If you listen to local music, then you’ve heard of Tim Mays.   Mays is the cofounder and co-owner of San Diego’s mythic music venue The Casbah.   On this episode of "I Made it in San Diego," Voice of San Diego's podcast about local businesses and the people behind them, hear how Mays went from a kid handing out concert fliers to an indie music legend.   Mays started booking and producing shows in San Diego in the early 1980s as a way to make sure his favorite bands came through town. By the mid '80s, Mays and some of his friends also wanted to open a bar more geared toward his generation – with their music in the jukebox.   Mays' side gig promoting shows and the bar he helped open, The Pink Panther, both found quick success. He quit his day jobs and became a serial entrepreneur with a knack for opening businesses that grew to be local icons.   "I never said, 'I don't want to work for the man,' I just was lucky enough to not have to after a certain point."   After the birth of The Casbah, Mays continued to open new bars, restaurants and businesses in San Diego – Starlite restaurant, Vinyl Junkies record store and Krakatoa coffee shop among them. He's created opportunities for dozens of local bands and artists, helped turn neighborhoods into thriving communities and still finds time to think about what business he might open next.

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Entertainment and hospitality is one of the top 10 industries in San Diego.

Because hotels play such a big role in our region, their owners have some political power.

In a new episode of I Made It in San Diego, a VOSD podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, I talk to hotelier Elvin Lai about how running a hotel has led to his involvement in several business ventures, city politics and the community.

After his father’s death, Lai was unexpectedly handed his family’s hotel when he was just 21. During the first few months of running Ocean Park Inn, a 72-room boutique hotel in Pacific Beach, he slept under his desk while he learned the ropes.

He turned out to be an astute businessman. But running a hotel was never enough for Lai. He’s become a serial entrepreneur and an active community member. Currently, he’s a member of a few hotel trade associations, he’s on the San Diego Convention Center board, and he helps run a program addressing homelessness in Pacific Beach.

“If the community is not succeeding and thriving, then there’s no business to be had,” Lai said. “You have a responsibility to the community that you’re doing business in.”

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Last year, $9.4 billion flowed to defense contractors in San Diego.

At the helm of one of those local private firms getting some of those military dollars is David Inmon, the CEO of Redhorse Corporation.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, a VOSD podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, Inmon talks to Scott Lewis about how he built a fast-growing business that provides program management and technology services to the military and other clients.

Almost exactly 10 years ago, Inmon and his business partner opened Redhorse Corporation. They had no capital besides a $50,000 loan from the small business administration.

Inmon is from Oklahoma, a descendent of Choctaw Indians – a minority status that helped him get his foot in the door on government contracts.

Redhorse grew quickly. By 2016, the business had revenue of $57 million and was among the 1000 fastest growing companies in the country, as ranked by Inc. 5000.

In the world of government contracting, small businesses get a big boost. Redhorse is not longer a small business, so Inmon says that shift has been a challenge.

"We made it, but now we've got to sustain it," he said. "We're no longer a small business and that changes the calculus quite a bit, particularly in the federal market space."

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For music engineer Justin Watson, music has always been a part of him.

Growing up in Detroit was tough. He lived near the stretch of highway known as the 8 Mile Road, in a neighborhood where everyone and everything was about work. Watson, who goes by Jay Wat, had to grow up fast. Music kept his family tight.

Wat's parents would put on basement parties that got the whole neighborhood dancing to Roy Ayers and Sly and the Family Stone. In the sixth grade, Wat's mom bought him his first boombox, and he'd play his cassette tapes on repeat.

In high school, Wat got a hip-hop education in Detroit’s "school of hard knocks," where DJs spun records, b-boys breakdanced to the beat, and emcees battled with freestyle rhymes.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, a VOSD podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, Wat talks about how he turned his love of music into a career.

“It just became a point to where I wanted to really do this full on,” Wat said. “I didn't make a conscious decision yet that I wanted to be a producer, a music producer. But I just felt like I wanted to be involved in music some way. Somehow, destiny guided me.”

Today, Wat is busy with more than 100 clients at his La Mesa studio, Jay Wat Production Studio. A lot of the artists he works with are young and come from inner-city communities like southeastern San Diego. Many of them mirror his own experience growing up in Detroit: Getting in trouble with friends, struggling in the classroom, and feeding a voracious appetite for music.

Wat views music as a way to offer the guidance and mentorship that was often missing during his childhood.

“I feel like I am a part of these kids lives,” he said. “And I just want to see them do so much better and succeed.”

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Ilisa Goldman thinks it should be easy for a group of neighbors to spruce up a vacant, city-owned lot with seating, shade, art and other simple amenities.

Instead, they often end up having to claw through a series of bureaucratic barriers and many simply give up, or avoid the ordeal entirely.

