, but the stands just a little prettier. It's still a stand that holds 920 gallon aquariums, but just a little prettier.

I'll try to shoot you guys some pictures when I get a SEC.

Oh, please.

I'll look for them.

Yeah.

And I'm definitely going to redirect. For those that are listening, go to watercolors aquariumgallery.com. You'll find the information. They're podcast or YouTube channel. And they're a wonderful store and they certainly have quite a bit of content on there. But now, do you guys treat a normal day to day any different than a pet shop? Is it just here's? Our open hours come anytime, ask us questions and they walk in, they're expecting something different, but instead they're seeing these fully decked out stands everywhere with these immaculate scapes. And then what product hidden between them?

There's a certain dry good section. Although I guess the dry good sections are a little intermittent. So yeah, dry goods kind of intermittent throughout. A little bit thematically spaced. Where there's cool lighting, that's where we have the lighting section.

Yeah, it's like sort of what Ben was saying before. We don't have as much dry good selection as your average store. We still carry the stuff you need, but we only carry the versions of it that we know we like, so we don't need to carry every filter in its cartridges. The only hang on the backs we carry are aquacliers because we like them. And the only media that we carry are the media for aqua clears because cartridge filters are trash, so amen to that. They are interspersed regularly, and it's probably smaller than your average dry goods section, but we're still a fully stocked aquarium store.

Today, I had a conversation of why our liquid fertilizer section is so limited, and I walked through. Well, I was forced to spend three months testing Grand rapids test water and the effects of different lines of fertilizers in Grand rapids tap water and what it does to different plants. And from that result, we made the decision. These are the fertilizer lines we're going to carry because these are the ones that coalesce best with the water we're working with here.

Yeah.

What a better way to do the all in one?

If you're servicing people in your local area, keep the stuff that they need, that makes sense. And as far as online sales, do you guys offer us your fish online or is it strictly in store?

No, just in store buffet plant.

If you want to see it, you have to go in person.

That's the best way of getting people in person. Exactly.

You got to come visit now in doing research in your business, because I find this entire concept fascinating. Do you guys have? Because I see here that you have it says art inspiration in your gallery and there's art prizes and apparently what's hinted as an art show. Do you guys keep art on the walls?

So we do keep art on the walls, but what you're researching about is actually a big huge Grand rapids art thing that the city does not every two years. Although they did this year art festival. Yeah. And it's called Art Prize and we are an art prize venue. So during art prize season, which is in September, artists come to us and say, hey, I want to put something on your wall and if we like the art, we'll put it on the wall. And then that's publicized throughout the city and for that two or three weeks, the entire downtown metropolitan area turns into this giant walking art gallery.

And so that will drive additional foot traffic in your store.

Wait, including your fish. Is this set up part of that art gallery?

Well.

The building is an old building. It was built in 1923. So it's got 14 foot tall ceilings. So we've got our tanks stacked up to, I don't know, the tops of them are probably at the tallest ones at about 6ft. So that means there's a whole bunch of space above. So we can put art in that space above the tanks.

And again it's sold there, displayed all week. And then is there auctions or is it just for competition?

It's a big art competition. It's actually the largest art competition in the world.

Largest art competition in the world. And you guys happen to be an aquarium centerpiece of that?

Yes.

I'm telling him we should submit an aquarium one of these years. I think it would make a great art piece.

Yeah, actually we just moved into this store. The store we had before was like three blocks away and it was 1200. We had 87 people in 1200 sqft. It was a little tight.

I was going to say that's like.

In space with all the tanks by.

The way, with all the tanks and.

All that, when we already had about twice as many tanks in that space as should fit for conveniences. I posted some pictures of the shop in the Chat. Just keep in mind that those are not promo pictures. Those are just whatever I had on my phone.

That's just for our fun people that want to join us on discord.

Yeah, at least you can get an idea of what we look like.

Wonderful.

And what Charles looks like because he's in one of the pictures from one of our upcoming YouTube videos.

The majestic. Hair and beard go together quite well, sir.

All of the curls. Yes, right. Sorry I interrupted.

No worries. You guys have been doing this now for six years. Did you have a store before this or otherwise? I've heard that some of you have worked in. The Aquarium Hobby and other retail stores, is that correct?

Yes. I started working for a service company in 2006. That guy opened a small retail store. About two years later, another guy and I bought him out. That lasted for five years and we split. So we grew a big retail store, had the service company, we split. I took the service company with me and opened Watercolors.

Okay.

I'm trying to think of foot traffic because I've always talked about destination stores, and again, that's what we're going off of here is the destination store and why it pays for them to do it. So we have a wonderful store in our area that we like to pick on called Forest Lake Pets. It's down in southern Minnesota, about 20 minutes north of the metropolitan area. And that is like, what we like to describe as one of our destination stores. And it's mainly due to selection. If you go there, they always have stock on hand. They always have really unique pieces. They're not afraid to get stuff that's unique that no one else has. And they make themselves like, every time you stop there, you're going to be impressed by something.

It's always different.

Even through COVID, they're able to somehow squeeze out and maintain a diverse selection. And it really did make every time I go to the city, we got to stop at Forest Lake. Do I need fish? God, no. I have a fish room full of stuff I wholesale through Jimmy. But it just inspires you and you watch your wallet suddenly empty. You just can't help yourself, honestly.

Idea. Right?

Just magically empty.

So you're the person.

Hard time containing ourselves to a small selection. We're such geeks over here.

