Wow, welcome to Cajun Custom Rods’ Blog. It’s hard to believe we are a “real” company now. We were excited when we got our logo, then our business cards, our shirts and when Jaesen actually made the first rod. Now, almost two years later, we finally have a website, it is official, we are up and running! It doesn’t seem like that long ago when Jaesen came to me and said “Hey honey, I’m driving down to Orlando so that I can check out this company down there and build my own fishing rod.” He’s had ideas before and little ventures that he has done, so I didn’t really think anything of it. And then he was gone for roughly 11 hours and came home with a car full of stuff. I’m not talking just a bag of fishing components; I’m talking the whole back of the car full of stuff. His excitement level was off the charts and somewhere in there I actually caught him saying, “yeah, and I can do this as a business, I’m going to figure this out … build custom fishing rods … and then I am starting a business.” That was a red flag waving in a hurricane force gale for me. Now mind you, we aren’t just lying around here with nothing else to do. He had just gotten back from Iraq and was in transition with his new squadron for the Navy. I was halfway through nursing school and we have 3 kids ranging in ages from 8 to 2. So with all the assorted school and activities for kids, plus school for mom, plus a job for dad, I was a little concerned with where would we find extra time to start a new business. If you know Jaesen though, if it is truly what he wants, then he does find a way for it to succeed, not just work, but succeed. And so here we are just waiting for you to jump in to our site and design your very own rod. We are a small company and extremely customer oriented so when it actually does say contact us, you can be assured of a response from one of us, because that is what we believe in-what we think businesses should do for their customers. I will leave this blog entry with a few fun items that occurred in our first several months:

• We decided to start naming our rods that Jaesen designed; we have a Green Goblin, a USA, and several college type rods.
• Eating homemade pizza with the IRS guy who spent hours going over our business plan with us.
• The absolute disbelief we felt when on our son’s grabbed a rod while the epoxy was still wet and sticky.
• Trying to figure out where to store 50 shipping boxes in our own crowded garage.
• Testing out bubble wrap products by letting the kids play with the wrap.
• Jaesen taking out the first rod finished and catching a fish.
• Deciding we could be our own photographers and learning a whole new business on top of custom fishing rods.
• Boring the wife to tears on which color blue should I use as a guide wrap, metallic, light blue, navy blue, ice blue, cobalt blue, sea blue……… “wait, what’s a guide wrap?”