Lifestyles and Lifelines

I had to go back and re-read the last few blog posts just to make sure I was remembering our state of mind and emotional state correctly over the last few months.

It wasn’t all made up. I haven’t been remembering the details incorrectly and there was no build up or exaggeration.
It was however a complete whirlwind. It’s been such a blur of good, bad and every possible thing in between. It’s still not really settled and the answers aren’t all final, but it is safe to say we’re feeling settled, safe and mostly positive… all words that I couldn’t possibly have used to describe our psyches at many other points over the couple of months.

In the present, we still sit on anchor and waiting. Somewhat locked in space and time by both the pandemic and hurricane season. For world traveling nomads… our current circle feels pretty small. We’re simply waiting for the world to figure out how to deal with covid (though thrilled to be floating around an island that has done a great job of locking down and currently has ZERO cases) and also waiting for hurricane season to end in order to figure out what’s next on our little journey. I spend long days working. Most of them somewhere between 12 and 20 hours… but also (mostly) keeping the stress at bay by forcing myself to jump in the water to snorkel with whatever creatures are nearby… most recently a tiny brown striped octopus not far from the boat.

3-4 short months ago I was literally spending whatever wifi signal we could find and several sleepless nights reading up on bankruptcy law and trying to put together a plan for how to best handle the fact that our trajectory was certain doom, we were likely to lose everything and our best hope was (at the time) to try and save/hold onto one property and then figure out how we would try to start rebuilding our lives and our futures (again) from there.

Today however we feel optimistic and positive about the direction.
Today, the house we’ve had sitting on the market back home was scripted to close.
It has gone pending and has fallen through 3different times since listing it a few months ago (only days before covid). We were forced to drop the price 5 times for a total of over 150k (all money we clearly had already planned on for our future). Despite the drops in price we also still found ourselves having to carry out a lengthy list of repairs/upgrades on the 100+ year old house (with 10s of thousands of dollars we don’t current have) in order to have a chance at selling in this strange market.
And now… it seems like it was all worth it… as the new potential/prospective buyers prepare to make it their new home.

A few months ago this was the absolute last ditch lifeline that we needed.
We had no backup plan. Despite months of working and reworking the problem, the house selling was the only path we could see to our future not involving losing everything and starting completely over. Giving up this lifestyle on the water we have grown to love so much. Going back home and going back to work. Picking up all the pieces and starting over from scratch.

Yet somehow now, only months later we aren’t too stressed about whether it pushes back again or not.
That same sale all-important sale is now somehow is merely a transaction.
Some padding to make sure we can set ourselves up for greater success moving forward. A very welcome addition to our accounts and a very clear statement that we are in fact going to be okay.

A couple months ago we decided that we would be an active participant in our future rather than sitting and waiting to find out our fate based upon the fate of the house selling (or not) and it seems to have made all the difference in the world.

We got literally within a few short days of of deciding to point the boat north to return to the states, listing our beloved floating home for sale and heading home to do whatever it took to protect our investments and our lifestyle. But then we started having deeper discussions of what that might look like:
- Would we apply for jobs? That’s certainly not our style and 44million people had also just filed for unemployment. What made us think we’d go back and find a paying job amidst the pandemic?
- We discussed potential projects. In our history this has always been our go-to response when we needed money or needed to shore up our future. We looked at possible renovations or upgrades to eek more money out of our properties. Sadly, these types of projects usually require months if not years to see any financial reward and we currently had neither the cash to do them nor the time to wait (oh, and its hard to provide our usual “sweat equity” from a few thousand miles away).
- We could start a(nother) new business/side-hustle… but certainly nothing about the state of the world speaks to this being a good time to start something (unless you’re in the business of making masks or engineering vaccines).
More importantly… why would we start a new business when we already have a couple that we’ve been ignoring for the past few years? Shouldn’t we first be spending some energy resurrecting the businesses we’ve already worked so hard to build and launch rather than trying to conceive of or start something new?

We briefly looked at zenbox design. Yes, we could do some architectural design work from afar… but who is looking to spend money on renovations right now, much less to invite contractors into their home at this point?

We next turned our attention to ZENVANZ.
A few calls to our friend and stand-in business partner back home showed bleak hope. It’s obviously difficult to imagine a business that hasn’t paid you for a few years now suddenly becoming a financial lifeline when everyone around you is applying for small business loans just to keep the doors open during a pandemic.
We instead found ourselves discussing the reality of a terrifying June, and metrics for what it was going to take us to even survive and keep the doors open through the summer. We discussed what it would take to keep the shop open and keep our people employed (and/or healthy) and it didn’t look good. We hadn’t yet even put a business plan in place much less had any type of savings or stockpile for this type of emergency… I mean, I as the founder of the company, design and sales/marketing lead haven’t even seen a dime from the company since we left 18months ago.