That's kind of a nice thing here is that everyone here is a little bit specialized. And since we get in the things we like, we have a choral person. I'm a wild beta guy. So it allows us to like that mixing pot of different ideas of what's cool.

And if you have a staff that's excited about something, you carry whatever that is.

And if you're excited about something, then you know you're going to sell it the next day, especially if you're thinking about taking it home.

There's no morning meetings of like, hey, guys, we got some white skirt tetras that no one wants to sell, but you have to sell them.

I don't know that we've ever had white skirt tetris.

If you do, you got to take.

A picture skirt tetra when there's like 100 undescribed high sets of Brightons'you could order.

I mean, come on, you're already under selling the product I just bought. So you were in this position where, again, you've had a store in the past. What was traffic like? So after you've established yourself, you're doing this now for six years on this Watercolors model. What does traffic look like for you in comparison to a traditional store? To the gallery that you're doing now, the destination location.

Good.

I feel like you're a numbers guy.

It's always growing. So I mentioned I work in the quarantine department, and most of my work is downstairs, but on the weekend, I'm the only manager. So the thing that has become as the company has grown, that has become much more apparent to me is how much less time I have downstairs.

We have a service company, and that's been bread and butter to allow us to do things our way. And when you do things our way, and what we of course would say the right way, then you god, we're snobs.

We kind of are. This is the time where you guys get to shoot your own horn. We're giving you the platform to do this right.

Yeah. And so if we're doing it right and that becomes viral, that people catch on to that and want more of that, and it grows by itself.

Confidence is contagious. So we had someone coming over the weekend because they read a review that we wouldn't sell people a pleco into a bowl.

Our bad reviews are our best advertisements.

We love bad reviews.

So, again, I have plenty of people that are starting new stores, thinking about doing stores. Maybe they want to convert that online hobby into something local that they do a couple of days a week and they're trying to listen in. They talk to these mom and pop shops and they want numbers. So I hate to do this to you, but what would you say is the difference between your store and a competitors or what you guys used to do? As far as traffic, is it 20% more? 15% more?

So the store that I used to have was 4200 sqft. It was just this massive behemoth and we had everything from red gravel to, yes, white skirt tetras and all of it. And we're specialized now, so our numbers are, of course, less than they were. We're only 2400 sqft instead of 4400. So at half the size, going with a percentage of traffic or percentage of amount of people, it's hard to quantify that.

Well, I think the way to quantify it is you just stated it there. You were double the amount of square feet, you had more stock options, and now you have a quarantine department that you can afford. Clearly, even with the less selection, which automatically equals less traffic in most people's minds, your people walking in and consumption rate of your product is clearly up, or at least the overall buy rate is higher. That's fair to say. Enough, right?

Yeah. And customer loyalty is huge. Our watercolors customers just keep coming back. They don't want to buy their stuff somewhere else. As soon as you get that. Well, if you ever have had ick in a tank, which, who hasn't? And you can go somewhere and buy stuff and know you're not going to have to worry about that. It makes you pretty loyal.

It's hard for people to convince themselves to go other places if they haven't gotten it here.

Right. And I also think that the model that we're trying to project is one that's for long term hobbyists. So how many people are really going to have a red gravel, clown puke, pirate ship tank in their house long term? But if you've got this beautiful planted aquarium and the plants are growing, that's dynamic and the fish are doing well, that keeps you interested. That keeps you in the hobby in a lot longer, keeps you going to the fish store a lot more.

Yeah.

Success.

We're not looking for one time purchases here. We want people to be here their entire lives.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You give people a little success, and they they continue to keep coming back. And I just want to talk about, you know, we're talking about percentage. Like like you're saying you keep 90% of your fish alive. That is absolutely huge.

I haven't heard of that before. Honestly, how it should be nice.

Yeah. I've been in the business for a long time, and people always talk about, I marked this up 30%, I marked us up 40%. But, you know, 30% of of $0.50 versus 30% of $12 is a huge difference. And we call it penny profit. And you can't take percent to the bank and make that deposit, but you can take your penny profit to the bank, make that deposit, and if you're making good money on a fish that you didn't lose, then all of a sudden, your success ratio just goes way to the ceiling.

Is your middle name Scramansky?

Scramansky. I am scrooge mcduck.

Okay.

Good to know.

It seems like the math doesn't add up because our markup isn't significantly higher than standard industry markup. We run the same amount of staff. As I'd say, most stores do, although they're more dedicated. If you don't kill 40% of your inventory, you have 40% more fish to sell.

And one of the things I always have to be conscious of is that, like, since I'm spending weeks with a fish in Quarantine, I more or less am thinking ahead of what I'm selling upstairs. Like, in my head upstairs. In effect, fish may be there longer or shorter, but I only have, quote unquote, a week's worth of fish upstairs in a given time, whereas I have four weeks of fish downstairs.

Is it hard to stay ahead of the eight ball when Christmas comes? Yeah. All of a sudden you have a run on a particular fish because aquarium fish hobbyists or Amazon has run an article on it, and all of a sudden, that demand goes way up. Does that just frustrate you guys at night when you're laying in bed thinking, all of a sudden, we're going to have such a run on these fish, and I've only got a weak supply.

It's the golden frustration, though, you mean I'm going to sell a whole bunch more of something. Keeping up with that can be a little frustrating, but the fact that people are going to come in and buy more.

There was a couple of months this year where chili ras boras had a three week lead time, but hey, we're the only store in town that can keep them successfully. And sorry, you're going to have to wait three weeks. And plenty of people did. A lot of people did.

