Coming up with ideas comes naturally to us at Bush. We can’t turn our brains off and every day Nighean is thinking about design, Andrew is dreaming about code and of course I am coming up with entrepreneurial ways to take advantage of their talents.

As much as I enjoy working on other peoples brands and businesses it just does not compare to the freedom and excitement of working on an in-house project. Our latest in-house project even has the word house in it: House Cow. Last week I was working hard at the urging of our farm consultant Peter Learn from Nogo Farms in Restoule Ontario to come up with a plan for marketing and selling cows for the Four Girl Dexter Stud (another in-house project). It came to me that the real special thing about our cows is that that they are perfect “house cows”. I have only recently become familiar with the term house cow which has come up whenever I talk to people about our cows and how we milk them by hand an my wife Alison then processes our whole milk for our family and friends. Many people recall growing up doing the exact same thing on their family farms and they referred to the cow they milked as their house cow; as compared to the other cows on their farm that were there for meat and even milking on a larger scale.

When I come up with ideas for a business my mind goes into start up mode, and having started over a dozen businesses, it has had allot of practice. The first thing that usually comes to my mind in this digital age is a domain name linked to my idea. If you can’t own a place on the web for your idea your idea does not have much of a chance to come to fruition. As soon as house cow came to me I checked to see if it was available. Darn housecow.com gone. With the Gold gone I checked for the silver and bronze was able to register housecow.com.au and I have just registered housecow.ca.

It’s all fine and well to have a cool domain name but how do you make money from it. Well in this instance my original goal was to use this keyword rich domain name to publish useful information about milking cows for home use and then referencing our Dexter Stud website for people who wanted to have a go. Another thing that came to me was that the site could be sponsored and supported by products, services and organisations in related fields. In particular I we want to approach this great company who use milk to make some lovely products, including udder cream–www.moogoo.com.au

There are a few more angles to my home grown plan that we will share in time. Right now I need to write Andrew the first blog so he can be ready to launch our custom wordpress site and I better get Nighean a creative brief so she can come up with a unique wordpress design. Here is a sneak peak at an image I hope helps–meet Condamine our families first house cow who we bought for Christmas in 2008 along with 3 other Dexter cows.