The whole idea of starting our own business came about while Stacia and I were taking our daily walks. During this time, the housing market was way up and people were buying and selling houses like they were trading collectible cards. Stacia and I would talk about a lot of things, but one of the topics was using the equity in our house to do something constructive. My thought was to sell our house for a good profit, move to a place where housing was cheaper and then use the money to start our own business. Then once we got the business going and it was profitable, we would be able to get into another house and I would be good to go with something that I would enjoy. (At this time, I was getting REALLY burned out on my computer career)
Later on I was talking to my friend Alan Braithwaite about a neighbor of his that had opened his own business that took items from people and listed them on e-Bay for a “small” surcharge. It turns out that it was a franchise called QuikDrop. So, following up on our previous conversations about starting our own business, we put our house on the market and started looking into QuikDrop. It seemed like a pretty nice business, because you could provide a service to people and wouldn’t really have to own an inventory. QuikDrop had a competing company called I-Sold-It that had a similar business model. I-Sold-It seemed to be better managed than QuikDrop, but we wanted to move to Idaho Falls and there was already an I-Sold-It going into Idaho Falls. So, we preceded to move forward with QuikDrop. We got a copy of the franchise agreement and met with the area manager. After meeting with him and getting the warm fuzzies on how well he was doing, I got a warning from my friend Alan that his neighbor was about to go out of business. It turns out that both of the QuikDrop stores in the Boise area went out of business at roughly the same time. Needless to say, we were a little “dis-en-franchised” 🙂 We told QuikDrop where they could put their franchise.
A couple of weeks later, I had almost given up on the idea but was looking at other available franchises. I stumbled upon HobbyTown USA. I always figured it was just a local store! I really liked the store, even though the merchandise seemed a little bit pricey. Well, I got looking into it and found out that we could actually afford to buy a franchise if we could manage to get our house sold. I’ve wanted to own a hobby store since I was in the Air Force back in the late ’80s so I figured it was a pretty good fit.