Do you keep waiting lists or do you just come first, take your number.

And also request list?

Wonderful.

So like today I had a call for I would like a blue spotted jaw fish. And I said, sure, I'll put it on the list and when I can get it in, I'll put it through quarantine and I'll call you when it's ready to go.

With the knowledge that people know that they're going to have to wait at least four to six weeks for that fish, and if it's not going to kill your entire reef tank, that's probably worth waiting for.

And a lot of people look at it as and that's the thing that when I first started working here, I was genuinely shocked that people accepted this mindset of that gives me time to get my tank ready for that individual.

Right.

And that openness to that idea was so reassuring.

You just expect people to give you a hard time, but when you explain why we do what we do, there's not as much pushback as you think. There are definitely going to be those people who are like, well, fine, I'm going to go down the street to the grocery store and you're like, great, well, then my fish are safe.

I didn't spend a month getting that through quarantine just for it to die.

You take it personally when you've kept those fish with you for a while.

The idea that you get attached to these fish and what's really nice to it is that people will ask, so what's the personality of this fish? And every once in a while, I have multiple individuals of the same species and depending on the person because we do have that loyal customer base, I'll be able to be like, this leopard rass is going to destroy your tank, but this one will fit in just fine because this one over here is a jerk. Yeah, but he will definitely not get along with your chorus rasp or something like that. And the ability to do that is just makes you fairly adaptable and to the individual that's trying to purchase a fish.

So if you got a customer that you really don't like, you sell that jerk fish to him, then.

No, because I have a soft spot for the jerk fish. I'm a maroon clownfish apologist. I love them so much. There's just something about a fish that's willing to look at something like 10,000 times its size and say, I can take you.

I'm sorry. Which dottie back was on your dream fish list? Yeah, it wasn't a dottie back, was it?

Oh, no, it was a dotty back, like the vicious Mccullochy dottie back that'll take chunks out of you.

Yeah.

If your dream fish is something that will attack you, then maybe Charles isn't.

The best person now, do you guys ever go down to the basement and just kind of look around and going, I know Charles has got a tank down here for himself that he's not selling these particular fish. He's got it hidden in a corner. And you go over there and you find all these clownfish, and you kind of go, I wonder where they went.

That's why we gave him the breeder lab. He's got his corner, and he can stay over there.

So in our freshwater department, we have a little breeder lab. We have a Kili fish corner. And every once in a while, something will come in, and I say, you know what? I really want to hold on to that for a while. The most recent example was we got some orange laser cory cats. And I was just like, man, I just really want to work with those for a while.

Or the licorice grammys, which are buried underneath everything else so that no one can find them.

Sounds like you got a problem. I think there Charles.

We have a number of problems.

What I need to do is call you guys tomorrow when your hours are open, pretend to be a customer and ask, hey, can you give me some antiblps in? That would be super.

And we'd be like, oh, okay, sure. Tell us about your setup.

Right.

I'm like, I have a waiting pool, a six foot kiddie pool with brackish.

Water waiting for them with some clone puke.

All right, we'll get you some antibiotics.

She said it. You heard it here first, ladies and gentlemen.

I would definitely get you some, but you can't really phase us with questions like that, because I got what I think was a prank call the other week, which was somebody called me and told me their fish was drowning. And I didn't even react as if that was something unusual. I just started troubleshooting it like, okay, so what's it doing? What does it look like? What type of fish is it? Did you get it here? And the people just kept going, no, I don't think you understand. My fish is drowning. It might look like that, but that's probably not I didn't realize until I hung up that these people were screwing with me. You just take it seriously. I don't know.

I just love the whole lot of weird stuff.

I just love the whole grabbing the troubleshoot method, just like Amy at Apple tech support. Hello. Welcome to watercolor tech support. Is your fish drowning?

Hey, Amy, is your refrigerator running?

Oh, you better go catch it is it a cannibal.

In all honesty, tell me that they thought they ate their fish while sleepwalking one night. So I do not take anything as a joke anymore.

Are you serious?

You do not have to listen to our story time episode. There was definitely some fish eating happening.

Yeah, she was 100% serious. She said she dreamt that she ate something disgusting and the next day her angel fish was gone.

Did you ask her if she had bones in her mouth?

I didn't know what to say. Honestly, I'm like, okay. And she left and I turned to the co worker that was next to me and I'm like, wait, did she really just say that she ate her?

A lot of crazy cat people out there.

So quick repeat story from one of our prior story time episodes.

Which one is this?

No, I think it was storytime one or two. Don't know. Offending anybody? I got a customer. Because again, you guys do service calls. You know how it goes. They call for every little thing and they're calling, oh, half of my fish are gone. Like half? There's no way it could be half. I mean, you have a pretty large tank. I can't remember what it was like 75 gallon, something like that. You have a pretty large tank and it's a bunch of small fish. If a couple of fish die here and there, you're probably not going to find the carcass. It's going to be eaten by another fish. They're going to decay or you're just not going to see it as they decay. No, you understand? Half of my fish are gone. What? Go over there not a scrap, nothing in the filter, nothing anywhere. So check to see if she had cats. She had no cats. All she had was like a toy dog in a bag. One of those ladies.

Put up a.

Camera and caught her kids partying and scooping fish out and kicking them back, literally swallowing them back. And they go through half of her tank in a night.

Little goldfish swallowing.

I'm just lucky they didn't get the.

