How and Why We Work on the Road

Sonja here and I thought I would write a post about why we have decided to live and work in a motor home with half the 296 square foot living space customized to an office.  One reason is because I have always had wanderlust running through my veins.

At 6 years old I saved up my pocket money, bought a ticket on a train (I am English), and ended up three stations away wandering around downtown, by myself.

It never occurred to me that I was too young, it was a place I wanted to go so go there I did. I wasn’t scared, on the contrary, I was excited and amazed at all there was to see. That feeling has never left me.

I have traveled the world for work and pleasure and never tire of either the process of traveling or what I see when I get there.

Different cultures amaze me, the way people live in different countries amazes me, the food amazes me. I want to try it all. I have been lucky enough to live on three continents and visit 30 countries but there are so many more to see and visit!

Life Can Try to Stop You

However, we now own our own company, and jetting or backpacking off around the world has to go on hold for now. When you have staff, you have responsibilities. These people rely on us for their jobs, to support their families, and to make a living. Not giving our all to our company would not be fair to them, ourselves, or our clients.

There have still been opportunities to travel though, we have flown and driven many miles over the years visiting our clients and going to conferences. While that has been a lot of fun if not tiring at times, you begin to ask yourself if there is an easier way.

I always thought buying an RV and traveling this wonderful adopted country of ours would be a fantastic thing to do once we retired. But the more I thought about it the more an idea formed.

Instead of flying all over the country and having to put the cats in a cattery (which they hate, they stop eating) why not drive all around the country and take the cats with us.

We had been taking an annual driving trip from Utah to California and sometimes Texas every year since we started the company and are usually gone for 2 or 3 months in order to attend conferences and visit with our clients.

We always took extra screens and a ton of other tech so we could keep working and hauling that stuff in and out of the car and into hotels rooms was really beginning to get tiresome.

Once we got the cats, being away for that length of time was out of the question. The longest we could be away was for a few days to attend a conference, hence the better an RV was beginning to sound.

Why Do We Need To Visit Our Clients?

This is a good question. I am sure most marketing companies don’t send their employees all over the country to see their clients but what we do is quite unique. While we do the obvious stuff, build websites, SEO, graphics, etc. what we excel at is digital content marketing. This means creating content based on what our clients do for their customers.

For instance, we have a client who specializes in spray foam insulation, he insulates schools, homes, wine cellars, factories, anywhere that needs really good insulation against cold and heat. But how do you let the general public know all about what he does?

Well for us, this means going to see him in California where he runs his business, interviewing him and his customers, videoing and taking pictures of them, finding out everything we can about what he does, how he does it, how it helps his customers. Then using all of that to create unique and interesting content that will get their website ranked.

We can spend days with just one client visiting their customers, videoing the client and their team working, then weeks editing, refining, writing, creating web pages with that content. And we want to do this with all our clients.

We have clients from California to Chicago, Vancouver to Miami. How do you visit them all without being away from home for months on end? Take your home with you!!!

We Bought a Motor home!

We spent a lot of time and effort ripping out half the living area and adding customized desks and tech cabinets, WiFi and cell phone receivers and boosters, scanner, and printer as you can see by the picture above. Everything needed to run a company on the road.

On our first real trip out we decided to just do 6 months to make sure we could live and work together 24/7 without killing each other. And guess what? It worked!

We have a lot of staff in Utah and in the Philippines and keeping in touch with them as well as our clients is paramount.

With careful application of the technology available today we can do weekly conferences and video meetings with clients and staff, upload the edited videos, create web pages, anything you would do in a stix n brix office, we can do on the road.

We Spent That First 6 Months at Conferences and Seeing Clients Everywhere from California to Texas

Some of these clients we had never seen before face to face so it really helped to strengthen that client relationship. Plus, they thought us being able to video and take pictures of the work they do an amazing bonus.

Having this lifestyle has not been without its challenges, which if you’ve read any of my other blog posts over at   My Weird and Wacky Life you’ll be very aware of the problems that can arise.

On the whole, though I must say we have been able to work in some absolutely amazing places.

Right now, we are parked in a very small campground in the middle of the desert with the most amazing rock formations.

At the end of each day I get to walk and hike all around and through them, sit in front of a real fire, watch the stars overhead, if I am lucky I will even get to see the International Space Station go over.

I also know that in a week or two my destination will change as will my view.

The work goes on, my company continues to grow, we continue to hire more staff and get more clients, all the while I get to fulfill my wanderlust and see this wonderful country up close and personal.

I Love this Life! – Small House, Huge Backyard…