The Rv Entrepreneur With Heath Padgett

When you're an entrepreneur, sometimes you have to do it all. Sales, marketing, IT, support—you'll wear every hat in a day. But as your business grows, you won't have time to do it all well. Once Heath hired Scarlett, he noticed an immediate improvement in customer experience. Support response times dropped, there were fewer support requests, and more resources to empower campgrounds to learn how to solve minor problems. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

Joel Holland bought Harvest Hosts in 2018 and in under two years he has grown it dramatically (I recommend going back to episode 157 before you listen to this one if you haven’t heard it). In this episode, we are diving into marketing strategies. When you buy or start a new company, it’s hard to know where you should focus your time and energy. For Joel, he spent a good portion of time spending thousands of dollars (willingly) testing marketing strategies to grow his customer base.

Alyssa here taking over the podcast for our fourth episode of the Start Up Series starring the one and only Heath Padgett (JK there are multiple Heath Padgetts according to Facebook, but mine is the coolest). So far we’ve covered product development, partnerships, and pricing. Now that we’ve got a product, a team, and a pricing model, it’s time to start selling. In this episode, we dive deep into sales and marketing strategies for Campground Booking.

"Pricing is hard." It's a sentence I've heard from many entrepreneurs including Heath. It's also a question you probably have before starting your first-ever business? How do you price your product? How do you price yourself? In today's podcast episode, there are so many nuggets of wisdom for Heath as he shares his own pricing mistakes. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

Last year right around the time we found out we were pregnant and trying to figure our lives out, Heath's partner decided to leave the company. It was a crazy stressful time for us made even worse by the fact that Campground Booking had an incomplete partnership agreement. In this episode, Heath dives into how the company structured a 3-way partnership agreement and why it was a terrible, terrible plan. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

In this first episode of the series, we're talking about product development. Softwares are massive, complicated products to build. Heath thought his experience as an RV would only help him build the best possible software for campground owners. But listening to RVers proved to be a mistake. This episode is filled with lessons on how to get feedback on your product so you can continue to improve it.

After dreaming of RV life for over 20 years, Jeff and Deb have been full-timing since 2015 working with big brands like Dometic. But the real story in this podcast is how they got there and how they took their previous experience—as a Walmart employee and a chiropractor—to create an awesome mobile business.

Mike made mistake after mistake with this rehab. There was a squatter living in the house who had to be paid to leave! They chose the cheapest contractor. They left the country during the renovation. No city permits were pulled for the renovation. They were robbed—twice. And then Hurricane Harvey hit. All the good contractors were snatched up and they were stuck living in a house with no heat or lights and a single electrical outlet.

Going onto grad school seemed like the next logical step for Nick and Hanna until one day Nick realized two things: He didn't really want to go into engineering People actually make money blogging That's when he got an idea: drop out of college and become a personal finance blogger. Together, Nick and Hanna created what is today called "Mapped Out Money", a blog and Youtube channel all about personal finance.

Jonathan runs FortySeven Media, a web design and development shop, and has traveled across the country with his family of four in an Airstream for more than four years. And while we talk a lot about Jonathan's business in this episode, what I loved most about our conversation was this idea of balance.

Josiah and his wife Ashley were ready to jump into real estate investment. They were meeting the right people, moved to an area with a great market—but then a mentor asked Josiah one question: "What value do you bring to a real estate deal?" This question gnawed at Josiah for weeks until he realized the honest answer. Nothing.  In this episode, we dive into how Josiah ended up building Investor Deal Room, a software solution for real estate investment deals.

Eight weeks after the birth of her daughter, Amber went back to her full-time job. Shortly after, her husband Chris was offered an executive chef position at a new restaurant. As you can expect with a new baby, this was really tough. So Amber quit her job to give freelance web development a chance. In this episode, we really dive into where that one decision has taken her family—from a Wordpress freelancer to running a marketing agency doing branding, SEO, design, and more. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

If you've ever tried to store your RV, you know that it's nearly impossible to find quality RV storage. Howard ran into the same issue—but instead of getting angry and calling a dozen more storage places begging for a parking spot (not that I've ever done that or anything), Howard came up with an idea: high-end storage for RVs. That's when RV Loft was born. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

Shooting weddings every weekend is emotionally and physically draining. And after years of being a professional photographer, Katie was looking for something that gave her a little more freedom. That's when a friend mentioned photo editing. Choose your own clients, work from anywhere—it's the perfect mobile business.

In the six years he's been running his remote account firm, Chad has read something like 18,000 resumes. So you could say he has a little bit of experience with hiring. Chad runs Live CA, a fully remote accounting firm in Canada that boasts over 60 employees. In this podcast episode—which is Chad's mainstage talk from our 2019 RV Entrepreneur Summit—Chad dives into the five stages in the hiring process. 1. Value 2. Hiring 3. Onboarding 4. Support 5. Offboarding --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message

When was the last time you took a moment to audit your life? After a few weeks of going all-in on full-time travel, Cyrus had an internal crisis. He wasn't working, he wasn't making money, and he was spending his days traveling aggressively—Something was off. What Cyrus learned was something that I've confronted myself in the past year. When you put your identity in one thing—your job or being a full-time RVer, for example—you end up feeling lost when that thing ends.

If you own an RV, chances are you've heard of RV Trader. I personally am on RV Trader every single day, since Alyssa and I are currently trying to figure out what RV we want to own next. So I probably account for 500K of the 18 million searches their website gets each month. This episode (which isn't sponsored by RV Trader by the way) is all about the RV buying experience and some really cool data RV Trader has collected about the process. If you nerd out about RVs like me, you'll love it.

Abby Holcombe recently won 4th place at the World Championships for Freestyle Kayaking, she is the youngest person to ever kayak the Grand Canyon, and she's been RVing full-time since she was 10 years old. Together with her parents, the Holcombe's spend over 300 days a year on the water doing what they love—kayaking. I wanted to bring Abby on the show to hear more of her story and everything she's accomplished BECAUSE her parents decided to uproot their life in Colorado in favor of life on the road.

After living and working in the Bay Area, the high cost of living and monotony of their work gave Ken and Ellisa the idea to hit the road. Ellisa’s bandmates were all moving on to different stages of life and Ken always had a love of music—together they decided to play shows across the country. Over 160 shows in a year!

In 2014, after their 3 kids had graduated from school, Eric and Tami quit their careers, sold the house, and bought their very first RV. It didn’t take them long to realize they didn’t want their RV life to end any time soon, so they had to find a way to afford it long-term. Less than one year after becoming RVers, they bought an e-commerce site, TechnoRV.com, and although they had no online business experience, they have successfully grown it 16 times over, all while traveling the country in their R --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rve/message