The reality of the current list of scheduled clients was that we couldn’t make it through August even if we could successfully fulfill the handful of orders we currently had on the books. We had recently attempted a new hire. To bring on a friend/fabricator who has always done some fill in work for us even as far back as when Jen and I were building our personal van. It became clear we had to tell her this wasn’t the time for a new hire and we honestly weren’t sure we’d be able to keep our current employees. It hurt.
We love the fact that our business has been able to employ/support the same handful of creatives that we spent our time in the shop with back in the day. The same people that watched the evolution of us and our passion projects and with whom we shared drinks in the evening as we all talked about the unknowns ahead… long before any of the projects of that day would turn toward anything involving an actual business.

Making the business survive (much less turning it into our now much needed lifeline) wasn’t a great or promising outlook… but it did at least provide something to do rather than the waiting and stressing we had become accustomed to in the spring. We dove into the well-past due work of setting this business up in earnest. Of structuring a true partnership between us and the friend back home who had taken up the reigns in our absence to keep it chugging along with the occasional client as they came in (somehow despite us doing no marketing whatsoever). Working to clean up past bookkeeping and accounting in hopes of applying for our own SBA loan to keep our employees and keep the doors open longer than the lockdown. Putting things in place so that I could (assuming we could keep the business alive) finally/hopefully start getting paid as well.

I also went heads down on the marketing for the first time since we launched the business. We’ve never had a marketing plan or budget, apparently we only post to social media every couple of months and haven’t exactly been “available” for calls or lengthy discussions even as interested parties tried hard to reach out to us over the last year.
It’s truly amazing this business was even still alive (almost despite our running away and doing almost everything possible to kill it). I started updating the website to show some recent projects, starting making occasional social media posts and making some posts on forums related to van-building… I didn’t really think much of it would matter, but even a potential new client or two in the middle of this might just be the difference between success and failure (and frankly… a much needed answer to how to distract myself from current events/realities).

I suddenly found myself working long days again and exhausted at the end of every day as I looked up from the screen to realize I had just spent sunrise to sunset without ever even looking out at the ocean much less getting in the water. But over the next few weeks a very strange transition started to happen as well... We signed up a new DIY client who needed to move into their van as their new covid cost saving measure. Then came another who wanted to be able to take advantage of the time away from work and enjoy the outdoors as a family since the kids were already out of school. A couple weeks later we signed up a new client for a full/custom build so that she and her partner could travel and work remotely while also being available to go help a friend across the country battling illness.

Precious few times in life do you decide to pour your energy into a project and/or business and also get to have the pleasure/satisfaction of seeing almost immediate returns… but it actually seemed that the more time and energy I put in the more movement we started seeing happen immediately. Ironically, we would come to learn later that the same world events that were leading to our real estate and financial woes (and causing us to sit in lockdown/quarantine) were also conspiring to lift up the efforts of our business.

As spring moved into summer and the longer-term reality of covid sank in to many families (and as they began to understand that that summer vacations weren’t actually going to happen as flights were cancelled across the country)… more and more people started turning their attention to other forms of travel. Owning a campervan or RV suddenly seemed like the only rational answer to how to travel during covid. We would later come to read in a few articles about the phenomenon, the strange events surrounding the pandemic were leading to what the media has now coined the “COVID Camper Craze”. One of the articles (from the WSJ) actually called out ZENVANZ as “one of the safest ways to travel this summer”. The next few weeks for us were a complete blur. Our small business was only setup to take the occasional client and only recently even talked about what our actual production possibilities were or what our shop could allow, and now suddenly I found myself fielding multiple calls/email each day as people clamored to get into a van as soon as last week!

Let’s be very clear. We didn’t see this coming. None of us saw this coming… but if someone was lucky enough to have a lot full of completed campervans or RVs sitting out front, this was a very good time for them indeed. The articles say that sales across the industry leapt up 150%. For us it was a much larger leap than that. For us it meant that the small family run business who was used to being able to offer a 4-6week turnaround for everything we built, suddenly saw our schedules booking out for months on end almost overnight. At some point in mid-July it actually began to become clear as our schedules booked out past end of 2020… that we now weren’t just working to save our business from going under - working on the business was potentially going to save us from going under!

