Research Madness
When we got home it began. Pouring into all the resources that we could find pertaining to Christmas trees. We looked into joining Christmas tree growers associations. Planned where our Christmas tree lot would be. What events we could include to attract people to stop at our lot. Darinka is a kindergarten teacher, and has lots of ideas on this subject. She also
has the talent of being able to imagine the endless possibilities of customer experience and interaction. Me? Not so much.
I don’t have the vision of the customer “anything.” I can learn, but it doesn’t come naturally. But I can DO things. Anything within reason. So I set to work on researching how to DO Christmas trees. The logistics, the makes, the models, the growing time, the harvest time, the roads we would need to be shipping over to get our product out. How to get from point “A” to point “B.”
But soon it became painfully obvious that not only would we be harvesting trees in four feet of snow, but no one was growing christmas trees in Creede for a reason. You don’t really grow christmas trees in a place like Creede apparently. In fact, from what we could tell, we couldn’t find anyone with any kind of farming operation that looked like anything we knew about. Not even remotely.
It was beginning to look like our beloved Creede was not to be. But, we had caught the bug. We knew that we had to grow and produce something. We had to find a way to live a more agrarian life. But it probably wasn’t going to be in Creede, Colorado.
That was a tough one. To be honest, I still look up the weather in Creede. I look up pictures on the internet that people have taken while visiting there. Some crazy movies of these tiny train cars that they run on the old railroad tracks in the summertime.
Even growing trees elsewhere has fallen out of favor around our house. Darinka and I started to feel like we didn’t want to make our living on a luxury. I work in the film business now, and as a change of pace, I really want to make a product that people actually need. I know it sounds crazy. Why would anyone want to do that? When you could make “one hour episodics” about unlikable people doing each other wrong. Or “shoot ‘em ups.” Or one more show about murder and DNA, with impossible technological abilities to zoom in on low resolution images and magically pull out the tiniest details. I mean I’ll do it. The checks always clear, and I work with a lot of good friends. But if I am creating my own business I will do it differently.
We needed to find a new approach. But where?