Why 'Anything Wild'?

It's All In the Name

"... at anythingwild dot com."

It's always amusing to watch people's reaction when they hear our email address for the first time. There's the high raised eyebrow vs. the low raised brow, the not so well contained smirk and the outright 'what is Anything Wild!'

People have tried to buy our domain name.

We've been asked if it is an 'adult entertainment' web site.

One customer heard it as Angry Child and we were forever Angry Child.

I'm not sure which is more entertaining, Angry Child or Anything Wild as you shake hands with the CIO of a Fortune 500 company or as you're calling the accounting department to follow up on invoices. 'And what is your company name?' Talk about first impressions.

While building our business plan we knew we wanted to have a web presence. We wrote down a handful of potential company names and checked the domain availability. Each of them was already taken. Finally Jeff said, 'oh just try anything wild'. We did and when AVAILABLE came up on the screen we took it. There! We had a web presence. Check. Done. It was a true sign of our level of patience. We had no idea how much fun it would bring.

For many years we ran our own consulting business, Jeff as a software architect and Karen as an education consultant. We had worked together in those capacities for some time so it wasn't much of a transition. We really kicked off our business in the early 2000's and we worked ... a lot. It was kind of ironic, we were working with very large, high profile companies from our 1100 square foot log cabin outside Monkey's Eyebrow, Kentucky. We shared a 9 x 9 bedroom as our office, and Jeff will always be the first to tell you that his desk was an old kitchen table. Boy, this is sounding like one of those 'it all started in our garage' stories. We never quite thought of it like that. We just tend to live simply.

We started with minimal overhead; 2 laptops, a printer and 2 new office chairs. I really think I cried when that computer finally died a few years ago. "DEAD! Just DEAD, DEAD, DEAD." is what the guy at Geek Squad told me. It was like it had beaten him. There was no hope for recovery. Most letters were worn off the keys; there are training manuals around the world that were written on that keyboard. Jeff's laptop wasn’t far behind. It was kind of like giving up your first bike.

The website never really developed for business purposes. Most of our business came from word of mouth or repeat customers. But our email addresses have been with us almost as long as we have been together. Despite all our moving around, our friends always know they can reach us at Anything Wild.

And it made for some fun company t-shirts.

Let us know if you've spotted one somewhere.