Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Fitzner.
Chris, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I took a nontraditional path into entrepreneurship. After two years of community college, I worked as an electrician and later at a crab restaurant before moving into marketing roles with companies including Amazon, Appian, AWS, and Gartner. At the same time, I kept building my own ventures, including a food concept, a live art event series, and Sijang, a packaged chili crunch brand that sold in grocery stores and on Amazon. While my wife was pregnant with our first child, I started building Signal House, a Richmond podcast and video studio, from the ground up while working full time. I have since grown it into a full production studio that helps founders and organizations develop, brand, produce, and grow their own shows while using that content to elevate their businesses.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not. I built Signal House while working full time, with a pregnant wife, while also continuing to run Sijang Chili Crunch. Eventually, I made the bet to leave the safety of a traditional career path and give Signal House my full attention. The struggles have been any single thing you can think of when starting a business. Hiring, managing a team, cash-flow timing, adjusting to the market. You name it.
The biggest lesson has been perseverance. Building a business means getting things wrong, changing direction, learning quickly, and being willing to fail over and over without letting those failures stop you. Signal House exists because I kept pushing forward, even when the path was uncertain and the easier choice would have been to quit.
As you know, we’re big fans of Signal House Richmond. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Signal House is a full production podcast and video studio in Richmond built for founders, businesses, and organizations that want to become more visible and more known. We do much more than provide a room and cameras. Through our Signal System, we help clients take a show from an idea to a fully developed brand, then handle the production, editing, clips, graphics, publishing, and ongoing support needed to keep it moving. Our studio includes multiple distinct sets, professional production equipment, and an engineer at every session, so clients can simply show up and focus on the conversation.
What sets us apart is how much of the process we bring under one roof. A big differentiator is the fact that it’s built by someone with a decade of marketing & branding experience with large enterprise companies and a creative director that’s built multiple brands from scratch. Working with us you don’t need to find a designer, brand strategist, studio, producer, editor, and publishing team separately. We have built the people, process, and creative system to handle the entire show from start to finish. In less than a year, we have helped launch and produce dozens of shows for founders, executives, nonprofits, and organizations across Richmond and filmed hundreds of hours. I am most proud that Signal House has developed a brand and body of work that feels much bigger than its age. We built the company around a simple idea: help great people create great shows that elevate their businesses and boost their signal.
We also built this all the way juggling a full time job, a pregnant wife, raising a newborn and Sijang Chili Crunch.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I honestly don’t think luck has played much of a role in what I have built. I saw an open market and an opportunity to create something better, a full premium experience instead of just another room with cameras. From there, I focused on putting myself around the right people, creating opportunities, and making sure I was prepared when those opportunities showed up.
If anything, I have probably had more bad luck than good. Very little in business or life has simply fallen into place for me. I didn’t come from a traditional school background, I did not have a network of connections opening doors, and I built everything from scratch. Because of that, I have always operated under the assumption that I am going to get things wrong before I get them right. Which always tends to happen. Once you know things will go wrong, you can just embrace it and focus on what your next plan of attack will be.
What matters more than luck is how you respond. I believe in being resourceful, positioning yourself well, staying close to the people and opportunities you want, and continuing to move forward when something does not work. A lot of what looks like luck from the outside is really preparation, persistence, and being willing to fail repeatedly until you figure it out.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.signalhouserva.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/signalhouserva/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-fitzner/