Sedantes that used to be really popular back in the mean they would have goldfish swallowing contest.

We're seeing some like hand to face there. Jimmy, you got to be nice to our guests.

No. Have you not heard of that? Back in the 50s that was very popular.

I'm just thinking it's like it's better than a lime as a chaser.

Absolutely.

Good one. In Minnesota we have some bait places.

And keeping them in a ten gallon tank, so I don't even know what to say.

They do some bait places up here and they do minnow shots. Yes, that's a pretty common tradition out of bait tanks.

Like, okay, fine, eat the minnows. But out of those nasty systems, 100% they do that at the highest feet of fish lice.

That's what they want to do when they're ice fishing.

That's why they do it in yeg and other things like that.

These are your Minnesota stories. Guys, I don't know if I want to share this.

Oh, no.

I've gotten into some shenanigans while ice fishing. This is not the time and place, but let's just say things happen.

Even Mike Rose on Wash, a bunch of hicks dirty jobs frying up leeches.

And that was over in Detroit Lakes, 20 miles from us. Mike rowe has done three or four shows in our area in the last few years and stuff. But as long as we're talking about eating something no, let's talk about Rocky Mountain oysters.

No, oysters.

Rocky Mountain. oysters.

Rocky Mountain.

They call it the testicle festival. And you can go to the local pubs out here and they'll have castrated testicles from either cows or pigs and they'll deep fry them for you and then give you beer. And then usually about six or seven beers in, somebody will say, oh, give you $100 to eat one of those raw. And you're looking at the guy who made $300.01 night.

I think now the Minnesota Board of Vacation and Tourism is going to come and beat you with a steak.

I don't care. I made $300.

This is not what I expected out of Minnesota. Is there anything else to do there?

No, we have a lot to do. Well, there is.

You have to find your own entertainment.

Yeah, we could take all our free time and then have our football team practice, but what for?

Yeah, and there is other things to do. But this is a family podcast.

That's right.

Yeah. I think you're talking about the most wholesome things you could do.

There you go.

Make a snowman.

So in a gallery setting like that, you guys have how do you address children's? Tanks. Because again, you're making all these beautiful breathtaking scapes with natural elements. corals, how do you deal with kids that come in and cater to some of that audience?

Bright Green plan and platties are great for kids.

We try to cater to every level of the hobby, and children are some of the for me anyways, some of the most fun customers to work with because it's amazing how enthusiastic they can get. And I'll have these moments where I was like, wow, I haven't been excited about this particular thing in like, 15 years. And it's that great reminder of, oh, this is something to be excited about. Oh, sorry.

Yeah. I found the only people who are upset about not having treasure chests are the parents. Yeah, kids want to learn and they want to see the things. And they do want brightly colored fish that are really active. But hey, if you can give them something that's going to make babies, then like a guppy tank. You can't get much better than that for kids. And they always recognize that. That's really cool.

I've had eight year olds come back and be like, so I was reading this article and those are some of the best days.

People always assume that kids are so impatient and so unwilling to listen. I had a ten year old and a twelve year old come and look at our African cichlid section and be like, you know what? I've got one of these. I really don't want them to fight. I'm going to come back another day. And I'm like, they can make those sorts of decisions. You just got to give them the platform to have all the information. And they usually make the right choices. Sometimes if they want to get a princess castle, whatever, go to a chain store. But we'll tell you why. What we do is better, and they understand that.

So you said bright green plants, platties, fun wag style fish. What other things do you do? Because I see people that try to get more natural escapes. I see people having fun with the coconut shells. Is there anything that you do that's creative where you're trying to raise the bar as far as accessories? Because I'm trying to put myself in some of my local stores. Right? You go in and some of them have expanded the plastics just for kids. Like they purposely have the puke neons, they have these glowing accessories, every type of accessory you can imagine. And it's like you're going down a toy aisle. You're seeing all of these SpongeBob square pants huts and literally all the way down to they're trying to make like, aquarium safe lego accessories. It's just so they're recreating play spaces for their fish, which is not necessarily what's intended. So is there anything special that you guys try to go above and beyond on a natural escape that's just intended for the more fun details? Or is it just centric around making a beautiful scape that is more kids centric, such as platties?

I think that Amy pegged. It those pink castles and things like that. It's the parents that want that stuff. When a kid walks in and he sees a beautiful tank, he sees that or she sees that just the same way that we would put a couple of brightly colored fish in there and that gets their attention. Or show them that there's a baby fish in a tank and that gets their attention in a much better long term way than a lego or SpongeBob thing.

I've never felt like we needed to reinvent the wheel there. An aquarium is cool just by being an aquarium, and the people who are here understand that too.

I think one of our more recent, quote unquote crusades has been that we've been trying to billy fish as an alternative to betas. In a small aquarium, there are dozens of kilifish that you could keep a pair of in and work with. And I'm still shocked at how open people are to that idea that there's this alternative to this industry staple that is so I don't know how to describe it because I'm always shocked when we try a new idea, and everyone is like, yeah, okay, how does that work?

That's fantastic. We just had a gentleman talking about killy fish in the podcast, and it just hurts my brain. I'm going to call it out. The most beautiful colorations in the freshwater kingdom in killy fish species without bar none. And most of them are unheard of. You don't see them in the trade. Some of them you can only get in auctions. And it's not because of, necessarily quantity. It's because it's just intimidating for pet stores for some reason to give them a try. It's like they have a bad thing wrong.

Right.

