This week, I'm chatting with my friend Alex Hopes of Silker Bark. We'll be talking about his journey

as an entrepreneur from starting with a pivot he didn't expect in life, being open to the new

route that life threw at him, and then going all in on a dog photography business that's

to become an exponentially growing dog event business. So if you're a fan of Winder Dogs Pugs and

Goldens, you have a lot

to learn here. But basically any entrepreneur that's had to kind of zig when life throws a zag at

them, you've got lessons to learn from this episode.

I'm Jay Papazan, and this is The One Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.

Alex, welcome to the One Thing podcast. I'm so happy to finally have you here. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. This is awesome. It's great to see your space and get to converse with you about all these things.

I know it's been a while since we got to hang out in person. It has. Yeah. I feel like the last time I probably saw you in person was at Zilker Park with the dogs or something. Yeah. And that's like the story, I think when we were looking at your story, your business story has been a series of pivots.

And I think a lot of us, like, were changed for a lot of people, is scary and weird,

but like the pivots that you've made have turned out pretty incredible. And you shared with me

recently, like you pivoted, and we'll get to the whole story, like from pure dog

photography to dog events. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, you know, it's funny.

I was actually an elementary education major. So my former self saw myself being a teaching

elementary students and now I'm hosting dog meetups. So it's certainly an interesting

direction, but I feel really fortunate to be in this

position and have the response from the dog communities that we've had. What began is a dog photography

project, simply going to Zilker Park and photographing dogs, got kind of popular on the old social media.

I mean, your Instagram got huge. Zilker Bark, you called it because it's Zilker Park, you made it Zilker Bark. Yeah. How big did it get in the beginning? I mean, I just remember, like, you had $100,000 or something, stupid? Yeah, so originally, and this maybe goes more into local government inefficiencies than anything, but I had the Instagram handle Zilker Park for whatever reason because surely

they didn't, surely they didn't go out and get that. Are you serious? Yeah, so originally the account

was called Zilker Park and I was like, well, I'll just go photograph the dogs of the park. I think

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