The stream of consciousness ramblings of a young entrepreneur…

Well as the title suggests, I have returned to the good ol’ city of Atlanta.  It’s good to be home, especially knowing you’re finally going to get to stay for a little while.  The downside is that now my expenses are my charge, not my clients.  Overall I consider it to have been a very successful series of months both from a business development and revenue generation standpoint.  Let’s take a quick look over the past months and my travels in brief shall we?  I will warn you…since this post is a “Reader’s Digest” summary of the last 3 full months of travels, it might be a bit long…

My first trip started in early January.  I was working on an extended project for a client in Santa Clara, CA.  We flew into San Francisco and headed out to our new home for the month.  The project itself went well with the exception of the scope of the project significantly increasing (almost 60% over the original scope) and the forthcoming budgeting headaches…  I was there with a colleague and business partner for a little over a month.  In addition to our existing obligations, a new endeavour was born in Starbucks just outside of Chinatown, to be launched in the coming months.  From a sight-seeing/touristy perspective, we visited Napa Valley, Chinatown and Yosemite National Park.  There were a few smaller excursions, such as our night out in Santana Row, but overall, we were too busy working to get a lot of tourist-esque things accomplished.  Definitely grounds for a second trip though; I never even got to ride a trolley through San Fran!  Oh well, I at least sat on top of Lombard St…  The food on the trip was decent; the highlight of which was our dinner at Alexander’s Steakhouse.  Very pricey ($100/ea) but plainly put, tasty cuisine!  This was also my first experience with Wagyu beef.  My jaw hit the floor seeing a $250 steak on the menu but I was perfectly A-OK with my $50 Bone-In New York.  Overall, definitely not a place I’d ever plan on living (I really didn’t enjoy Santa Clara) but definitely worth a trip to go be a tourist sometime soon!

My next trip was to the GORGEOUS Broomfield, CO…  I absolutely loved it where we stayed.  Very classy area and a large variety of entertainment, shopping and food!  The scenery was exactly what you think of when you think of flatland just outside of the mountains.  Trees, rolling hills, mountain skyline and a little bit of snow to accentuate the snow-capped mountains in the distance - it was beautiful.  Sadly, we were only here for a little over a week.  Originally the project was supposed to last for 2 or so but as usual we managed to wrap-up early.  I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed to leave.  I’ll definitely be visiting Colorado again the first chance I get.  A lot of fruitful business discussions were had and groundwork began for my next project.

The third trip of the year was to Columbus, OH…  Ohio was actually not bad.  My past experience with Ohio was less than memorable - cold, drab and ugly weather in Mentor, OH working on a drive-thru kiosk for a major QSR client.  Columbus was much more enjoyable though.  Although we were only out here for a few days, it was a pretty good trip.  A little bit of business, a dabble of food and a night-time ride out through the surrounding country and overall I’d consider it a success.  It was defintiely a nice short get-away kind of project.  I’d be up for visiting Ohio again depending on the area, but it’s not on the top priority of places to go spend time…

My most recent and hopefully last for a little while began as a road trip.  Focused on development and growth opportunities for one of my primary business ventures, we left about 9am Monday the 24th of March and began our 9 hour drive up to Rockville, MD.  The drive was actually very enjoyable!  My business partner and I both agreed it felt like a college road trip, complete with low-budget hotels and coolers for snacks, drinks and meals along the way.  Great music, beautiful scenery, good company and fantastic business development dialog made the drive go by extremely quickly.  I spent a lot of time on my laptop working on the latest web-design project I’ve got underway.  It’s coming along well - should be unveiled in the next week or so!  The evening we arrived in Maryland we went to dinner at a place out in Washington DC by the river and enjoyed a decent meal.  The view and company were better than the meal, definitely not worth the cost of the meal but the developmental dialog over dinner made it well worth it.  You seldom go wrong with a nice dinner with executives and friends.  After dinner and during our endeavours to find a hotel, I managed to fry (Yes, completely) every cigarette lighter in my business partners car.  There went 2 fuses and my power inverter.  My laptop was drawing more power than the AC inverter could handle and it overheated, shorted and fried the fuses.  Tuesday morning consisted of a quick breakfast and some electrical repair and - most importantly - a new AC inverter!  Anyway, more meetings transpired the next day; all good stuff!  Finally we made our way Tuesday evening to Philadelphia, PA.  Philly was a whole different ballgame.  The mere task of finding a hotel was an ordeal but thanks to my handy-dandy Google, travel websites and GPS we managed to find one…  The next day consisted of more meetings (yay!) and finally my flight back to Atlanta…

Finally returning to Atlanta and knowing I’m going to be in-town for awhile was quite a satisfying feeling actually.  Sadly, what I expected to be a few relaxing days upon my return turned into 2 full days of a filthy & hectic project out in Covington.  We had to perform an audit on a heavy machinery warehouse, only about 1/5 of the total warehouse from a square foot perspective but it was a significant portion of their bulk assembly components.  Either way, that was the filthiest I’ve been in a long time - but it was a great stress reliever…

So, here I sit, on the heels of April Fool’s Day and I’m finishing my winding down period after a few long months of travel…  Now it’s time to begin the ramp-up for growth and revenue generation opportunities over the coming months.  Here we go again…

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