In 2015, I had my first child and new I wanted to create more freedom in my life. So, my husband and I decided it was a good time for me to explore starting my own business. He was retiring from his military career in just two short years and wanted to take a year off from working. So, I knew where I needed the business to be financially and by what deadline.

Remote work at this time was just beginning to be a trend with the development of certain platforms and technologies. It hadn’t taken the leap it certainly would during the Covid pandemic years. But, I really enjoyed working from home and loved building my own business. I still worked way more hours than I would like and even had some travel now because of out of state clients. But, I truly loved what I was building and we were growing closer to the retirement deadline. Even at this time, I started the transition into building a schedule that worked for me and my family. You can see that post here…

As we headed towards the big R-Day (retirement), my husband and I were approached with a business proposition to start a company with two other people, which the two of us would run and operate together. So in 2017, after talking it through, we decided to take the plunge and give it a try. We grew that company into a multi-million dollar enterprise over the next six years, despite a global pandemic that shut down our target customer (retailers). I closed my first business to go full-time in this new venture after just six months.. And as any entrepreneur knows, the hats you wear are many in the beginning.

It was a six year roller coaster and in 2021, as we found ourselves coming out of the uncertainty caused by Covid, my husband and I decided we couldn’t face the risks of having all of our eggs in one basket any longer, not while our now two kids were so young. So, it was decided I would transition out and find a new job with an outside employer. Remote work was now growing, especially in the accounting world. So, finding work wasn’t too difficult and pretty soon I’d landed a job with a company called Nimbl.

We trudged through the next couple of years and got back to rapid expansion and growth at PPS, the company we’d founded in 2017. But, it wasn’t the same for me or for my husband. We actually enjoy working together, but we’d never really had a passion for the loss prevention industry and it just wasn’t fun anymore. Following a conference I attended in early 2022, I came home and opened a discussion with him around what he wanted to do and setting more intention in our lives. It was at this time we decided we wanted to fully offboard ourselves from PPS.

We first opened the discussion with our partners to see if they wanted to take over and run the company, buying us out from our shares. They didn’t really have an interest in doing this and we did have a full team of employees to consider. So, we started exploring the opportunity to sell and eventually one presented itself. After many long, painstaking months of due diligence, we finally signed the closing paperwork on May 10, 2023. My husband had a one year employment contract with the buyer and the agreement was he would work himself out of the next year.

Faced with finally having his year off, we were staring down a barrel of the discovery around next steps in our lives. We’d recently found a passion for RV’ing and were already talking about homeschooling our kids, as we both had found we didn’t love the public school life and schedule. (You can find more on that in The Education of 2C’s series). Then one morning, as I sat reading in the early hours, it just dawned on me – why didn’t we go full-time in our RV for a couple of years and explore the U.S.? When my husband woke up, I sprung it on him just like that ‘Why don’t we just go full-time in our RV for a couple of years?’ and thus, the great idea was born.

The next year was a whirlwind of planning and discovery, but now we are set to embark on this great adventure in just a few short weeks. Our house is nearly empty and our camper nearly packed. The first couple of months is fully planned, with the next 18 months half-baked. So, here we are heading out on the adventure of a lifetime…

Also – check out my husband’s view of our adventure at 4C’s in an RV, where he talks about the actual RV’ing part of our journey.