Working with our hands

Do you enjoy creating things? Do you enjoy working with your hands? We recently came to realize that Robyn and I do enjoy creating things and working with our hands. I guess that's part of the reason we want to raise funds to open a family recreation business.

This past Christmas I made small jewelry boxes for the girls, and Robyn made several Christmas gifts for our kids and me. Five years ago our neighbor and I made the standing desk (see photo) that we stand in front of every day while working on our computer. (Did you see the research that came out last year about how deadly it is to sit all day? One researcher said sitting all day was just as lethal as smoking and obesity, even if you exercised an hour in the evenings.)

On a related note, a few weeks ago we went to Lowe's to buy a DeWalt drill. You would have thought I was a kid getting a new bicycle. I was so excited to get a new power tool that I gave Robyn a fist bump as the cashier rang up our purchase. (It helped that we got a 10 percent discount.) Does your significant other do anything silly like that? Robyn rolled her eyes at me, but I think that down deep she thought it was cute that I was so excited.

I have loved the woodworking projects I've done the past few years. I consider working with my hands a gift. I enjoyed my job at the university in Texas, and I loved my jobs working for the Southern Baptist Convention. But I really love when I get to work with my hands. I served several years on a chainsaw crew with Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, and I told people that I never felt more like a man than when I had a chainsaw in my hands. So it has charged my batteries working on trying to establish this business idea we call our diamond in the rough.

I continue to apply for and interview for jobs that will pay our bills, and we will pursue this dream in hopes that one day God will provide the financing for it. In the meantime, we are enjoying the challenge of trying to create something ... kind of like our grandparents and their parents did a few generations ago.

Please sign up to "like" our Facebook page and vote this week for the logo version of your choice, and ask your friends to do the same. Voting is open until Saturday. Thank you very much.

Vote for our logo artwork

Thanks to our good friends at Stormer-Brooks Illustrations, we already have logo artwork for your consideration. What a great job they have done, and we are so impressed with how quickly they get back to us. We highly recommend them if you need artwork produced for your business.

As one of you suggested, we asked Stormer-Brooks to take the sketch of the boy swinging on the vine and combine it with the sketch of the boy and girl searching. They gave us two versions to consider for a logo for our business dream: the Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure. Now we ask that you help us decide which way to go by voting. Here are the two versions.

Send your vote and any comments or suggestions through an e-mail to info@arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com or by logging onto our Facebook page. (Please ask your friends to "like" our Facebook page and vote. We would be grateful.) Vote for the diamond version or the circle version. We will keep the voting booth open until Saturday, Feb. 4, and then we will send your selection back to Stormer-Brooks for them to continue developing our logo.

Thank you for taking the time to help us take one more step toward creating our business venture.

Thank you for voting

We are so excited to proceed on developing a logo for the Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure that we've decided to end voting a day early. (Call David impatient. He's chomping at the bit.)

Thank you to those of you who sent an e-mail or posted a message to our Facebook page expressing your opinion. We hope more people will vote in our next round.

We believe our fantastic graphic artist, Stormer-Brooks Illustrations, gave us several winning drawings. Most of you voted for the drawing of the boy and girl. We love that one too, but we also really like the action of the boy swinging on the vine. So...

We're asking Stormer-Brooks Illustrations to incorporate the drawing of the boy and the girl with the boy swinging on a vine drawing. (It's your fault, Scott, for suggesting that we add a girl to the drawing.) The swinging sketch more accurately reflects what the Diamond Mine Adventure will be. We're hoping he can come up with a logo that keeps the movement and excitement of the boy swinging while featuring a boy and girl.

Scott is extremely talented, so we have complete confidence that he can pull it off. No pressure, Scott. He said he will give us the updated drawing with several alternatives on how to configure the logo, and we will invite you to vote on those here and on our Facebook page very soon.

Stay tuned.

A few practical things

We are waiting until 7 a.m. Wednesday to give you time to vote for which artwork you think we should use for our company logo. Please send us an e-mail or go to our Facebook page to cast your vote.

While we wait, we'd like to mention a few practical things we've learned in the past two weeks. We hope you will follow us as we try to build our business, and we also hope this blog will provide practical help to others who try to start a business.

