Why Cleveland? Part II

Many people have asked us, why Cleveland? Do you have family there? Did you grow up there? What side of town? I will have tackled two of these in the last Blog (Why Cleveland? Part I).

Why Cleveland?
The funny thing about telling people that you are moving to Cleveland is that I get the same response. "Have you ever been there?" Haha! As if, "if you had ever been there you would never actually move ther ... especially from Austin Texas!" Yes, I know that there is like 300 days of cloud cover, yes a ton of industry has left the area, yes half of the people are on prosac. Funny story, I work with a guy whose sister lives in Ohio. I was joking with him about everyone being on prosac and he said yeah it must be true, my sister has been on it ever since she moved there. (Well I guess it really isn't a funny story is it) On the other side, the Cavs are a growing team, they are going to be amazing as they mature. I have always been an Indians Fan and The Browns have had enough great draft pics to hopefully grow into some success. The beaches are awesome, Cedar Point is Close, there is a sweet zoo, and the list goes on ... not to mention there are actually seasons there.

More importantly than any of that, we know that this is where God wants us to be. There is no other place that I would rather be than in his will. We had visited the area twice last year and there was a connection there that I couldn't quite explain. There is a different mentality there that you can't really explain, but it felt like me. I remember thinking, these are my kind of people ... I have been missing these. We could do the same exact thing somewhere else and even get some good results, but complete miss all that God wants to do. There is nothing like the eternal effect you can have when you are right in the exact spot where God has called you to be. Right in the right place and at the right time. He has already set things in motion and really beyhond that, we could really live anywhere in the world and be completely content, but Cleveland and the surrounding area is our place in the world!!

What side of town?
We took two trips to Ohio last year. The first trip was mostly exporatory. We found out that Cleveland and the surrounding areas have 76 suburbs!! Holy Frijoles man! We had no idea. We bought the annual suburb rating edition of Cleveland Magazine. It was great ... it gave a lot of tremendous info and stats. We drove to most of the suburbs and and got it narrowed down a little to about 5 to 6 locations. We really feel like eventually we will have Venue locations in all of those initial cities.

The second trip that we took was partially a vacation. I visited my church planting/fight promoting/tatooed/real estate/Stage Building/Marketing Guru friend in Slidell, LA (Rob Braniff). Then we went to Augusta where I had the honor of marrying off my sister (Laurie) and visiting some family. We then got to spend a couple of days in a condo at Myrtle Beach with my wifes parents, her 4 brothers and their families. Then our crew along with Tim and Marla (part of the church launch team) headed up to Ohio. After we dropped the kids off at Nana and Papas, we spent a couple of days in the Cleveland area. I was actually surprised, because I really wanted to be on the east side of the city, but the more time we spent there the more we realized that we were supposed to be on the west side. We really feel like Avon is the city where we will begin.

Anyway, I hope that helps get a little into our heads and answers some the questions.