They have, like, a bad PR agent. I don't understand why people aren't getting into it more. And you guys are doing the lord's work there for sure.

Lord, you hear a lot about the like, they only live a year. If people know about them, that's what they think. If they don't know about them, they think they look difficult, and neither of those things are true.

Yeah, I'm sitting on gardener ice species, and they said four months. We've had them in captivity here before. I'm sitting on what, year and a half? Jimmy easy so far. And I got them as an adult. Who knows how long they've been sitting out there?

They should make it five years easy.

That's what I'm saying. Yet, one more time.

You got any fry out of them yet?

Oh, I just got males. That's all I got.

Okay.

So fun.

Sorry, I'll have to call you guys. I get it. You guys can hook me up with some females.

Yeah, for sure.

I could hook you all up with some females.

Oh.

Don'T make promises you can't keep.

What I want to do is I want to be an old man. Chromodgen. Right. I'm going to play a role here because I've heard a lot of stuff from a lot of mom and pop, pet store owners, and number one, I'm just going to go down the list. stocking, right? Yeah, stocking. They feel like they should have only bread and butter stock. That's what they believe that people will sell. It's proven to be the easiest. And they don't want to go out of their comfort zone, because the comfort zone can lead to a lot of confusion. They don't want to have to educate the customer. And again, it's another thing that they have to specialize food and care with, and they feel like their overall margins will decrease because of it. So immediately blown out of proportion. Yes, you guys have less stock than you did before, but you guys, again, do what you believe in because you know that that person on the sales floor is going to do a home run with it. You know that if they understand it, you have success with it. That's going to be contagious and move on to the customer. So if you're excited, they're excited. You know, mythblown all the water. Fair enough to say.

Yeah, and definitely. And, and and, you know, white skirt tattoos weren't bread and butterfish 50, 60 years ago. Right. So there's lots of fish that should be bread and butterfish that should be super common in the hobby that are amazing and easy, just as easy as white skirt tetras, but nobody tries them, so try them and make them bread and butter.

Or, like, we may not have as many fish as many stores, but we do offer maybe more choices when it comes to specializing in certain things. Like, at any given time, we have, like, a dozen kili fish in the store. We have six species of cory cats.

Right now.

We have several species of wild betta.

Six species of a pista grama. It goes on and on. So it's more about keeping a lower quantity of more species. And I've sold a pista grama to newcomers to the hobby. Just because they don't know what they are doesn't mean they don't want them. If you explain it to them, somebody.

Comes in looking for, hey, do you have those ram fish? Well, we do have rams, but to fit the same spot in your fish tank, we have a pistol.

I think a lot of mom and pop stars would be surprised how many people make the Episto option.

Right?

Yeah. And if you can be like, anybody who's a hobbyist has had that experience where you go in and this happens all the time here, like, you go into a store and you're just like, well, I figure I'd better ask, do you have better hendra? And you're so expecting that, oh, no, sorry, you can't get those. But if you do have them, that is my favorite is so extreme because nobody's expecting to be able to keep the fish that they want or the fish that they saw, unseriously fish. That's not the way that the hobby usually operates. So, I mean, that itself just puts our own stamp on things like, yeah, we'll get it, we want it, and we can take care of it, and we can tell you how to and people want that reassurance.

Yeah.

The Betah hendra story is actually I want to harp on that.

Yeah, that's one of your story.

What happened was this guy came in and he asked if we had betahendra, because it's like a dream pipe dream fish to him. And I sighed because I had a pair that I was working with, and I said, yes, you can have them. Because it's that moment of like, for me, it was just another wild betta, but for him, it was the dream, and it was like, that's an easy decision to make. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

You're preaching to the choir here.

The fish that I was researching when I was first starting to get into things are. Fish that are commonly known to be unavailable. So I would have been pretty discouraged if I wouldn't have been able to find them at that time. And if I really wanted a micro tenpoama fascia LOTTOM and all I could find is a three spot garami, I would probably have been pretty disappointed. So it's nice to be able to provide that for people, for sure.

So the answer to your question, though, is that the whole idea of bread and butter is unnecessary to think that way.

Boring.

It's boring, yeah.

And frankly, it is. Let bread and butter be done where bread and butter needs. You guys are making a feast.

Yeah, right?

Yeah.

We love every fish.

Back to old man Karmage and Robs here. Going down there again. Stocking is really where it starts off, bread and butter. And they keep low quantities and they believe that empty holes. And when people come in and ask for things, set the expectation, especially when they're the only store or only handful of stores in the area that carry certain things, and they know it. They keep prices high and margin free because, again, they're still working on that 40% stock rate. You guys have not only blown that apart, but you guys stated in your stocking that when you have an episto, you're not afraid to get six different Epistos. It's not just getting the type of fish, it's getting selection of that same variety of fish. You're carrying six different cores, and again, that's blown out of the water. Then we go on to the business model. Being a destination store I hear people argue with all the time. I don't want I've literally heard this and this hurts my brain. I don't want the traffic. It's too much. People just want to come here. They don't want to buy anything. They're in my way and they leave.

I don't get that. Doesn't make any sense.

One of the most memorable days I've ever had here was we had far too many groups in the store. This was pre COVID, mind you, and I was balancing four groups of people in addition to the multiple groups everyone else in the store had on their hands. And it was genuinely fun because everyone was joking. Everyone was like, that type of energy is contagious. And it's like that positive feedback loop where if you're having fun, they're having fun, and then because they're having fun, you're having fun, and it just keeps feeding into itself.