It was truly the perfect storm of eager prospective clients, my partner and I both already focused on and actively working to improve the structure and foundation of the business and both working our asses off to transform a small almost second thought of a side hustle into an actual profitable business. My new attention (and ironically being stuck in one place during lockdown) meant I could take over not only the sales/marketing (which Ive been doing since we left, but certainly not at a good or focused level between limited wifi and trying to teach ourselves to sail) but also the lengthy conversations with clients about design/layout/function of building their perfect adventurevan while he focused on scheduling, orders, subcontractors and hopefully the now much-past-due accounting.

Don’t get me wrong. Like everything else there are/were hurdles and lessons learned along the way.
Even now we still haven’t cleaned up all the bookkeeping that will allow us to formalize our partnership, which means I still haven’t gotten paid, but I have been working long days nonstop for the last few months trying to take maximum advantage of this rare set of events… It’s also become very clear (as things tend to do in the rear view mirror) that we are truly terrible at running a business.

Starting a business? Fine. We can do that, no problem.
Jen and I love the visioning stage. The creative energy of something new, the imagery and structure of a product launch and the naming and design of the business itself (especially when, like our businesses it’s truly just an offshoot of our own lives/lifestyle)…. but when it comes to making good decisions about business, the commitments required and day to day operations - we may just be the worst. It’s not only outside of our skillsets but we also simply have no desire whatsoever.

When we bought the boat only a month after a very successful launch of ZENVANZ, we literally offered the business to any friend/colleague/acquaintance we knew who was struggling at work and seemed like they needed another option. We knew there was great opportunity there but we also knew that we wanted to be elsewhere. We wanted to be out exploring or teaching ourselves to sail rather than working long days in the shop. It wasn’t easy. There was a ton of demand and excitement about the thing we just created... there seemed no doubt the business was well timed and hitting a niche in the market, but we also had promised ourselves years ago to make all our decisions for happiness over money… and if that meant that the business had to shut down than that was an unwanted but acceptable loss.

We offered to simply hand the keys (and the existing products/design/inventory and the long list of prospective clients) over to anyone willing and told them they could keep all the profits until the business proved itself and then they could eventually start paying some small portion to us as well.

We felt good about it. It meant we could leave without the stress of running a business and they might have the change agent they needed to make a shift that otherwise might not have been possible in their own life. 18months later, when we finally realize that our business has in fact been profitable, that we’re now working full-time again on it, but literally every check has and still does get cashed into someone else’s account while we are simultaneously discussing filing for bankruptcy??
These are not the notes of a successful entrepreneur!

I can’t tell you the number of conversations we’ve had with a dear boat friend (who also happens to have been a very successful businessman/manager/leader) about our business. Chats where I sit and watch his face as he tries to understand/comprehend how we could have been so stupid. To watch his grimmace as I describe the current status of our business and how our decisions to trust the best will happen have left us both vulnerable and exposed. To watch as he tried to find the words to even ask how we could be so completely out of touch as to literally hand over an entire business and profits to someone else with no control or benefit to ourselves. It was only in watching his very emotional reaction to our situation time after time that I truly began to see it for myself.
To understand the foolishness of what we had done and the very real chance for it to bite us as a result… but at the same time we continue to believe.

We still trust in Karma. We still work to right the ship as best we can, but to also trust that things will work out (as long as we continue to work for them). To trust in our relationship, the bond with our friend and partner back home and the mutual goals and good for where we are all heading together.

“But… didn’t you just get burnt by starting this business with friends?” he would ask… and rightfully so.
Yes. We did.
And even if things went south and the worst case scenario happened here, again, I can say with pretty high confidence that we would do it again. Because we choose to trust. We choose to love. We choose to believe that the universe will generally give back what you give to it and right now we are feeling pretty positive about all we’ve been giving and what it appears to be giving back.

I have long held this argument with Jen that her belief that “the universe provides” is in no way a plan.
Waiting for the universe to give what you need or to bail you out is simply foolish as a standalone venture. Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.

But… it’s also becoming harder and harder for me in this life to not admit that (after you’ve done the hard work to put yourself in a position and after you’ve fed years of positive energy out there into the universe) that it might just at least send a few opportunities your way. And those opportunities, as long as you’re present enough to recognize them, to reach out and grab them; and as long as you’re willing enough to to do the hard work, to spend the sleepless nights and the blood, sweat and the tears to work for them (even without any assurance that things will turn out okay or that there’s any reward at the end whatsoever)… that those opportunities might just provide.

They might just turn into the lifeline you needed all along.