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Dream Job...all about us
Our DREAM JOB...Hi! I'm Craig...The Chief Editor and my wife...the inspiration behind Northwest Travel Tips and of course, not pictured, the entire staff that continues researching Northwest Travel Tips for you. The following summarizes our dream job. My wife and I have a passion for travel. We've had the fortunate opportunity to travel throughout 41 different countries and every state within the U.S. We simply love it. We later took our passion and opened a small tour company servicing the Pacific Northwest. Within 2 short years, the competition grew putting us in a challenging situation. At the same time our family was growing, my wife was pregnant and we had a three year old daughter already. Making Ends Meet... Making ends meet was quite the challenge, especially now that the competition was eating into our marketplace. We eventually had no alternative but to down-size the tour company and look for a job. My background was geology and environmental management. Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard to find a job. Within a couple of weeks of looking I had a job in the environmental industry (not my idea of a dream job). After I was hired I mentioned to my co-workers that I'd only work at the company for about six months. After-all, I had bigger dreams than to merely work a "job", I had a tour business to develop. Week after week I worked, each day thinking about the dream of independence and developing plans to escalate our tour business to newer and higher levels. Eventually the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years. Finally after 11 years in the environmental industry and with a family of four children, I decided enough was enough. If I was ever to fulfill my dream I had to do it now and take the plunge! I had to get out of the "job" syndrome. Mark Twains words were grinding at my heart, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor...Explore. Dream. Discover." Freedom... My wife was very supportive and understood the importance of following a dream. After-all, freedom is very important to us. Having the freedom to be involved with our kids while they're growing up is priceless. And, we found that merely working for money did not give us the freedom that we wanted. We wanted money to be the by-product of our work, work that we truly enjoy and can offer some benefits to others. Now with the hard part over, making the decision to quit my job, the door of opportunity opened wider than ever. I decided to turn in my resignation at the beginning of the year, kind of like making a new beginning. It was August, I had four months to get my act together. I must admit, I was a little nervous. I was use to getting a "pay check" every two weeks. My wife and I discussed in great length, business ideas, the tour company, etc. Then, out of the blue in November of 2002, we stumbled on a company offering websites and all of the information to build an effective site. We nearly shrugged it off, we knew next to nothing about creating a website let alone getting it listed in the top searches on the Internet. We reviewed our goals again and thought, perhaps the best option to continue in the travel business was to develop an online magazine about the Northwest. We new the subject very well and knew the fun we could have with it. However, we weren't quite sure how we were going to make money building a website about the Northwest. We Found It... We began our research into SiteBuild It. Our eyes began opening as we saw all of the possibilities we could do with a website, the freedom that a website could allow us. We could envision our dream job unfolding before our eyes. So we jumped into SiteBuild It at the end of 2002, quit my job in January of 2003 and never looked back. We were living our dream job and following the advice of Mark Twain, "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor...Explore. Dream. Discover." We began first developing a site about the Northwest, our home, Northwest Travel Tips. Here's the targeted traffic the site generated at its beginnings: December 2002 we had 1403 visitors, January 03 - 2622 visitors, February 03 - 3184, March 03 - 3728, April 03 - 5615, May 03- 7246 AND it KEEPS GROWING! What does that mean, targeted traffic coming to our site, money in our pockets yielding FREEDOM! January of 2005 we decided to expand our travel experiences to include the world, so we launched Luxury Romantic Vacations. And it's just that, all about romantic vacations. And of course, my wife is the romantic one, so we decided to combine Love & Travel together; therefore, launching another site Love Quotes For You. The tide for us has changed and there's no looking back, only forward to what the future holds as we continue to live our dream job. Occasionally I run into one of my old co-workers. They're amazed and say that we are "lucky". We don't think it was luck, oh perhaps stumbling on SiteBuild It was a little luck, but we took what SiteBuildit had to offer and simply implemented it. Anyone with a dream, desire and a few goals can do the same thing. Why?... We were asked why we chose to build a site about travel. It was very simple, we had an interest in it and we know the material. We have other interests too, like boating, hiking, scrapbooking, and cooking and have thought about building websites about those topics too. We'll see what we do as we continue to live our dream job. And I can truly say that we've found our dream job. It's so much fun, it's not even work! To us, FREEDOM is one of the top reasons why we chose to go into business. We found a "job" just wasn't able to give us the kind of freedom we wanted. Also, if we worked hard, we wanted that hard work to come back to us in our business and not building someone else's business. Whatever your dreams or passion are go for it! Don't pass up your dream job. We are now continuing working on our sites, a passion of ours, Love Quotes, Luxury Romantic Vacations and Northwest Travel Tips. Check them out and watch them develop and grow into some of the Top Sites on the Net. And meanwhile, don't just watch us, follow your dream...live your dream job, life is too short! Feel free to contact us about finding your dream job. Don't ever give up your dreams... Sincerely & to your dream job, Craig & Maria Dahl - Senior Editor
We're Senior Editors for Love Quotes For You, Luxury Romantic Vacations, & Northwest Travel Tips; we've brought the Best of both worlds together, Love & Travel.
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