We were lucky to catch up with James Rodriguez III recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi James, thanks for joining us today. Almost all entrepreneurs have had to decide whether to start now or later? There are always pros and cons for waiting and so we’d love to hear what you think about your decision in retrospect. If you could go back in time, would you have started your business sooner, later or at the exact time you started?

Being fully transparent, not starting my business sooner is one of my deepest regrets in business. I personally feel like I lost out on years of opportunities to learn and grow. I always knew I wanted to start a business, but I remained in the side hustle phase for the entirety of my educational journey. I was stuck on this idea that I needed to finish my educational journey before starting my business to obtain enough knowledge to do so. In part, some of it was fear of taking that next step to officially form the business and also not knowing what resources were available to me to get there. Eventually, I did build up the confidence and knowledge to take that leap of faith to form Nexus in 2016. Knowing what I know now, I would have formed Nexus from the onset and especially sought out business mentorship. The latter was critical for my journey. I went through the Small Business Development Center (SBDC), which was probably one of the best decisions I could have ever made. Even having my business experience at that point in time, it provided a great safety net of resources, knowledge, and guidance. It helped me navigate how to find funding, look for commercial properties, and tighten up my business plan. I can’t stress enough how great of a program it is and I recommend it as a first step for anyone interested in walking this journey. I think if I had started my business sooner, I would have had a much stronger online retail presence with years of cash flow history. That would have opened so many more doors. It would have made it easier to get funding for the next phase that I’m actively working towards and potentially even allowed me to expand my vision further with the additional resources. For someone who considers themselves a visionary, it has been difficult to have these grand ideas of what I want to achieve without having the full resources to achieve it right away. I believe starting sooner would have facilitated that path for me. Now that being said, the wild card in all of this was the pandemic. It’s difficult to say how it would have impacted my business, and perhaps starting later was a blessing in disguise. I know a lot of physical retail stores couldn’t weather the pandemic storm that hit them and closed for good. But despite that, all I can do now is focus on the present, plan for the future, and try to instill my learnings and experience to others.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My background is a culmination of my journey with my side hustle-turned-business and educational career. By trade I’m a full stack software engineer with a background in innovation, customer experience, research, and business. I consider myself to be a jack-of-all trades and self-starter, so I like to tackle all facets of technology and business. It’s one of my greatest assets being able to leverage my experience from both industries and channel that into my business, Nexus. What I am most proud of and what truly sets Nexus apart is that it provides a safe, inclusive, and diverse community nexus for gamers, geeks, crafters, collectors, and cosplayers of all backgrounds. It’s a space where you can come as you are to discover, learn, share, and engage in your passions and hobbies with your family, friends, and the community. Our offerings are as equally diverse as is our community.
From a retail perspective, we will offer comics, manga, toys, collectibles, figures, games, and gaming accessories. It is important to me to provide a platform whenever possible for the community. One of the many ways we are seeking to achieve that is by featuring products from the community and other local small businesses. Furthermore, our services include private rooms with streaming capabilities featuring theater, karaoke, and tabletop, PC, console, and VR gaming; a library of comics, manga, tabletop games, miniatures, terrain, and battle maps; a crafting station with sewing machines and 3d printing for creating props, cosplays, miniatures, and terrain; and lastly, public play spaces for tabletop, PC, console, VR, and arcade gaming. Our flexible business model allows customers to engage with these services in a way that makes the most sense for them. Whether it be hourly rate, day passes, or one of our monthly or annual memberships, there’s something for everyone. I think our memberships will be the most popular for our customers because of the wicked awesome benefits and rewards that I can’t wait to share. Lastly, we will be hosting a ton of events such as tournaments, nerd poetry slams, paint nights and celebrity meet-and-greets to name a few. Although this may seem like a lot already, this is just the tip of the iceberg for what we have planned for the community. Being a customer driven model, we will be actively leveraging feedback from our community to expand all our products, services, and events. We are excited to work with the community to usher in the next era of this industry, and to make Nexus one of the pioneers to achieve that.
With that said, I want the community to know that we really want to work with you! We want to partner and collaborate with a wide range of people and skillsets in this community.
Specifically, we are seeking the following:
• Press & Media
• Local Businesses & Organizations
• Social Media influencers
• Streamers
• Podcasters
• Cosplayers
• Artists
• Graphic Artists
• Comedians
• Poets
• Writers
• Actors
• Voice Actors
• Dungeon Masters
• 3D Printers & Hobbyists
• Cosplay and Prop crafters
• Terrain and miniature crafters and painters
• Photographers
• Videographers
• Prop and set makers

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. If you are a part of this community and have a skillset that you’ve combined with your passions and hobbies, I’d love to connect with you and see what opportunities we can discover together. You can easily connect with me on any of our social media channels or our contact form on our website.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

