A California Roadtrip: Tips for Working While Traveling

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Today's episode comes to you from the road. As eCommerce entrepreneurs, flexibility is one of the biggest perks of the job. But how easy is it to pack up the family into an RV and head south while trying to stay on top of your business? Hop into the passenger seat as we dive into what it takes to hit the road, spend time with family and turn an RV into a mobile office. Today, I share my personal experience on the road, away from Montana, while trying to get meaningful work done, as well as the biggest lessons I've learned from this incredible experience. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com) Andrew: When I sat down in January to plan out my year, one of the first things to make the list was not to be in Montana on March 15th. It's a great state but the springs can be a little cold and miserable, and so our family decided to get out of town and spend a month in Morro Bay, California. Today on the eCommerceFuel podcast, I want to take you along on that road trip for a number of reasons. I want to take you down to our eCommerceFuel meet-up that we had in southern California, take you inside the recently Shopify Unite conference that I went to and give you some of the takeaways from there and some of the please I met, but ultimately I want to answer the question: can you get real meaningful work done on your business from the road, even if you have a family in tow? Let's find out. Hitting the Road in the VW Van Andrew: We decided to drive down and the vehicle for the trip is my 1990 VW van. You may have heard me mention it before. It's a little house on wheels I bought probably for like a quarter-life crisis when we had our second daughter and I was convinced that we'd never leave home again. But a vehicle I've always loved. It's a little van that seats four people. It sleeps four people with a couple of beds. It's got a fridge, stove, sink, a couple tables, a heater to stay warm at night, and a sliding door that sounds like a guillotine from the French Revolution. The drive from Bozeman to Morro Bay was almost 1,300 miles, which is really equivalent to 10,000 miles if you're traveling with kids, as anyone with kids will know. You've got bathroom breaks and other miscellaneous stop required every 20 miles. And in a van, you try to stick to the side roads because the interstate just isn't that fun. The van's already noisy. You usually max out at about 65 miles per hour or 50 miles per hour if you're going up hills. So on the interstate when people are screaming by you, it's not that fun. So we slated five days to travel down. We stayed with friends the first night and camped in Utah, Nevada, and California the next three nights. And I think my first lesson takeaway from being on the road is that you've got to have a core team in place for the times that you aren't going to be able to work operationally. I can't imagine trying to get away. We were camping, which is a little bit tougher, no cell service, but even just in transit, driving and airports, it's really hard to meaningfully run the operations of your business. So lesson number one, if you want to do this kind of thing, you've got to have a core team in place, which I've been blessed to be able to have some great people come on board that I can trust. Getting close to California, we of course had to go through Nevada which beautiful but incredibly lonely place. We went hundreds of miles sometimes without seeing really any other meaningful signs of civilization. Fortunately, we had DJ Claire to get us through some of those lonely stretches of road. Claire: [club music] Andrew: What do you think about the desert out here? Claire: I love the desert. Andrew: Should we camp out here like gypsies forever? Or should we go to the beach? Claire: Go see the beach. Andrew: All right.