Goldman is the landscape architect and planner behind Rooted in Place, a firm she started to help clients – mostly nonprofits and community groups – create public spaces and outdoor learning environments for kids.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, I talk to Goldman about the community gardens, outdoor classrooms and other projects she's designed, and her ongoing struggle to make it easier for people to improve their neighborhoods.

Jargon like "tactical urbanism" and "placemaking" have gained popularity in recent years. Both concepts refer to the kind of work Goldman does – quicker, easier, more affordable urban projects, often in historically underserved communities.

Goldman said the placemaking movement is gaining popularity, in part, because once one community builds a successful project, other people take note and feel empowered to do it, too.

"I think that communities were sort of tired of waiting," she said. "They were waiting for improvements to happen in their community and trying to go through City Council and trying to go through governance and realizing it was really hard."

Goldman has successfully completed several placemaking projects across the county, both with her firm, and during her stint with the city of San Diego’s short-lived Civic Innovation Lab, a pet project of then-mayor Bob Filner who envisioned it as an incubator to help the city do quicker, more affordable, neighborhood-driven projects.

"I saw firsthand what the real issues were inside the city, and outside of the city with community organizations," she said. "What were the biggest challenges, why was it hard to do these placemaking projects. I had really come to understand that our development services [department] was geared toward developers who had money, not toward communities that wanted to make their own change."

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Moving sucks. Mike Glanz went all in on that basic premise and ended up running an online moving business in Oceanside that now pulls in about $8 million in annual gross revenue.

A decade ago, most people were either renting their own trucks or hiring full-service companies and paying them thousands of dollars to do everything.

Glanz and his roommate Pete Johnson started seeing the rapid emergence of a new type of move. More and more folks were renting their own moving trucks and then finding movers to hire by going online to sites like Craigslist, or swinging by Home Depot to pick up day laborers. Glanz and Johnson called it the "hybrid move," and they decided to build HireAHelper.com, a website that would make it easier.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, I talk to Glanz about how and why he's helping to disrupt the multibillion-dollar moving industry.

By simply entering a date and zip code, folks can easily compare prices of local movers. With just a few clicks, the movers are hired and the deal, which typically ends up costing under $300, includes insurance, meaning anything that breaks in the process will be replaced.

When the website launched in June 2007, it grew steadily. By 2008, Glanz and Johnson were feeling confident they could turn HireAHelper into a very successful business. But then the mega-business U-Haul stepped in and served them with a lawsuit. U-Haul said they were infringing on the term "moving help," a term the company has trademarked. 

The lawsuit nearly shut the business down.

"[U-Haul] didn't give us an option to go away or to close up shop or to just quit," Glanz said. "They seemed like they were out for blood."

Instead, HireAHelper doubled down and worked to grow the business enough to pay off the legal fees and make a profit. The lawsuit was eventually settled, and the website has gone on to become a solid business that helped facilitate over 65,000 moves across the country last year.

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Brian Beevers is the man behind the farmers markets in Clairemont, Serra Mesa and at Horton Plaza. He's also got a farmers market-inspired shop called Simply Local in North Park that sells goods made by San Diegans.

Becoming one of the region's biggest purveyors of local products, though, wasn't easy. The success of a farmers market relies heavily on finding — and keeping — the right locations. That means Beevers' businesses over the years have often fallen victim to the whims of landowners.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, a podcast about the people behind the region’s businesses, Lisa Halverstadt talks to Beevers about his ongoing struggle to open farmers markets and sustain the interest.

“I've always known that I am at the mercy of the land owners, and it's something that you just have to kind of live with every day, that you just don't know for sure when somebody just might pull the plug on you," Beevers said.

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When Josue "Josh" Anival Salcido entered his first professional wrestling ring in 2009, it was as a last-minute fill-in for a few performers who didn't show up. His twin brother Jaime Salcido was by his side, and they tag-teamed in a Lucha Libre match.

They had been training for that moment for more than two years, and even though they thought they weren't quite ready, the fans disagreed. Their careers as Lucha Libre performers, Josh as Krazy Klown and Jaime as Rasta Lion, lurched forward. Sometimes the two wrestled on the same team, other times as rivals.

On a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, I talk to Josh about wrestling in Lucha Libre matches across Southern California and Mexico, his recent retirement and his new venture as a promoter for a Lucha Libre business that puts on matches in the South Bay.

Lucha Libre is more of an art form than a sport. It’s dripping with long-held traditions. Josh fell in love with those traditions – the colorful masks, the slick and high-flying maneuvers and especially the intense matches where wrestlers would wager their masks or even their own hair (losers have to submit to a haircut right there in the middle of the ring, and winners take the hair as a prize).