This business started as a side hustle starting all the way back in high school about a decade ago. At that point in my life, I was fortunate enough not to need a job, but I wanted money to fund my growing hobbies. Oddly enough, I drew from my experience of making money in video games with in-game economies like RuneScape and World of Warcraft and combined that with my passion in the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game. I literally started with birthday money to buy my very first collection, and that started my entire journey of buying, selling, and trading cards for profit. I found I had a knack for making market predictions in the game and investing in cards that I anticipated would increase in value over time. One thing that I believe was also paramount to my success at the time was also being a competitive player in the community. It gave me that expert domain knowledge of how competitive and casual play would impact the market, and I would invest accordingly. Early on in this side hustle my parents were a little hesitant about me investing money into trading cards, but there was one moment that shifted that mindset. I went to a national level competition for Yu-Gi-Oh! in California with over 1000 players. I flipped what I had originally invested in at less than a hundred dollars to a few thousand. I remember coming home and excitedly showing my parents how much I made. They were impressed and proud of what I had accomplished and gave me their full trust to continue that side hustle after that. I continued doing this throughout my entire college career while building my own network of buyers and sellers and expanding onto online platforms like eBay and TCGPlayer. I even used this side hustle to pay part of my way through school and, of course, continued to fund my hobbies. I didn’t formally turn this side hustle into a business until 2016 where I officially formed Nexus. This is when I really started to think about how to expand my business and what I would need to do to take it to the next level. In 2018, I secured a small office location and hired employees for the first time to scale up my online business. I learned a ton in this time period, some things the hard way, but it was all invaluable experience nonetheless. I wanted to expand out of the trading card scene into other offerings, but most distributors required a brick-and-mortar location. In late 2018 I sought out a small business loan and started actively looking for my first physical location. Leading into 2019, I also began attending conventions as a vendor for the first time to experiment with selling products with great success. I had a decent amount of momentum going until the pandemic hit and put a pause on everything. I decided to pause looking for a physical location because of market uncertainty. During that time, I refined my business plan and vision for what I wanted to achieve. Now I’m relaunching my efforts for a physical store with my newly built business team. It has been an interesting journey this past decade taking a simple side hustle and scaling it over time, but I am thrilled to finally take my business to the next level.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Well, my most important partner is my wife, Thalia M. Espana (CMO), both in life and business. We’re high school sweethearts and have been together for almost 12 years now. Initially we were drawn together from our alt style and just being different from the norm. Over time we really gravitated towards each other because of our visionary and ambitious personalities. We both try to embody that Jack and Jill of all trades type way of life. This mindset has enabled us to become a power team where I can marry my expertise in business and technology with her expertise in media, marketing, and creativity. We’ve been driving each other towards our ambitions ever since. Yu-Gi-Oh! has aways been a huge part of my life and is the common thread of how I met and developed friendships with two of my other business partners over the past decade. I met Daniel Torres (CAO) in high school and our friendship developed organically through mutual friends including my wife. I took him under my wing as a player and in the later years, he was my right-hand man for traveling to tournaments to compete or vend. He was even my best man at my wedding. His career eventually led him to develop a background in leading teams of people and projects with a mindset of servant leadership.
You’ll start to see a trend here, and you might as well equate me to Batman with how many people I’ve taken under my wing. I remember being at my routine weekly tournament one night during college when I first met Jimmy West (COO). He was playing an older deck and I have always tried to mentor people in the game, so I offered to help him build a more competitive deck. We built a great friendship from that moment onward. We eventually formed a team and started to pursue the same side hustle in parallel and partnership. We’d swap ideas for investments, travel to major competitions to compete and vend. Jimmy’s career led him to a background in finance and business operations.
My last business partner, Mike Sepulveda (CIO- Chief Innovation Officer), I met through our day jobs and we hit it off very well. Mike comes from the start-up and video game industry as a UI/UX Designer and has a diverse background in this space. He has an eye towards innovation and the customer experience, and that allowed us to work extremely well together, truly symbiotically between software engineering and design.
I’ve always been very open about my vision and ambitions for my business, and I’d just riff off each of them to grow the vision and imagine new possibilities. My team has never had any doubt that I would achieve my vision. There has always just been a knowingness that it will be so and they were just waiting for me to finally say “go” to help me achieve it. I remember when I finally sat down with each of my now business partners and discussing my plans. Without hesitation everyone said yes. It was an impactful moment for me because I have equally hungry people in my corner who share and deeply understand my vision and the community I am trying to build. My business team has two common themes: 1. We’re all geeks at heart, and 2. We’re all jacks and jills of all trades. This was important to me because I wanted people who could leverage the fullness of their skillsets to bring even more value to what we are building with Nexus. I also wanted people I could trust to have the same fire of impact to the community. I’ve been truly blessed on my journey to make these life-long connections and couldn’t have asked for a better team.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.nexus-entertainment.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nexus.entertainment
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nexusentertainmentllc
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/nexus_entmt
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NexusEntertainmentTV
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@nexus..entertainment