Saturday, July 31, 2010

Chapter 1 - Crazy?

Our family’s mission is to create good food and not freeze to death. The End.

When the stock market started its death spiral and took half of our retirement fund with it, we decided that things needed to change. Sure, we could plug along working for the big, corporate machine for limited return, but isn’t there something better out there? Why, yes there is, Billy…self-employment with little or no job security. Now, doesn’t that sound grand? And so, here we are, just a few months later, saying “Why let a stranger gamble away our future when we can do a fine job of it ourselves?”


After making the decision to strike out on our own, there were many stops and starts. But what it boiled down to was finding a business in upstate New York that could sustain our family. At this point I should mention that although most of us were born, and in some cases raised in the Northeast, we have lived in Florida for a very long time. This is where the concern about freezing to death comes in.

Day after day, DH looked for business opportunities and we even thought we found a good opportunity in Wilmington, NY. We spent several months developing a business plan only to come to the conclusion that it was too big for our britches. It couldn’t be done without hiring staff and a huge mortgage. It just seemed like we were getting in way over our heads.

We abandoned that ship and started investigating camp grounds. A lot less staff required, something definitely manageable by a small family, usually owner financed. Yahoo! Sounded like this was it! I was excited and came home one day with big plans for this campground, big, big plans. No sooner did I get the word “campground” out of my mouth and DH says, “No campground, I’ve moved on to something else.” Good golly, I can’t keep up!

He had found this property in North Hudson, and it was a steal. A complete disaster, but a steal…

To be continued...

No comments:

Post a Comment