Yeah. Our regulars might not buy something every time they're in the store. They might come by every week and they might stay for an hour, like a long time, just looking at whatever is new. And if we're busy, they will be selling fish to our other customers because of how much they love them. So it's hard to want to squash people's excitement.

It's a hobby. It's supposed to be fun.

It's supposed to be fun.

Have you ever considered putting in a snack bar?

I have, actually.

Or maybe a real bar.

Yeah, there you go.

Have a couple of beers before COVID we did have a sitting area.

Yeah.

Actually, in some of these destination stores, to go even further than that, I see a lot of them having koi ponds and other things, and just because they get so much traffic, they decided to put up a bubble gum dispenser with koi food. So if people are in your store, I will always argue that that cremudgeon is wrong and that's always opportunities to build a relationship. And, you know, there's times where I've gone to forest, like Pets and I haven't bought a thing. I don't need it. There's nothing there that I needed. But anytime I go to the cities, I will go there and there's something I have to have. It just disappears out of my wallet. It's like it's compulsionary, like I have some sort of disease and it just makes it disappear. Like they have a magic spell over my wallet. And that's what it does to all of your customers. If they're in there, they spent an hour, they went home, they're going to tell their friends, they're going to show their pictures on Facebook. It's going to better use somehow. If not, the dollar dropped on that occasion. So old man criminals out on that one as well?

Yeah, we were just having a conversation about how many people feel guilty for asking us questions or for buying stuff. Where is it going? Where people don't want to take your money? Give me your money, let me talk to you.

I had a guy that rang out three times today, because twice on his way out, he realized there was something else he wanted and he was like, I'm sorry to interrupt again. And I'm like, please interrupt spending money.

What else does old man Karmajan have to say?

Old man karmajan.

All right.

Old man Robs right, definitely sees that your quarantine process is crazy. He believes firmly that it's nonsense. And why make people wait when they could spend money now on something? And if it dies, so be it. I'm going to have that customer back. Buying it again. Clearly that's been blown out of the water and should have been from the get go. Anybody that's thinking about that process, you respect the return customer, you're doing the best for the customer, and above all else, you're doing the best for the fish. You guys shattering the word shrink and calling it what it is, that there's no acceptable loss of life and you did the best for every fish that you can. Honestly, I'm beside myself in a chair. That is the way you're supposed to think about it. I've just been in this weird corner for way too long.

Apparently, they're living beings, they have their own equivalent of hopes and dreams, and I think we all need to respect that.

You make me cry on that one. All right, so old Bancromudgeon rob's out on that one as well.

So benna goes off to college.

What comes when everyone who works here is a hobbyist or has the potential to be one? There's a certain type of person who will really latch onto this as almost a way of life, just like, caring about it and advocating for better use of our wild ecosystems and all of that stuff works together so that we can build a better hobby. Like one that's sustainable, one that doesn't just bleed dead fish everywhere, one that doesn't just leave. Like, I think the average lifespan of an aquarium hobbyist is like, six months. What is that?

Something ridiculous?

Yeah, it's something ridiculously low. Where an established tank should be set up for years, but so many people just fail and give up. And how can an aquarium store survive if all of its customers fail and give up? It's not infinite.

We get into this hobby because we want to keep fish alive. And I think a lot of stores set up their customers for failure by not giving them the resources they need to do that, because you're not going to have a return customer if they cannot keep that organism alive. You get into fish because you like them, you don't enjoy killing them. That's something that you should never get over.

Yeah, well put.

I've never gotten over it.

So back to old man Crumudgeon, right? He also has a firm belief on the design of your store, specifically, not just that it's a destination store, because clearly, if I have a lot of different selection and they're all healthy, that's a destination store in and of itself. But you guys decide to take it the extra mile and decide to escape all of these as though I was trying to make a masterpiece in my own home. Number one, having escapes make it hard in their mind to sell individual plants, individual accessories, and, of course, trying to scoop fish out of escape, it's going to take me time. I'm going to have to fight around plants. I'm just having bare bottoms and screw. You all right? That's a huge fundamental. And at most, what they'll have in these stores is one tank. And you'll see it almost in every one of these long term stores, not just those fly by night stores. They'll have one tank where they'll show this big, beautiful community tank and there's a sticker on it and this is not for sale. And it just blows your mind because that's the one fish I wanted, what.

It could have been.

I think old man Chromodon needs more practice catching fish.

You can definitely tell the newbies from the people who've been here for a while. And speed of catching fish.

Neon touches out of a heavily planted aquarium, it's.

Even possible without uprooting any plants, but that's like pro level.

That's a true skill there.

So who's the best catcher there?

Catcher in the rye.

We might have to have a competition there. Amy does have some mad skills, but does she? I have, like, decades of experience.

I have nothing, like, no ability to do the two hand method. I might be the best single net catcher here.

Hold on, hold on. The two hand method?

Yes.

We're bare handing these things because I'm not good. She's like, shrek where she just puts.

Her face in the water and comes up with a trout.

There are plenty of fish I do have to catch by hand. Hill, stream, loaches. You got to catch them by hand. Like, a lot of the time, you got to catch them by hand.

I still haven't gotten over the one time I had to manhandle a two foot long tiger shovel nose.

Oh, yeah. There's not any other way to catch one of those.

So I heard Tyler shuffle nose, and I got to chill up my chill.

In your experience, come with a single tier? Because that's what it usually does.

No, it came with a big ball of hatred.

Tell them the story, Rob.

