It’s been too long !!   We have been RV nomads for nearly eight months now, and while we’re completely happy that we made this huge change in our lives, we also want to acknowledge that some aspects of the journey have been quite a challenge.  Namely, becoming RV nomad entrepreneurs and getting a couple of nomad businesses up and running from the ground up has consumed much more time than we anticipated.  And for that reason IT’S BEEN TOO LONG since we’ve posted any content. 

Let’s back up a bit and refresh our memories on why we decided to make this big change (more details on this at our earlier blog post HERE) and what our vision for being RV Nomad Entrepreneurs is.  In September 2017, we went to the Jackson Hole region of Wyoming for our 35^th wedding anniversary.  While this was one of our bucket list destinations and we expected to be Wowed, we did not expect the experience to completely alter our perception of what our life should be . . . but that’s what happened.  When we returned home, we put together a plan to transform our way of life with the overall goal of creating space for more exploring and experiencing.  After tons of research, we were inspired by a number of RV nomad entrepreneurs and decided that was the life for us.

We developed a business model with several complementary segments that required, facilitated, and/or benefited from nomadic travel (more details on our businesses HERE) and one of those segments is creating content for social media.  We are very grateful for all the content creators out there that showed us an alternative to the “normal” life path of climbing the career ladder and acquiring more and better stuff, and we want to share our story in hopes of providing similar inspiration to others.  That said, it’s been widely reported that generating revenue from content creation builds slowly over time, so we decided to pursue additional sources of travel-related revenue.  Having multiple sources of revenue that are aligned with our passion for travel makes a lot of business sense, improves our financial stability, and most importantly fulfills the mission of being able to explore and experience more!

In the past, we’ve always approached challenges by having a plan, working the plan, and adapting the plan as needed along the way, and the transition to becoming RV nomad entrepreneurs has been no different in that respect.  What’s been different with this transition is that it wasn’t just one aspect of life that changed, like building our first home ourselves OR getting our bachelors degrees in our 30s OR making career changes OR relocating to North Carolina in our 40s.  Even though we’ve experienced and initiated a lot of change over our lives, the scale of this change is really HUGE and impacts almost every aspect of daily life. This time we completely transformed our ENTIRE life at the same time — seeing our adult sons much less frequently, shifting from corporate careers to building new businesses, trading our comfortable home for RV life with no prior camping experience, learning how to operate an RV, and leaving our beloved social network for an unknown nomad community. 

The turbulence of this transition has been more intense than any other change we’ve made in the past, and we were juggling and adjusting to all those changes at the same time.  In any change journey, whether it’s a self-imposed journey or a change imposed upon us, there’s a period of chaos and volatility that occurs as you’re learning and making adjustments to get to the new reality.  This period of uncertainty can be very difficult and can trigger self-doubt — EVEN IF THE CHANGE IS THE RIGHT CHANGE.  When we set out to make changes in our life, we like to think that the path will move forward in an even and predictable way.  Most of the time, the reality is much messier.  It’s important to take a minute (or two or more) to consider the big picture and recognize the chaos for what it is . . . TEMPORARY and to be expected.   

We had kicked off our transition plan in early 2018, and as the year came to a close, we realized we had “completed” the tasks on that plan.  We took some time to reflect on the past year, assess the progress we made on our plan, take stock on lessons learned along the way, and visualize what we wanted the next couple of years to look like.  At that point we had made a solid start on content creation, but we recognized that the travel agency and mapping businesses needed some intense focus to be ready for taking on clients and get positioned for growth.   We decided to dedicate the first quarter of 2019 on those efforts and then determine how best to balance our efforts between content creation, the travel agency, and the mapping business. 

Going forward, we’ll be getting back to capturing and sharing our experiences along with growing the other two businesses.  We intend to have video and/or blog content posted 2-3 times per month which isn’t as frequent as many similar channels but is what we think we can sustain, and we’ll have more frequent postings on Facebook and Instagram.  The great thing is we really enjoy all three aspects of our RV nomad business model, we’ll be having new experiences and exploring new places, and are excited to see where it takes us. 

We have been very, very fortunate during this year with opportunities to collaborate on videos with other channels (check these out here and here), and we’ve gained many subscribers through these collaborations.  To everyone who has joined us so far, we want to say a huge THANK YOU!  We are looking forward to getting to know you and would love to here from you with feedback on our videos and what topics you’re interested in.  Please leave a comment below to say Hi and share your thoughts.

Until next time, we encourage you to think about . . . Where Do You Want to Go?