Franchises, Networking and yelling at Visio

I have three things I want to talk about tonight, and they are numbered accordingly :)

1. I received an interesting invitation this week. A former boss of mine at a computer company I worked at happened to read my blog. He has sent me an invite to join him at an entrepreneurs group that he attends regularly. Now, finding like minded people in this quite un-industrious city of mine is easier said than done, so an opportunity to do a meet and greet and exchange some ideas with some people like myself is wonderful. As I am told, this group is comprised of other local business people and entrepreneurs of a wide range of ages and origins, and I am interested to see what kind of contacts I can make, and possibly mentors I can find. Hopefully I will get a chance to meet with this group soon, and have some interesting stuff to report back here.

2. In my previous post, I spoke about my quest to learn how to build web sites. So far, I am at the stage of constructing wire frames and have started to try my hand at production in Microsoft Visio. With the web tutorials I've found, the learning curve seems to be quite reasonable (even though I have had a few moments of wanting to throw my laptop at a wall) and I should have some structural plans for my real estate website completed soon. If I hadn't mentioned it before, the whole reason for learning web design is so that I can build a web site that centers around real estate. I don't plan on building the final site, but I would like to do all of the preparatory work leading up to the final coding and construction of the site.

3. Finally, I would like to talk about a whole new direction I might be going in soon, or at least investigating. I've been having conversations with a friend of mine who has built and sold two businesses. She has built, ran and sold one restaurant, and most recently, created a restaurant on paper, and sold it through a franchising company for a hefty sum. Now, I know I have a number of business aspirations, but it has always been one of my dreams to build and run a restaurant or lounge. Building a restaurant is a fairly serious undertaking, which is why the idea of creating one on paper is quite appealing. My thought is that I will create the business in it's entirety (menus, logos, website, business plan) on paper, and then do one of two things: see if it could potentially be sold by a franchising company, or, if the timing is right, possibly open it for real myself. Either way, it will be a good exercise in asset creation, so we'll see how it goes.

That's all for tonight.