Meet Mike Moore

We recently connected with Mike Moore and have shared our conversation below.

Mike, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

I think I found my purpose from refining my interests in life and seeing how my professional life and my personal life could somehow work in harmony to create a mutually beneficial path forward – if that makes sense. I have worked many jobs over the years but I was always doing something as a service. I started working with primary age kids when I was in high school. They let me come over and work with 1st graders for an hour out of the day. After I got my college degree I wanted to travel and see the world, but when I came home I knew I had to find something that interested me. I found my way through many jobs in the service industry before coming back into working with kids. I got my master’s degree while I was starting a family and went into elementary teaching and have kept at that for over 10 years now. I always had ideas floating around to pursue other things and with the business I started it just kind of came about as we found it harder and harder to buy gifts for kids as they got older that they would be interested in. It seemed like going somewhere and doing something with kids always got better results. That’s where the experience-based gift card platform started – with that idea to get kids out exploring what they are in to. I have always been an explorer. I explored the woods surrounding my home in Virginia growing up. When I came to Colorado I collected maps and went on adventures whenever I could to discover new places that interested me. Now, with teaching full-time, I have weekends and holidays and summers free to explore our beautiful surroundings. I think that my purpose came together in a very organic way as I am passionate about serving kids, their families, and their interests.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

My focus is to build this business into something of a household name. First, here in Colorado. And next, the sky is the limit! I want people to recognize the Go Explore Gift Card brand and partner with a wide variety of small businesses in Colorado and beyond to help promote what they do for kids and families while their partnership adds value to what we do as well. I want kids and their parents in all cities and towns across Colorado to use our website as a means of finding creative, active, and inspiring experiences where they can explore classes, tours, and other fun things to do. We want kids to find their passions and explore their own interests.

Right now we need all the help we can get. We are a family-run and family-oriented company that needs help spreading the word about what we do and why we are a simple, easy to use, gift platform for parents, grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, and friends of kids who need gift ideas for birthdays, holidays, and other special occasions. A lot of folks resort to buying Target and Amazon gift cards for kids – and those are great in a lot of ways, but we made our gift cards easy to use and check your value remaining and spend that remaining amount on great experiences and make lasting memories. Everyone I know who learns about what we do love the idea – but now we need your help spreading the word. The holidays are coming up – are we going to keep supporting billionaires, or do we want to support our local Colorado small businesses?

Follow our Facebook or Instagram pages to learn about upcoming giveaways. We are giving away $150 in gift cards each month to those who simply follow our page, or comment on a post, or sign up for our newsletter on our website. It’s really that simple! We want to put gift cards into your hands and have you use them with our amazing partnering businesses so that you can enjoy yourself and will want to share that joy with a young person that you know.

We will also be at a number of holiday events coming up. There you’ll be able to get physical gift cards as opposed to the digital ones sold on our website. These cards make great stocking stuffers for kids and teens.

We hope to see you out there exploring all of the amazing opportunities Colorado and Go Explore Gift Cards has to offer!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1. Don’t Give Up On Your Dreams – somewhere along the way I wanted to make movies and travel the world for a living. I never moved to Hollywood or went to film school, but I do enjoy making a travel documentary of my summer vacation photos. I may not have achieved the ultimate dream, but my persistence got me to a point where I have modified my expectations and live a fulfilling life knowing that in a way I really am seeing my dreams play out when I stop and think about it.

2. Don’t Be Afraid of Failure – I feel like a failure multiple times in a day. When that adds up to the amount of times in a week or month or a year, it’s overwhelming. I have taken many a sales position where my income is dependent on my work ethic. It’s hard to fail in a spot like that. But it makes you more persistent, adapting to failure and moving on in spite of all obstacles. I see similar obstacles all the time with starting a business. All good things take time and effort.

3. Patience is Key – Patience has served me so well in life and I see that skill with young kids is going away. With the immediacy of everything and what consuming fast-paced media has done to young brains I wonder what the world might look like one day with impatient adults everywhere. I think it’s absolutely necessary to slow our brains down sometimes, put down the device, and to find comfort and waiting for something to happen. It’s rewards go far beyond that immediate moment.

How can folks who want to work with you connect?

Right now I am busy calling small businesses to talk with business owners or someone in their marketing department to share what we are all about and to see if they might want to partner with us. We offer no charge to businesses to advertise an offer with us. So for those businesses that have not had any redemptions of our gift cards yet, hang in there. But also, we are not charging them a cent. And in today’s world of advertising and marketing, that’s a valuable resource to have around in my opinion. Their partnership with us adds value to what do because we have a bigger variety of businesses for kids to choose from. So I want to promote their business and what they do as much as I can, free of charge, until I can bring someone in the door for them and hopefully make them a lifelong customer.

I have also been reaching out to Colorado influencers, especially the ones who promote what kids are doing, to see if they would be interested in a partnership where they help promote what we do on their channels.

I feel like there is a great network and community of entrepreneurs and marketing folks here in Colorado that I’d be interested in learning from at events and learning what works and how to spread the word as effectively as possible.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Photographer Credit: Lucy Moore

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