Tell them the story, Rob.

Go ahead.

I love reliving this.

Years back years back when black arowana from South America were basically nonexistent, and you had to call in favors with your favorite wholesaler just to get a wild one. Right. You had to pay four digits out the nose to get one of these things in. And you get it in just for someone to have you rescue their small tiger shovel nose that's half the size of the marijuana just to watch the shovel nose eat it whole.

No.

Yeah.

I had a guy do that with a rainbow wrasse and his shark tank, and he was convinced that the rainbow wrasse was way too big for his banded bamboo shark and an $80 meal. It was a nine inch rainbow wrath and a two and a half foot shark. So not a monster. And it was just sucked it down like spaghetti.

Yeah, mine was a one $200 meal. I finally get to the point where I can talk about numbers.

Was that your 1200 or his 1200?

It was my 1200.

At least this was the customer. And I even warned him that there's a risk that your structure will eat it. that'll be fine.

So he brought it home.

And for the record, for anyone listening at home, the question is not can it eat it? The question is, will it try? Got a dead fish. It doesn't matter.

The question is when will it eat it? It might not be now, but it'd be six weeks. But it gets bigger.

I feel like we interrupted what you're about to say, though, when you first mentioned the shovel nose.

Oh, no, that was the story we.

Were just talking about man handling fish.

Got you well back.

Sometimes nets aren't viable.

Back to old man Crimudon roms so in doing this design, we're going to pick through every one of the stereotypical oh, I don't want to do it your way. So we went over that catching fish get better, right? Stop sucking number one. Pretty much also that escaping a tank makes it impossible to sell plants when you're doing an array, how do you know it's by a bundle, by a pot? Generally they put them in bags, they put them in plastic pots and they put little tags on them to make sure they're nice and clumped out of each other. How do you an escaped environment sell plants where they're already planted and escaped?

So the escapes are definitely simple. We're not talking something you'd enter in an aga contest.

I don't know, I've seen your pictures on your website, man. They're pretty nice.

I think that sells plants like better. We have a label on the tank that says what the plant is. We keep them in their clumps. We don't really sell well, we sell some potted plants, but not much. But even if it's a potted plant, you just put it behind a rock so you can't see the pot. So the lead on the clump and plant the clump the argument is the.

Trick here is a lot of our new people that like breaking period with aquascaping is figuring out how to hide seams like that.

Yeah. And so if the plants already look good in our tanks, they're going to look better in theirs.

Yeah, I think part of the difference is, too, that if somebody's in our store shopping, we're not going to put a staff member on top of people, hounding them the entire time, but there's always going to be someone around. And so if people don't know what things are or whatever, we say, hey, these are the tanks. Everything in this tank is for sale. Ask me if you have any questions. And we ask every customer who's looking for plants, so what's your lighting setup like? So how are you running your tank? And so if they say, hey, what's this one in point? Then we can say, oh yeah, this is that and you probably can't grow that or this is that and that would be a great fit for you. So it's more about working with people on an individual basis to make sure they're getting what they're looking for versus you can label something as well as you want and people are still going to have no idea if they can grow it, they just know that's pretty I want it.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting way of doing it scape the tank around selling, but still make it look like escape. That way it can go in clumps. That really does answer the question that's the idea of me going over chromoson robs is trying to get these questions answered so when we get feedback we can be like, hey, this is what they're doing. This is why it succeeds. So the last part of doing that is, of course, maintenance. Old man cremation Robbs believes that all he has to do is a water change and heck, he doesn't have to do that. As long as the filtration is working right, he can just drain it out the back of the filtration system and not have to ever put his hand in the tank. Unless he's scooping out for money. So if you have a planted system in his mind, not planted system scathed in any form, you're now making more work for Robs.

I would never be able to get around somebody who just drains the back of the system for their water changes. Yes, the way we do it is going to be more work, but to vacuum a little bit while you're doing a water change, vacuum around escape. You don't have to vacuum around the plants. The plants love the nutrients that the fish poop has. So you vacuum a little bit and it's plenty.

It's also the time here functionally. It's the time of the people that are specialized in working in those things. And it's good because I'm not the best planet aquarium person, at least when it comes to biology and plants. But people like Ben and Sally and Amy, they're much more qualified to deal with that. So it allows your employees to specialize in the things that interest them the most. We have one person who her entire job is selling, making corals look pretty and taking care of them, and she likes corals, so she fits in just great there.

And we have the same person for plans. And actually we have a person who is specialized and dedicated towards water changes and maintenance. That is her job is to do the water changes. It's not a 15 year old kid that's doing 10 hours on the weekend. It's somebody who is wait experienced with that specific thing.

You have a maintenance department, we have.

A maintenance well, I guess we could say that.

There you go. You have a maintenance department.

We have a maintenance mara.

Yes, we do.

She's tremendous, and we couldn't live without her.

You have a quarantine department, a maintenance department. You also have a podcast department.

We have a plant propagation department. We have a coral propagation department. It's individuals who are passionate about those individual sections of the store.

Wonderful.

A person who's passionate about making something work is invaluable to anything.

And then the tanks always look amazing, which nothing sells plants. We sell a ton of plants. Ridiculous how many plants we sell. And nothing sells plants better than amazing looking plants. Nothing sells fish better than fish that look great in an aquarium, and they.

Look best in an aqueous tape aquarium.

Yeah, planted tanks make fish look better.