Josh remembers seeing a Lucha Libre match for the first time as his dad watched it on their home TV in San Ysidro. He knew immediately that's what he wanted to do with his life, he said.

"I just got mesmerized and fell in love with Lucha Libre," he said. "It's like poetry in motion ... everything flows and everything looks good and everything is like, wow."

But it wasn't until he tried to overdose on cocaine and alcohol that he realized he had to finally go after it.

Josh retired in October after a particularly bloody match.

He said he makes more money now as a promoter than he did inside the ring, but that money was never his motivation.

"I did it for the love and passion of the sport," he said.

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Back in the late 1970s, musical theater was growing rapidly from coast to coast. Semi-professional actors looking for a chance to perform on stage had several opportunities. But kids? Not so much.

On a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, Paul Russell talks about how he filled that niche and built a kids' theater side job into what he said is now the largest youth theater program in the nation.

In 1979, Russell got a job teaching drama at Christian High School in East County. The high school shows he produced were so popular in the community that the vice principal persuaded him to start Christian Community Theater. Christian Community Theater brought together dozens of churches and, for the company's first-ever production, kids and adults starred in "The Sound of Music" at an amphitheater on top of Mt. Helix.

The show was not great, but the community loved it – especially the parents of the kids who performed. The parents wanted more, and they asked Russell to put together a theater program for children – something after school that would teach kids how to act.

So in 1981 in his garage in El Cajon, Russell and his wife Sheryl officially started Christian Youth Theater. By the end of their first year, enrollment doubled. In their first decade, they grew from one location in El Cajon to eight locations all over San Diego County.

Early on, though, the nonprofit grew too much, too fast. More than once, the debt piled up so high, the company came close to shutting down. But Russell said big donors would step up to help, or they'd find other ways to keep things going.

"I am not a great businessman, but I always surrounded myself with a board that was way smarter than me," he said. "I didn't want 'yes' people. I wanted people to help solve my weaknesses. And so business people would come along and say, well, look at your profit centers. Expand on those and cut those programs that aren't able to support themselves."

In 1995, Christian Youth Theater opened a location in Chicago, and from that point on it expanded to other cities.

Russell’s passion for teaching kids the arts has never waned.

“I believe in it so much because I really do believe we're changing kids' lives and developing character one stage at a time," he said.

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Jennifer Luce has made a name as an architect who takes an artful approach to designing buildings.

Her firm, Luce et Studio, designed the Nissan offices in La Jolla, Extraordinary Desserts in Little Italy and dozens of other award-winning projects in San Diego and beyond.

On a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, Luce talks about how she got an unexpected break early in her career, and how she has worked to keep the momentum going ever since, with varying degrees of success.

At her first job out of architecture school, Luce was tasked with designing prisons. She needed a creative outlet, so she entered a prestigious international design competition.

More than 500 firms across the world applied, including people three times her age, with decades more experience. She wasn’t even a licensed architect yet. But the jury saw something special about her design, and selected it as the winner, effectively putting Luce in charge of a multimillion-dollar project, the Center for Innovative Technology in Virginia.

"Winning a competition early in life is a really pivotal thing to happen to you because you're jolted forward even if you might not quite be prepared for it," she said.

The experience gave Luce the confidence she needed to strike out on her own. She always knew she wanted to be her own boss, but she had to rebuild her firm three times before it finally took hold.

Finally, though, her firm is landing the kind of clients she's always wanted. It's behind the redesign of the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park and is designing buildings for other arts and cultural organizations.

"Through that perseverance, the work that you're meant to have comes to you," Luce said. "And we are at a moment where we're just doing exactly what we want to be doing."

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Back in 2001, the internet was a weird and wonderful place.

It was devoid of the much of the online entertainment and noise of today. It was a place where a couple of Santee kids could do silly but entertaining things like bring the video game Tetris to life by running around San Diego dressed as a Tetris block – that people noticed and enjoyed.

In a new episode of I Made it in San Diego, Voice of San Diego’s podcast about the region’s businesses and the people behind them, VOSD contributor Dallas McLaughlin talks to Rocco Botte, Derrick Acosta and Shawn Chatfield about how they turned their funny internet videos into Mega64, a successful online business with thousands of fans worldwide.

Botte, Acosta and Chatfield never set out to build a business. As theater geeks who grew up in Santee, they started out making free videos for fun. But the right people saw the videos at the right time, and set the trio on an unexpected trajectory that has lasted for more than 15 years. With over 400,000 YouTube subscribers, over 100 million views and over 70,000 subscribers to the Mega64 podcast, the three continue to ride the wave of internet success.

"We're even called the cockroaches of the internet," Chatfield said. "Because we're never like the biggest thing, but we're always around and not really going away, and you can't kill us. We can survive anything."

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