Juan Ortega Neon Glass Bending Teacher

Break Away From The 9 to 5

When i was a prisoner of the 9 to 5 all my thoughts and all my creativity was aimed on how to get out of the 9 to 5 prison, so when i finally came up with the solution now my problem was how to use my skills  to make money, that’s when my creative juices started to flow and they did not stop, every day i was thinking of ways of making money with my neon glass bending skills making neon.

 


The first thing that i thought off was visiting other sign companies that did not have a setup to make neon but did sell neon, so i went and visited all the sign companies close to me, they all said they’d consider me, and they did, i started to get a lot of work, almost overnight, this was 2007, it lasted about 2 years and then the calls dried out, two things happened, LEDs and the economy started to go bad, then i was out of work, i waited for about a month and i got desperate and went out looking for work, no luck, but i got to see that thousands of people were out of work, this was the time when the housing bubble burst and the banks were in trouble, so i went back to neon and started to think and to put my creativity in overdrive, what kept us from sinking was that my wife still had her job and my son also had work plus we had our saving that we never had to touch. So the sign companies where now out of the picture so i had to get new clients, for a short time i started visiting stores that had neon giving them my business card just in case their neon needed repairs, no luck there either, nobody called, that’s when i thought of getting a website, so i shopped around for website designers, i found several, but the prices were to much for me, they ranged from $3000.00 to $10000.00, so i went to google and typed “How to make a website” and i found a website that  taught how to make a website, so i bought the software called Dreamweaver and after studying just the necessary i did my first website, it was a very simple website nothing fancy but i only wanted to put the word out there and make myself visible, and then my website was live.
I bought book on SEO on the best ways to make your website attractive to google so google would put me on the first pages on the search engines, i also started to make some videos on how to repair neon signs and in about 2 months the first calls and emails stared to come in, i was in business again, this time mostly in the repair business, but most of the repairs were local so i thought ” how can i do repairs from all over the USA, this is where the creativity spark began, an idea came, first it was impossible for people to send me the whole sign, but just sending the broken part is possible, but i would have to teach them to take the broken part out of the sign, so i made a video on how to do that and put it on YouTube and it’s still there, https://youtu.be/A00JQ_vPWm0 
i also had to teach them how to troubleshoot the sign so they know what’s wrong and  either replace a broken section or replace the transformer, people started to call or email and they wanted to know the price for the repair and they started to send the broken section and i had a ton of work, this was something that nobody in the USA was doing, and i don’t know if somebody is doing it, but I’m still doing it, the demand goes up and down but its still happening, all this came because being free from the 9 to 5 makes your creativity come out, being on your own does that, and it’s a great feeling when your idea becomes a reality and is successful in that its working. Some clients started to ask me for parts, their signs were working but their neon signs needed fixing in other parts, so i started to sell parts for neon signs, which i still do, then other people started to copy me and now there are many people selling parts.
Then somebody emailed me asking if i was willing to teach them how to bend glass for neon signs, and at first i said maybe, but then i thought, why not, so i made more websites and videos advertising that i gave classes and the students started to come from all over, NY, Texas , Louisiana, Canada, Japan, some students told me that they could not make the trip so again i came up with the idea of  making videos of the whole course and selling them to those people that could not make the trip, and they started to sell, not as frequent as i wish but little by little.
My wife never believed that this was a viable thing to do, she just told me get another employment and stop experimenting on being independent, she didn’t believe, but my thinking was, as an employee you can get kicked out in seconds, even if you’ve been working there for years, it only takes the selling of your company or a new manager or a new bad economy to end your employment so the wises thing to do is to plan your independence, and if you are young and you don’t have any skills, the planning starts when you are looking for an employment, don’t search for an employment based on the money you are going to be paid or don’t just get any job, get a job in which you are going to learn a trade, a job that will benefit you even if they lay you off, or if you are already working in a whatever job then find a trade you like and take some classes, don’t waste more time.
“Where there’s a WILL There’s a Way”
What’s more important than money?
“Time” Unless your a genius and can design video games on your lap top and sell them for millions, but if you are not a genius, and you are not a doctor, lawyer, engineer or something similar then start looking at the cost of getting the money you need.
The cost of money= to the time invested to get it.
Time = to life, because you have a limited amount of time, and if you make $15.00 dlls an hour for 8 hours a working day that equals to $120.00 dlls for a days work, you still have time left in your day but not much, lets say you get up at 7am to be at work at 8am, then you work for 4 hours and then take a lunch break for 30 min. maybe one hour then back to another 4 hours of work, so your out of work at 5pm then you drive home maybe if your lucky it will only take you an hour driving time so you get home at 6pm then you only have 3 hours left to live your life doing what you want, well that’s if your not married with kids then you have to take out the trash, fix something that’s not working and that’s it, back to bed, then it repeats all over again the next day, so whatever you are making equals to selling your life (Time=life) for most of the day, then after 46 years of that your life is full of memories mainly of your work, because that’s where you spent most of your life.
You know, they say that when you die you go to a place where somebody maybe Jesus projects you life in like a big screen, and spirit being tells you “Ok lets see what you did with your life” and the movie of your life is seen in Imax quality, and then you try to narrate your life and it could go something like this;
Oh yes thats the day we had our annual special, 50% discount on everything, oh and that was our mothers day campaign, we made a lot of money that year, and so the whole movie was filled with similar scenes, and very few of family life and what really matters.
So at the end of the movie the spirit being asks the newcomer, “So that’s it, that’s what you did with all your time on earth?” and you answer “Yes sir”

Conclusion;

Aim all your cannons to be as free as possible from the 9 to 5 life, there’s no better feeling than to be able to control your time, because who’s able to control their time controls their life.