Well, let's go to the last point. That old man chromogen Robs, because he's frankly getting angry in the corner, wondering why in the world he hasn't been doing this the entire time. So the only other thing to pick on that I see in this scenario is you guys are setting up full systems. They're not necessarily Mars racks recirculating systems, although it could be. You have the option, but the point is, in your store to make custom stands full on scapes so the entire gallery shows the tank displayed as though it would be in their own home. So old man Robbs sits there and looks at that and going, I didn't go to art gallery school, I went to retail business school. And retail business school taught me that my square foot should make me money per square foot, and I need to cram as much shit into those spaces as possible to make my money. So if I'm wasting all this space by putting spacing single stands with displays that I am not getting my biggest bang for my buck, and it's a waste of space and I should be making more. Besides the point that me doing these displays, I don't make money off of selling them. There's no way that someone's going to come in, pay me for the entire set up and I'm going to make money and have people haul that out, escape it when they get there correctly and put the fish in. And I just want to have my hands out of the business because, again, it's just too much work.

Then he should keep selling shit.

There we go. We have a read. The end of karmajan.

Robs yeah. Go sell batteries or go sell car parts or go run a grocery store if you don't like what you're selling, if you don't believe in what you're doing, this isn't a business. I don't know any store owners that are wealthy. I know some that do just fine, but not wealthy. If your goal is to go out there and have a business model that's going to make you darn rich, I don't think this is the way to do it. But if you're going to try and make something better and make a decent living at it, then find a way to do it right.

Good advice.

It took me six elements of Karmajan Robs to get that line out of them. I'm proud of myself. Yeah.

I wanted the rethurge, I wanted the retrograde to strangle you.

Those are every point that I made tonight, every point that a real karmajan has talked to me about and try to preach to me and why these destination stores do it wrong and it's a waste of time.

We get cynicism right now. We've got piranhas in the store. That can be discouraging because it's ten no's to one yes. Right. And you get the thought that nobody's ever going to want to do this right or I cannot get through to people. And then I had a kid today who was saving up for a fluval evo so he could figure out how to do saltwater because he loves the tank he is now. And I'm like, maybe the piranhas don't get to me so much.

I'm sorry. That hit my funny bone. Well, guys, I got to say thanks for coming on. Thanks for being a punching bag for karmajan, Robs, and really enlightening. If someone is listening to this, they're opening a store. Considering opening a store or have had a store, long term, take this as the jolt in the pants. Do it right. Find new ways to make your place the destination store. Again, people coming to your store is never bad and money will come as long as you're doing it correctly. Take the extra mile. Don't treat fish like shrink, and above all, have fun and be passionate while doing it like these fine gentlemen we're talking to. Any other notes that we have seemed to miss this evening?

I think you guys nailed it. Well, one other point. I can't not talk about the people that work here. When your philosophy is to do it right, you attract people that also have that same philosophy. And when everybody does it right, it's better. When Kirmage and Rob is going to have a curmudgeon like attitude, he's going to attract people that are kurmegen. Yeah. So keep doing it right and surround yourself with people that do it right, that want to do it right.

Staff members who keep us accountable by asking questions based on things that we taught them. Is it nice to be called out on something that you taught somebody?

I love it.

I absolutely love it.

Yeah.

For real?

Yeah. We're not afraid of the karmajan or the call out. We got to have conversations like this to keep doing it the way we're doing it.

Wonderful. Well, guys, there we go. I can't thank you enough for coming on. If you guys want to keep following these guys, they have a fantastic podcast. I think you guys are in your 20 ish episodes on your watercolors.

25 coming up.

25 coming up for the Watercolors podcast. Again go to watercolors aquariumgallery.com. You'll find their podcast. Subscribe to that. It's a wonderful podcast. I've been listening and doing homework for this podcast for sure. And don't forget to give them a call order. Those annabelle. If you live in the Grand rapids missioning area.

I feel like I'm missing something about annabelle. What's wrong with annabelle?

Nothing. No one can find them. They're like my favorite fish species that no one has ever seen. And we get we get a lot of green for you.

How to come get them then?

That might be worth a 15 hours drive, honestly.

All right, we'll keep an eye open.

Wonderful. So again. Watercolors aquariumgallery.com. Subscribe to that. Keep up with Amy, Ben, and Charles. Thanks again, guys. And if you like what you heard on the podcast and you want to support us, go to our website, aquariumgyspodcast.com. And by the website you'll find our information. Support our sponsors, bar none. Get some merch. Otherwise, you can throw us a couple of bucks to keep the lights on. We appreciate that, but always share the information. That way, Jimmy can finally be embarrassed of his jokes he makes on the podcast.

My jokes are the best jokes. What's that?

Thanks a lot for having us on tonight, guys. This has been a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's fun. Again, our pleasure about ourselves.

We might have to do it again. I feel like we need to go more in depth and have a Quarantine episode. We're going to get beaten up about this now.

I hope so.

Yeah. I love that I can always talk about Quarantine.

Yeah, like people haven't had enough of quarantining here in 2020. I really think people want to listen about Quarantine.

In honor of COVID we're having a second episode of Watercolors.

They got Charles locked up on the damn basis.

Let's talk about dead fish all day, guys. That sounds awesome.

Yes. All right, well, again, thanks so much. Adam, you got any other points? All right, Jimmy, let's get one more microwave before they close it down, and we'll see you guys next week. Audio. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content. It like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent would be so sexy until I heard adam's voice.

Go, Frank.

Kiss him.

Don't you know that's my boy don't you know.