First, the technical support from GoDaddy.com has been very good since we opened our account. But after 5 or 6 attempts, they still have not been able to fix the link to our Facebook page. Their technical support folks are very friendly and helpful and patient with us non-techies. We've called and bugged them about numerous things, and we were not put on hold for 20 minutes waiting for someone to answer. They are always happy to help.

Second, one of the things they taught us last week was a little trick for posting photos on blogs and Facebook pages. We've bugged our graphic artist friends to save images into JPEG format to load onto Facebook and our blog, but we learned that you can use the "print screen" key on the top right of your PC keyboard and save it in a format that works.

We wanted to post the sketches that Stormer-Brooks Illustrations produced for consideration for our logo so that people could vote on them. We opened the document on our computer screen and pressed the "print screen" key. Then we opened "Accessories" from the start button and opened the "Paint" program. We pasted the saved screen image into Paint; then we edited them and saved them as "PNG" files, which Facebook and blogger accept. Voila. No bothering friends for JPEG files anymore.

Now for a bonus. If you live in the Little Rock area and have any problems with your fireplace, we want to recommend Jason Ward with ABC Chimney Sweep. Ever since we bought our house, the damper would not open very wide and would not stay open, so we had to wedge a block of wood to keep the damper open. Recently we called a chimney sweep and were told they charged $50 just to come to our house, and they assumed we would need a new damper installed at the top of the chimney for about $300. Then we called Jason, and a few days later he came by. A nice gentleman, he came in and within five minutes had the damper open and working fine. He suggested we buy PB Blaster, a better version of WD-40, to remove the rust on the screw on the handle. It worked like a charm. As he walked out, we asked how much we owed him. "Nothing. It's just one neighbor helping another neighbor." Thank you, Jason.

Votes are trickling in. Please take a minute and let us know which artwork you recommend we use for our logo. Have a good day.

Did you see the news Tuesday ...

It's the start of another busy day. While we give you time to vote for which artwork you think we should use for our company logo, we wanted to point out some interesting news this week.

In case you haven't read our other posts, we are working to establish a business in the family recreation industry. We believe many people like us would pay to play for a couple of hours in a fun, safe attraction featuring obstacle and ropes courses. That is our dream.

One of the many reasons we believe our business will succeed is because of the health of the average American. Did you see the report that came out January 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Association? It said that 35.7 percent of adults and 16.9 percent of children in the United States today are obese. 

A Centers for Disease Control report said people who live in the South are the least likely to be physically active in their leisure time. The CDC said the current number of obese adults and children in the U.S. is triple the rate it was just one generation ago and estimated that 64 percent of all Americans are overweight.

The national media have spotlighted the pandemic rise in obesity and diabetes in the past decade. Parents and medical professionals continue to look for avenues to encourage children to use to get exercise and improve their health. And a Gallup poll found that almost six in 10 Americans want to lose weight.

As a family recreation attraction, we believe the Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure will become a place families will want to visit over and over. We are convinced that we can create a demand for this type of family attraction that taps into the growing need for exercise and recreation.

Thank you for following our efforts, and we value your support.

Introducing our dream

We are progressing slowly toward laying the groundwork for our business venture. At the advice of friends, we've established a presence on the web by creating this blog, securing Internet domains and creating a website and Facebook page.

With that done, we'd like to tell you a little more about our dream. We've named it the Arkansas Diamond Mine Adventure. Check out our first attempt at a website (arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com). It's going to take a good deal of money, which we have precious little of at this point, but we believe it will succeed and hope people across the country will help us make it a reality.

The idea came to us one night last summer as I watched our 8-year-old son play at McDonald's. A manager had to come and run off several teenagers who wanted to play in the kid's playground area. The idea occurred to us that lots of people (children of all ages, if you will) love to play, climb, swing, slide and race. And as big fans of "Survivor," "The Amazing Race" and "Wipeout," we've wished we could participate in obstacle courses like the ones on those TV shows.

