For two years, yeah. Was it easy going from a small salary ’cause you obviously built the facility where you were dealing with six figures or more. Was it hard to do that or it just- It just evolves. It’s evolved. This is like growing up. I mean, every day… Read More
What kind of disappointments were there in these beginning times?… Read More
So, your income was coming from a couple of sources through your four?… Read More
For operations, yeah. Memberships, gift shop, admissions, classes. Read More
How were memberships received?… Read More
Pretty well. I mean, it was slow slogging. I mean, we started the first year we had 70 members or something like that and every year it would grow a little bit, but it was tight. It was really tight, which is why for our first couple of years, there… Read More
And this is before, I mean, there was nobody out there at night. And I thought to myself, every IMAX I knew at that point was a money losing operation for somebody. So, I had those kinds of things, but ’cause I moved very slowly, and I tried not to… Read More
What kind of budget did you start with?… Read More
My first budget was 10 grand, and please don’t spend it less than, in 12 months, ’cause you were gonna run out of money in 12 months and that included my salary. And when I think by the time when I first sat down and had my first lunch with… Read More
And I’m going, “No.” And my board’s going, “Well, why not?… Read More
We have all this anchorage.” And so, I had a few incursions like that, that wanted to use the land for something else. Read More
IMAX came and thought they might wanna put an IMAX and did we want an IMAX on our property?… Read More
Did you have any, as you’re developing your master plan, was there any friction with the board or people who wanted to go in a different direction as you started to develop things?… Read More
There was hardly any friction about the plan. There was, because we had a lot of ground physically available to us and the community was just starting to grow around us, we had other organizations coming to us and asking our board can’t you lease us X amount of ground. Read More
I mean, that was my favorite one is I had a group of fairly wealthy people who decided they loved the lawn bowling and there was no place to do lawn bowling in the area and so, and we had all these acres, couldn’t we give them a couple of… Read More
And then I’d go talk to a couple of different board members about, do you think this is a good idea and would you help me fundraise for it?… Read More
And then once I got all the pieces in order, then we’d take it to the board and go, okay, on the master plan, this is the next thing, and Karen says it’s gonna cost us this, and we think we can get the money here and the board would… Read More
To this day you can be an owner/builder in California. You don’t have to have a general contractor. And so, I just learned to be an owner/builder. And so we could build stuff that a lot of people couldn’t have afforded if they’d just done it the traditional way, which… Read More
So, I could draw walls and I could draw landscape features and I could, because there was no structure to that. It had a little house for the coyote so the architect was, the pro bono architect, John, would draw that and we’d get a permit stamp from that. And… Read More
Did you have a master plan that you had to show them or that you wanted to show them?… Read More