Publisher comes back from breakdown and finds major success

Interview and Article MICHELLE R PRICE

Ocean Reeve almost can’t believe where he is today. Starting from humble beginnings, Ocean began life in a small provincial town in New Zealand, he has risen to find major success in the highlycompetitive publishing industry.

After learning that he had been adopted when he was in his 20s, Ocean spent several years being involved with a gang, participating in criminal activity and battling addiction. He admits he rebelled in a big way after also being bullied during his schooling years.

Ocean said, “I just lost interest in caring about anything that I thought I wanted.”

In 1999 Ocean experienced a significant spiritual shift. “I had an epiphany, it kind of made me feel that I was going crazy to be honest.”

He said he knew of a woman who was into spiritual stuff in Wellington at the time, so he visited her to get advice about how to deal with what he has labelled a ‘crisis of the soul’.

Ocean returned home and followed her advice, which centred around the Wiccan faith, and everything fell back into place for him. He admits he still had a lot of internal work to do, saying he was faking a lot in his life.

Eventually Ocean married Vicki Jane. He had two children to a previous marriage and then became an active step-father to Vicki Jane’s two children. With a background in the film and TV industry, Ocean broke into publishing, saying it provided him with the security he felt he needed at the time. He’s had experience in the education and sales arms and admits he has seen some disturbing practices over the years, with lowquality publishing being sent to market. That is what convinced him to go it alone.

Speaking to his wife, Ocean said together they came up with a sound philosophy; ‘don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal’. He allowed himself to be guided by integrity and honesty when starting his own business.

“If you told the truth, you said it straight, you didn’t cheat anyone, you didn’t steal anything… not everyone is going to like your direct approach. You’re not going to have to remember the bullshit you told in the past because you’re never having to back up a lie and the people that don’t like that direct approach aren’t the people you want in your life anyway,” Ocean said.

“So in a very short period of time I removed all the toxic people from my life. I’m proud to say that in 2021, I don’t have one person in my life, business or personal that I don’t want to be in my life and that includes the hundreds of authors that we’ve got in our stable at the moment.”

Ocean also now has 20 colleagues who have come on board since he started out on his own and Ocean Reeve Publishing recently won the Business Enterprise Award, presented by APAC.

On a daily basis Ocean chooses to wake up happy saying, “I believe you wake up conscious, you have a decision, am I going to be happy or shitty or whatever I want to be today?… when you’re maintaining elation, that’s what takes work.”

Ocean admits that he did suffer from a severe bout of ‘imposter syndrome’. “It wasn’t about me knowing that I was up to the mark to do what I had to do… I know a little about everything and a lot about publishing and marketing.

“Where I got imposter syndrome is when I met ‘Flash’, my business partner Jason [Smith], and he’s a completely different person to me… he helped me see other parts of growing the business and working on the business that I hadn’t seen.

“When it started to pay off and our business exploded, our authorship exploded and our team exploded there was this realisation that the name Ocean Reeve Publishing, and me as Ocean, just this country boy from New Zealand, suddenly there was this separation that was happening and I had a massive meltdown.

“I basically curled up into a ball on the couch and for about a week I was not me.”

One of his kids asked what they should do to help dad as he’d never seen him like this. Ocean admits he is normally ‘Mr Fix It’, “But this period in my life I couldn’t even fix the way I was thinking.”

Ocean rang business partner Jason ‘Flash’ Smith and told him he’d have to run things for a while. “The way I got out of it is I needed to get out of the house, and my wife is… she’s just my best friend… she said let’s go away and stay in an apartment in Brisbane for the night or just the weekend and let’s get out of the house,” he said.

Ocean admits, “I was really badly depressed and… I felt like my identity had been stolen by an entity and I didn’t know who I was, and I went into this hotel and I walked into the apartment in the middle of the Brisbane City and I just turned on the television and flicked it on whatever channel it was, which just happened to be a Country Music channel and Tim McGraw was singing this song ‘Humble and Kind’.”

Tim’s song includes the lyrics, ‘don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t lie’. Ocean was standing there, still clutching his bags and listening to the words, recalling the philosophy he and wife Vicki Jane had come up with years earlier.

The couple only spent one night at the hotel in Brisbane. Ocean woke up and realised he was back to his old self and wanted to return home. “Suddenly Ocean was back”, he understands now that that separation had to happen. “The company can be the company but I’m still that country boy from [New Zealand]”, he said.

Next on Ocean’s to-do-list is to open a new branch of Ocean Reeve Publishing in New Zealand before the end of 2022. Then he plans to launch an office in Singapore by 2024.

www.oceanreevepublishing.com