Job creation (for my kids)

As a natural consequence of  trying my best to lead an online marketing team as my day job, being generally interested in all things tech and just being a nice guy, I get asked quite often to help people with their websites.  Sometimes its simply taking a look and making some suggestions, other times they have nothing and want to get started.  I do most of the work without pay – but there is value exchange: I stay sharp on what is really needed to make a site work – design, infrastructure, content, advertising, search, social, etc.
This past Friday my family and I went to the opening of a new restaurant right down the road from where we live.  Those of you that have been to my house or no where I live know that we don’t have many restaurants nearby, so when I heard about this one opening I was pretty excited – and when I found out they were focusing on local foods, grass fed beef and from scratch cooking I knew it was something that I wanted to support.
How do these two stories fit together? You might have noticed from the link I included to the restaurant in the previous paragraph that the restaurant doesn’t have a website – their online presence is hosted solely on Facebook.  This is a fine place to start, but certainly doesn’t give you as many options long term to manage your brand as a well constructed and regularly updated website.   I want to help them out, but honestly I barely have time for the sites I am running now, much less one more…what to do?
It hit me yesterday that there is another opportunity lurking here: getting my kids some practical job experience.  I could get the site setup, but then I would let them run it.  The owners could contact them for content updates, reports, etc.  I could help them out on things they didn’t know how to do, but it would be theirs to run and make successful.  It would teach them the responsibility of working for someone on a project (different than the relationship you have with a teacher that gives you assignments) and would also give them a real resume item to point to – “I built this”.  It would give the restaurant some cheap resources to get off the ground.  And I would have another outlet to stay in touch with what was happening.  And grass fed beef hamburgers with lamb bacon only minutes from my house anytime I wanted them.  Sounds like win-win-win to me.
I contacted the owners yesterday and am not even sure that they will want me to help them with my site, much less have my kids be responsible for the updates under my supervision.  But even if they aren’t I think this idea has legs – surely there are some local businesses that need some help that would work with me on a project like this?


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *