I know it is a cliché… but time really does seem to fly when you’re having fun. Twila and I have been so blessed to work at things we love over the years. First, just our normal jobs, working for some great companies, were very rewarding and educational. Then, as we slowly started our own little company and it began to grow, it was never like work. We worked with such great clients like Ford’s Furniture, Shop at Home Carpets, MidSouth Lumber, Professional Tax and many others that it was more fun than work. I will admit, managing our rental properties was never really our thing. Those were sort of like they say about buying a boat… the two happiest days are when you buy it and when you sell it. That’s how we were with our rentals. We were lucky enough to buy and sell at just the right times.
One of the largest professional blessings in our lives was when we adopted SOKY Happenings. When Twila and I first looked at buying the magazine, there were three things on our mind… we had both spent years in publishing and we missed it, SOKY would be a perfect match for our advertising agency/graphic design business and it would give us a chance to give back to the community we loved.
SOKY started 16 years ago, June 2007, with an idea and some hard work from founders Carrie and David Francis. They did a great job getting the magazine established as the go-to source for area events. It was not uncommon to see a childseat and a copy of SOKY in the back seat of many moms’ cars as they depended on the comprehensive calendar of events to find things to do for their entire family. And that has not changed, as we still publish a monthly calendar of hundreds of area events.
When Twila and I adopted SOKY in March of 2012 we had two major goals in mind… to continue the events calendar and to make SOKY Happenings the voices of Southcentral Kentucky. We wanted to give small businesses and non-profit organizations an inexpensive way to share their messages. Let’s face it… our friends in TV, radio and newspapers do a great job, but to be effective with them you need a pretty decent-sized budget. With SOKY, we wanted the folks with a small budget to have a chance to reach the area consumers in an effective and cost efficient way. And I’m proud to say, we have accomplished that.
When a sponsor invests in an ad in SOKY, they often have the opportunity to write an article and share some pictures to tell even more of their story than can be included in an ad. And we have always insisted that nothing negative makes it into SOKY. Articles in SOKY Happenings are required to be enlightening, entertaining and enriching. That’s not always been easy and we have, at times, had to walk away from a sponsor who insisted on being negative about a competitor or some other element of their business. But, as they say, that’s life and we were happy to do it to protect the positive stance of SOKY and the publishing environment that all our sponsors depend on and our readers look forward to. I know I have had to quit watching and listening to news programming because it is so negative and depressing. Thanks, guys, but I can depress myself without your help.
But, I digress. I say all this to say SOKY Happenings turns 16 this month and while, thank God, I don’t have to go through it learning to drive as Twila and I did with Jarrod, we will look forward to it driving more folks to area small businesses and events in the coming years and hope you will continue to read the magazine, enjoy the calendar of events and help us continue to make Southcentral Kentucky the best place in the world to live, work and play.
Happy Birthday, SOKY Happenings!