From Accountant to Aquarium Designer: One Man’s Fish Tale

It’s a hobbyist’s dream to turn a pastime into a paying job and to spend the workweek doing what was once a weekend activity.

Omar Azze, 33, says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t own a fish tank--even though he couldn’t always tell a guppy from a goldfish or a yellow tang from a tomato clown.

“Fish are really peaceful,” said Azze, a Huntington Beach resident. “I can just sit and look at a tank and not do anything.”

If all Azze did was admire aquariums, though, he wouldn’t have achieved the success he has with Ocean Design Systems, a service that creates and maintains aquariums.

Azze founded Ocean Design in 1989 and is its owner and operator. The enterprise, interestingly, has brought him back to the field where he had his first job: As a high school student, he worked part time in fish and pet stores.

When Azze went to college, he abandoned aquariums for economics. He eventually moved to the Bay Area and took up accounting.

“It was very boring work. I was doing taxes and payrolls, very mundane things,” Azze recalled. “When I turned 28, I felt I needed to make a decision career-wise. I could either stay with accounting or get up and take a chance.”

With $10,000 in cash plus a few thousand dollars worth of aquarium equipment from his days as a hobbyist, Azze printed a few flyers, bought a truck and opened Ocean Design. He ran the operation out of his garage and a spare bedroom.

Business grew slowly but surely. Azze now has about 45 clients, the majority of them businesses such as doctors’ or lawyers’ offices. Ocean Design also designs and maintains aquariums for individuals.

Steve Tong, owner of Tong’s Tropical Fish and Pets in Fountain Valley, recommends Azze if any of his customers are having problems maintaining their tanks.

“He’s honest. He’ll tell you if you don’t need to buy something,” Tong said. “I know he does a good job.”

In a business where one exotic fish can easily cost several hundred dollars--the purple tang, for example, native to the Red Sea, often runs about $250--cost control is important. Azze charges anywhere from $500 to $8,000 to set up an aquarium, depending on the size and what fish will live in it. Monthly maintenance runs from $40 to $120.

Azze charges extra if a client wants to rent fish rather than buy them outright.

“A lot of people into tanks buy a fish to match a color scheme of a room,” Azze said. “And some people are very concerned with the color of the fish. They’ll get bored and change it every month.”

Another bonus for clients who rent: If the fish get sick, it’s Azze’s responsibility to play doctor.

Azze says entrepreneurial skills run in his family. His father owned a hosiery factory in Cuba before the Castro regime. After the family left that country in the early 1960s, Azze’s father relocated the business to Puerto Rico. Also, both of Azze’s brothers are entrepreneurs: One rents and sells industrial sewing machines, the other designs office interiors.

Azze’s clients attribute his success to the high quality of his work.

Newport Beach dentist Ken Bonner hired Azze, whom he met as a patient, to maintain his daunting pair of 75-gallon saltwater tanks. That followed unhappy experiences with other aquarium maintenance services.

“They weren’t doing a good job. They weren’t keeping up with the work, and a new guy who didn’t know my tank was always coming in,” Bonner said. “Omar’s consistent, and I like working with a one-man show.”

Azze, however, is no longer a one-man show. Even working 10-hour days and six-day weeks, he says, he can’t keep up with his growing business. Ironically, the first chore that the former accountant farmed out was his bookkeeping.

“I hate bookkeeping,” he said. “I’d rather spend time reading about fish.”