RVE 173: How Eric & Tami Bought a Business and Grew It 16X While Traveling Full-Time

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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 RV.

This podcast episode is pulled from Eric & Tami’s talk at our 2019 RV Entrepreneur Summit. The RV Entrepreneur Summit is our annual business conference designed specifically for RVers.

My favorite part of this talk is when Eric shares the two definitions of entrepreneurs. The real definition:

entrepreneur: a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.

And the definition too many of us—myself included—tend to fall into:

entrepreneur: a person so highly talented that he or she must perform every function in the business in order to save it from complete failure.

There are a lot of great stories and lessons in this episode. A few of the major things Eric and Tami share are:

• Where and how to buy an existing business
• The transition of ownership when you buy an existing business
• How Eric handled their very first customer support call
• The exact numbers it took to buy and hit the ground running with TechnoRV
• Their first year’s revenue numbers (and how that wasn’t going to be nearly enough)

Plus, they dive into the 8 biggest lessons they have learned as they’ve run TechnoRV:

1. Know who you are as a business
2. Money is just a tool in business
3. Ground game is worth it (AKA it’s all about relationships)
4. Accept version #1
5. Cash flow is king – not revenue
6. You can’t afford to do it all yourself
7. Don’t be afraid to ask (after you’ve built the relationship)
8. You are not as smart as you may think

This was one of our favorite talks from last year’s RVE Summit and I think you’ll enjoy it too. For more information about the RV Entrepreneur Summit + information on RVE 2020, check out theRVentrepreneur.com.

Want to see all of Eric & Tami’s slides for their presentation? You can watch this talk below:

Links mentioned in this episode:

• The RV Entrepreneur Summit
• Empire Flippers
• Techno RV
• Techno Trucker