Patrick Ruddell a.k.a. Chef Patrick
Contact: Patrick@ChefPatrick.com
I am the creator and head chef here at ChefPatrick.com.
I will spare you my childhood and start off with dropping out of high school in the 9th grade. I acquired my GED, went to one semester of community college and joined the Air Force. After the Air Force I went from one corporate job to another and found one major thing in common. They all fired me or I quit before they fired me. I am not meant to be in the corporate world, I am an entrepreneur and love starting new companies. Believe me I have started and failed at my fair share.
About four years ago I found my calling in real estate. I created two of the largest real estate companies in central Florida. One was a we buy houses investment company and the other a short sales company also known as loss mitigation services. The we buy houses investment company was started with less than $500 in my bank account. These companies allowed me to purchase, sell and short sale almost 300 single family homes. Between the real estate market crashing and losing my passion for the business I decided it was time to get out. One major advantage I had over everyone was the creation of national brands. I was able to sell those brands and get out of the businesses with something to show for it. I could not just retire for two reasons, I didn’t save all my money, Instead I spent a lot of it on an expensive lifestyle and two because I would be bored out of my mind. Because of my internet presence in the real estate industry I was able to succeed. Why not take that without the physical real estate and see what can happen. On May 15th 2008, with no experience, I joined a couple domain forums and started buying domains, roughly 1,000 names to date. Besides purchasing domain names I knew I had to create a brand to get my foot in the door and build a reputation with the domain business. I created DomainSubway.com, which was my primary site, blog and domain portfolio all in one. Then came DNKitchen.com which is now ChefPatrick.com.
I’ve been running this blog for about 2 years sharing my life, my goals, my mistakes and my successes on this rollercoaster called life.
I’ve been domaining for about 2 ½ years officially now and man have I come a long way in such a short time. I started out not knowing anyone in the industry and knowing some, but not a lot, about domaining. Now, two years later, I can proudly say I have brokered over $3million in domain name sales, have one of the more popular domaining blogs in the industry and held the first ever domaining conference on a ship – DNCruise. In addition to operating ChefPatrick.com I have the pleasure of being a domain name sales broker for Moniker and have learned a great deal in my time there thus far. I haven’t lost my true entrepreneurial spirit though. Recently I purchased ScienceFiction.com and am working with a great team to develop it into something fun and informative in that genre. Prior to all this I was a real estate investor and serial entrepreneur. It was the lessons learned in my real estate years that prepared me for domaining by forcing me to learn how to use the internet as a marketing tool. I quickly realized the importance of domain names and grew my personal portfolio little by little into what it is today.
By using the internet in real estate and writing for my blog I quickly learned how to use social media outlets such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to my advantage. The videos displayed on ChefPatrick.com have received over 25,000 views so far. As a result of all this, I’ve been labeled a social media expert by some and asked to speak at many events.
I want to just say that I’m so thankful for my readers and supporters. Without you guys I wouldn’t be here. I’m even thankful for the non-supporters because they make me want to be the best at what I do. Right now I’m focused on making this a better blog, selling domain names and building ScienceFiction.com into a great business. So stay tuned to see what happens next!!
Updated 12/23/10
