This was a very big weekend for the team. First of all, we had a birthday to celebrate and family dinners back-to-back. It is always good to see family and friends, and the long-weekend migration of kids from afar meant lots of time to catch up. The weather here turned brutal Saturday after a week of what could be described as “almost Spring like” weather. We are currently under about an inch of snow which is still falling, and this next week looks to be not much better weather wise. Cold, windy, with snow turning to rain. Surely someone will comment that it’ll be “good for the grass and flowers”, but we’d rather just see sun.
The weather made it a good weekend to work indoors. We have spent the better part of this weekend in deep planning mode. This means building business plans, sample charter itineraries and menus, while determining what activities we want to offer to our possible guests. Research is often tough to find if you’re not onsite, but we feel we’ve got enough local knowledge to get close for our first pass. Needless to say, lots of spreadsheets and documents, lots of internet research and lookups, and reading…lots of reading. Of course, part of this is still just theoretical given we don’t have a platform to launch yet, however this is a good sizing and complexity effort to focus on what really will make a charter a “premier” experience.
Also this weekend a lot of work has gone into the website. This will likely be the first impression, the initial engagement mechanism, and the ongoing relationship tool for our company. We expect to be able to post many of the adventures and pictures/videos our charter guests undertake; both for their own use and our benefit. With so many social media platform options, it’s tough to narrow down and we’ve considered a few like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Vimeo, YouTube as the big ones. A greater ultimate reach is likely best, however one could run ragged trying to manage all these platforms and the return on investment may not play out as much as what we’ll call “old school networking”.
Fortunately we’ve decided on only a couple services to engage with to start and continue to build out as needed with our own web platform which is quite extensible. All technical aspects are now in order and filling out the content is up next – always a big job to get site pre-populated with all the necessary and informative writing. After that we’ll need to tackle the branding and graphics which will need some much needed attention – it’s pretty bad right now and my good friend and fantastic artist Rawbie will make this sucker professional in no time.
That’s all for now, and thanks for reading.