We started doing some research and writing a business plan after I learned that I was getting laid off at the end of August. We previously mentioned that we sent our plan to Warren Stephens at Stephens Inc., and he gave us the name of the Diamond State Ventures venture capital group in downtown Little Rock. When we saw the name, we thought it was to be one of those God things because of the similarity of the names and they would write back a few weeks later with a check enclosed. That was September 9. For whatever reasons, they haven't written back or returned our phone calls. So we've decided to put feet to our faith and try to do what other people have done in recent years: raise funds on the Internet.

We enlisted the help of a gentleman whom I worked with on various projects in Atlanta, a fantastic artist with Stormer-Brooks Illustrations. We told him about the business idea and asked for drawings of a boy playing in the forest/jungle for a logo for our company. Scott gave us five plus one of a boy and a girl. [Thank you again, Scott, for the great job.] These also are on our Facebook page.  Our family narrowed the choices down to the boy swinging and the girl and boy.

We invite you to help us establish this business, and the first thing you can do is to vote on which image you think would make the best logo. Vote early and vote often, as they say in Chicago, because we want to move forward as quickly as possible.

We now have the drawings on our Facebook page and have invited visitors there to cast a vote. You can go to our Facebook page or send us an e-mail at info@arkansasdiamondmineadventure.com. Vote for the boy swinging or the boy and girl searching. Thank you very much for your interest and encouragement.

Calling Dusty and Michael

I'm not proud, but I think I'm a fairly intelligent person. I don't have a huge ego, but I have a measure of self-confidence. David is a pretty smart guy. We both graduated from college. So it comes as a surprise that we are struggling so much with these high-tech endeavors.

Friday afternoon we took the next step of creating a Facebook page for our business dream. Our teenage daughters are on Facebook every day. It is now a common part of our culture. It couldn't be that difficult, could it? Signing up for Facebook was as easy as signing up for GoDaddy.com., but after several hours of struggling, we developed a new dance step called the Facebook fall back. Left foot forward, two steps back. Right foot forward, two steps back.

Yes, creating a Facebook page for an individual is easy. They are pretty much all the same. But to make it look like a polished business page is a different story. David recently read an article on successful Facebook pages such as Disney and Coca-Cola, and ideally we'd like our Facebook page to look like theirs. Coming up with that look apparently requires that you have the same code-writing skill that it takes to design a website.

Late Friday night we enlisted the help of our good friend Mike, who runs his own graphic design business. It gave us some solace that Mike, who is 1000 times more tech savvy than we are, spent an hour trying to work on our Facebook page before giving up. [Thank you, again, Mike.] Saturday morning we wasted spent another couple hours trying to work on it, all the while looking outside at the beautiful sunshine, and it drove me nuts. I told David he should be outside playing basketball with our son.

I suppose our first mistake was not giving the task to our daughters or some other teenager. They seem to know everything about the Internet. But then we noticed something on the Coca-Cola Facebook page. There's an intriguing paragraph halfway down that surprised us. It says that two fans of Coke named Dusty and Michael took it upon themselves to create Coca-Cola's Facebook page. The multi-billion dollar, most-famous-brand-in-the-world, business behemoth didn't create its own FB page. Two guys took the Coke bottle by the cap and developed the page for them ... for free!

We realize that you know very little about our business dream at this point, but Dusty, Michael, if you're out there, we sure could use your help.

Who's your Go-Daddy ... or The Problem of Pain

I had intended to blog every day about our progress on establishing our business, but I learned that could be a difficult task. So I commit to recording our progress on a regular basis, meaning every few days.

As with most toddlers, our first baby steps were filled with excitement, fear and trepidation. They did not go as smoothly or as quickly as we thought they would. "Starting a website? How difficult can that be?" Lean in close to your screen and see if you can hear us scream.

We Googled website registration and clicked on GoDaddy.com just because we had heard of them from their past Super Bowl commercials. Their home page had a box comparing their services and prices to Network Solutions and several other businesses. NS had been recommended by several friends, but they charge $35 per domain name compared to GoDaddy's sale price of $5.99. That's a no-brainer, we thought. We can go out to eat with that $29.

Well, we couldn't register our domain names for the advertised sale price, so we called their customer service line. A nice gentleman answered and he took our information to open our account. Then we gave him our domain names and he said it would be $9.99 each. We asked for their website special price, and after searching for a few seconds he said that offer had expired. Hmmmm.

