RVE 81: Scaling a Remote Team with David Blackmon

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I’m recording today’s episode from Madison, Maine. Alyssa and I are wrapping up our last campground video of the summer for the Jellystone parks. This turned out to be a pretty aggressive schedule this summer. I’ve said it — I don’t know how many times on the podcast we talk about how we’re going to slow down our travels, yet here we are having high tailed it up the east coast this summer.

If you listen to the podcast on a regular schedule, you’ll notice that for the first time all year I didn’t publish a podcast episode on this past Tuesday. The month of July was kind of a crazy time for us. If you’re in our FB group or follow the blog, you may have seen Alyssa’s blog about what we’ve been struggling with—but a brief recap is that in the month of July we lost a family member (had to travel back to TX), had two MacBook computers break on the same day, started work with two new clients at the same time, and we were also in the middle of filming these 5 campground videos as we traveled up the coast.

If there’s one big thing I’m learning right now it’s that:

In many ways, growing a business means there will be a lot of factors that push you to give up your time + freedom and focus on the business.

For instance, two big clients coming on board last month, hiring Kelsey (our podcast editor) for a number of other projects so onboarding her to the team, and keeping up with our other commitments all have a way of adding more and more time to our work. This isn’t inherently a bad thing as business is growing and that’s good, but it also contradicts many of the reasons we chose this lifestyle, one reason being freedom.

The space we’re currently in is figuring out how to grow and scale our efforts, without having to give up all of that freedom. I wish there was an easy answer for how to do this (if you have one, let me know).”

I guess what I’m learning from this and if I could share any bit of helpful advice it would be:

• Figure out what kind of work/life/RV balance or blend you need on the road and do what feels right for YOUR Situation

I think the easy answer in this situation would be: figure out exactly how much money you need each month and only take that amount of work. While this sounds like a great answer, I’ve found that my number always changes. Plus, I don’t think I’d be happy making $2k per month and then playing the rest of my time away. I enjoy my time working, so my answer for this question is different and so will everyone else’s.

So I’m learning to listen to what feels right to me. In this moment, it feels like we’ve brought on a lot of work for this short period of time — but I’m also thinking how this situation is going to set us up for paying off the rest of our student debt this fall and accomplishing our next big dream of international travel. 

Update on RVE Summit!

RV Entrepreneur Summit 2018. We’re hosting our next RV Entrepreneur Summit in Fredericksburg, TX again from Feb 22-25. We already have several speakers lined up and we’re releasing early bird tickets on August 9th. If you want to be the first to get access to those, you can go to therventrepreneur.com and enter your email. The marketing guy in the back of my mind wants to really push you guys and tell you that tickets will go fast, but I honestly think they will. We already opened up tickets to our attendees from last year and had 50 folks snag tickets in the first couple of days. So I think we’ll have around 200 attendees this year.

Scaling your business:

Today on the podcast, I am bringing back a previous guest — David Blackmon from Aspen Grove Studios to talk about what he’s learned in the past year while doubling his team and reaching $500k in revenue in his WordPress theme and development company.

A few things we talk about on this episode:

• Growing your company and building a team
• Hiring employees and how to outsource tasks
• How being an entrepreneur gives you the freedom to pivot your plans
• Growing pains when expanding your company
• The difference between serving people vs. selling people

Links mentioned on this episode:

• Aspen Grove Studios
• David’s Twitter (Tweet him about the RV Entrepreneur WordPress theme project!)

Thanks for Listening!

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