Kid ventures

Like most young people, both my kids enjoy building and creating things, and they often enthusiastically pursue various entrepreneurial projects. In the last few months, they’ve each launched a website featuring very different things.

Dual Blade Games

With dualbladegames.com, my son Alex unveiled his first publicly available video game, Testing Cube. Testing Cube has been called* “the greatest and most exhilarating new game of the last decade.” Check it out and you’ll see why. Keyboard recommended. People have been generous with feedback and if you have any ideas for him, he would enjoy hearing them.

Rhea’s Recipes

S'mores on a stick

Rhea has been baking up a storm for the last year or two and recently decided to start blogging her favorite recipes. S’mores on a stick (above) is her most recent addition and she’s adding new ones all the time. Her meringues are my favorite so far. If you visited the Botanical Garden Lights this holiday season and parked in our neighborhood, you may have walked by Rhea’s dessert stand. If so, you might have been wise enough to buy some of her delectable meringues. The wee desserts were a huge hit, and have been called* “a dazzlingly timeless reinterpretation of a classic favorite.”

Firewood

Firewood delivery. He left his helmet at a customer's house.
He left his helmet at a customer’s house.

Alex still finds time to sell firewood to anyone in Ansley Park or Sherwood Forest. He buys it in bulk from a tree care company, splits down the big logs to a good size for fireplaces, and delivers loads one bundle at a time via his bicycle. Rhea has picked up his marketing torch; she spun up a firewood order form and any sales that come via that form earn her a commission. So if you are getting cold this winter and live nearby, you know what to do!

* Called by me.

Passing the torch

luna
Luna, my GuildQuality co-founder, keeping an eye on things

Yesterday, I shared this on the GuildQuality blog and thought it appropriate to also post it here.

Sixteen years after GuildQuality’s launch, a decade after Mark Miles joined us to help build and lead the business, a bit more than a year following our sale to Providence Equity (wherein GuildQuality became part of the EverCommerce platform), and exactly one year after bringing Best Pick Reports and their team into our fold, Mark and I are pleased to be handing over the torch of leadership…. Read the complete post.

Building a mountain lodge in Western North Carolina

Following the sale of GuildQuality, I’ve turned my attention to a handful of ventures that have been on my back burner for a long time.

The first new endeavor is the development of Big Ridge, a mountain club in Western North Carolina. Big Ridge will offer family and friends a simple and gracious home away from home, opportunities for convivial fellowship and quiet reflection, and a home base from which they can enjoy all the bucolic pleasures the mountains have to offer.

For those who are curious, here are a few answers to some obvious questions:

Who is Big Ridge for? Ultimately, there will be around forty owners. If you love the outdoors, time spent in front of a good fire, and the idea of a gracious and comfortable “summer camp”-type setting for families, it will probably be your sort of place.

What will be there? Pastures; woods; trails; a pool; a small lodge with a big kitchen, a dining hall, and a handful of hotel-style bedrooms upstairs; about five tiny two- and three-bedroom cottages; and two full-time caretakers. I expect we will also have gardens, bees, chickens, and more. And, of course, we’re surrounded by the North Carolina mountains and all of its delightful offerings. You might think of Big Ridge as a bigger version of the kind of place you’d like to have in the mountains, but with someone else taking care of everything.

Where is it? Big Ridge is in Glenville, NC about 2.5 hours from our house in Midtown Atlanta. It’s about thirty minutes from Highlands, NC, just outside of the wonderful mountain town of Cashiers, and up the mountain from Lake Glenville (the highest elevation lake East of the Rockies).

Where do things stand now? We’re interviewing general contractors and tightening up the architecture. We’ll soon be underway with construction documents. My plan is to break ground in the Fall, recruit the management team while construction is under way, and complete construction in late 2020.

Most of the work that’s happening right now is on paper and in meetings and not much is happening on the property itself: The apple trees are dormant, the woods are quiet, the grass in the pasture stopped growing in November, and Big Ridge is spending a decent amount of the winter blanketed in snow, with turkey, deer, and an occasional bear leaving tracks here and there.

How can I learn more? I’ll share more here from time to time and will share a good bit more at grahamdev.com. We’ll also host a proper unveiling in Atlanta in a few months. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your reactions and will happily answer any questions, so please reach out.

P.S. Here are some pictures of the property, along with a few videos. This one is my favorite (volume up).