Hi I’m Ali, co-founder of HeyTurlock. This is my little story about why Hilary and I decided to start HeyTurlock. Well, first a little background. We are long-time, 4th generation Turlockians, cousins, philanthropic, avid community event go’ers, regulars at the Turlock Certified Farmers Market, volunteers, foodies, moms – and we’re planners! As in…we find comfort in syncing our personal Google calendars, we’re not interested in last minute scrambles for childcare and we like to know what’s going on around town! Ahhhhhem, not to say that we can’t have last minute spontaneous fun, it’s just that these days our planning responsibilities require taking care of +2 and +3 people. However, we’ve decided to take planning a giant step further by starting HeyTurlock.
One summer day while volunteering on the Carnegie Centennial Committee, where we were helping to promote the remarkable Carnegie Arts Center and its 100 year history we were both flummoxed by the inability to select a date for an event that didn’t have an obvious conflict. We stumbled through our personal calendars, Googled the date a few times, sent a few text inquiries about other events and eventually settled on the best date we could, knowing there was a conflicting event taking place. Argh!
A few hours later the “aha!” lightbulb went off in my head and I quickly texted Hilary to see if she wanted to take on a big and meaningful project, utilizing her fabulous organizational skills that are NASA tested (yes, she worked at NASA). To my amazement, she said yes! I then proceeded to stay up until 1 a.m. writing the business plan (I have a baby so not that outlandish a feat), we worked out the particulars together, and then voila! three months later, we’re a licensed California business, have a new technology platform, have a great website, hired Kristin Bettencourt to help make it awesome, hired Max Hollinger to help with great photography, we have stickers, postcards, social media content, and over fifteen energetic and adventurous founding “HeyFave” members.
Our next goal is simple – to grow, spread the word and introduce HeyTurlock far and wide in our community. We love Turlock and we love HeyTurlock. We hope you love and use HeyTurlock as much as we will for our personal planning. Please share with friends, re-post, re-tweet and re-gram with reckless abandon. HeyTurlock is about our community – so let’s share the plan (and get our personal calendars in order)! Thank you for joining this journey!
-Ali Cox, Co-Founder