The next 7 or 8 minutes are a blur, but we communicated as nicely as we could that we thought he should give us the price on their website. He explained (repeatedly) that Google had erred by taking us to, I think he called it, a cached homepage that had expired. So it was Google's fault. We're only talking four bucks here, but it was the principle of the matter. So we asked if a supervisor could override their policy and give us the lower price. On hold for several minutes while he supposedly checked with a supervisor, we Googled GoDaddy.com again. This time, it took us to a homepage offering a special price of $4.99. When he came back on the line, he said his boss said no deal. We excitedly told him we had found a different offer number for $4.99. He looked it up and--you guessed it--said that it too was an expired web page. We decided to wait a day and see if we found anything better. Meanwhile, GoDaddy.com sent us an e-mail asking for an evaluation of their customer service, and offered us a 20% discount on our next order. So yesterday we went ahead and placed the order. The 20% discount comes off the full price of $11.99, not the advertised price of $9.99 currently on their website. We think that stinks, but what can you do?

Getting on GoDaddy.com's website to create our first website (you only get one web page for the low price) was the most frustrating thing I've done since trying to ... I can't think of anything to compare it to just now. Suffice it to say, our first stab at creating a website is nothing like the websites we go to everyday. We decided to put "under construction" on the sites and will continue to explore how to do a better job. Please send any suggestions. (I'm taking a slow, deep breath to relax.)

The wonderful writer C.S. Lewis wrote, "Pain is God's megaphone." Yes, I'm trivializing here, but our first baby step was painful. Pain reminds us how much God loves us. So today we are grateful for GoDaddy.com reminding us how much God loves us. :-)

Alright, our next baby step is to create a FaceBook page. This can't be nearly as difficult, can it? We'll let you know early next week. Blessings to you.

We want to start a business...

Hello. I'm David, and my wife, Robyn, and I want to start a business. We need a lot of help to do so, and we hope a lot of you will follow us through this process, and contribute.

Like many of you, we've never done this before, so hopefully we can learn from each other. Our plan is to document all of the steps we take to (try to) get this business open and running. The business plays on our love of physical exercise, the outdoors, and our desire to participate in challenges such as those found on the TV shows "Survivor," "The Amazing Race," and "Wipeout."

First, a little about me and my wife. In the profile is a photo of Robyn and me at one of our favorite places in the world (Disney World). We are 40-something and the parents of five precious children I grew up in Little Rock and reached my sports apex on the Junior Deputy Sheriff's YMCA football team (with Houston Nutt's little brother Dennis) in third grade. We won the city championship! I was a photographer for the Razorbacks my sophomore year in college and later transferred and graduated with a business degree from Baylor. (What a great year for both of my teams!) I went into communications, serving as a TV news reporter and then going into corporate communications. My varied career includes jobs at CNN, TCBY frozen yogurt, HealthSouth and 11 years with the Southern Baptist Convention. Most recently I worked at a new university in Texas for three years before being laid off in August.

Robyn grew up near San Francisco playing sports. She was a swimmer and played varsity volleyball, badminton and soccer. She went to Colorado College on a soccer scholarship and was an All-American goalie. After college she became a physical therapist and enjoyed doing athletic training. Her greatest reward, though, comes from staying home and raising our children.
Which brings us to the present. We would love to run our own business, and back in August when I was preparing to leave my job, we wrote a business plan and sent it to the CEO of Stephens Inc. Warren Stephens graciously wrote back saying they don't fund start-ups, but he gave us the name of a local venture capital group to contact. We did, but for whatever reason, they have not written back or returned our phone calls and e-mails. So, we decided to step into these uncharted digital waters to see if people would be interested and willing to help us.

I'm going to save the business specifics for tomorrow. Today, we are taking our first baby steps. Establishing this blog was the first step today. Whew, we're nervous. The second step: we're going to establish a website. We've done a little research and it looks like the GoDaddy.com people are as good as any, and cheaper.

We welcome and invite your feedback. Please leave comments and advice. Tomorrow we will let you know how the GoDaddy registration went.