Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Episode 30.
What inspired you to start your business?
David and Beth Pruett are survivors. They survived a flash flood that nearly swept away their home, as well as the Loma Prieta earthquake that shook the Northern California in 1989.
Their experiences, and the panic they saw others going through, encouraged David and Beth to never be caught unprepared again. “Our mission is simple, to share what we’ve learned and help others be ready for whatever may come their way. “
Hear the amazing story that lead the Pruetts to building their emergency preparedness business. Listen Now!
- Find out more about David, Beth and Amp-3: https://www.amp-3.net/
- Checkout David & Beth’s YouTube Channel Also: USNERDOC
Beat out your competition – EVEN if it’s Amazon.com: https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook
Full Transcript
Intro with David & Beth: So we lived four miles from the epicenter of the 1989 earthquake, so everybody calls it the San Francisco earthquake, it’s the Loma Prieta earthquake.
I was at work at the time and it was a little bit after five and it literally felt like a giant was outside the building, shaking the building as hard as he could. And we’d get earthquakes in California all the time, but at the time.
When they happened you were like, Oh it’s an earthquake, and it wasn’t a big deal and things would shake and that was it.
This was like a major jolt from that earthquake. Again, it was about a week of no power. It was more devastating than the flood because it affected so many more people.
And you felt it at nighttime when the sun went down, suddenly there were no lights in the buildings.
Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.
If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.
You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.
We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your Maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.
From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure life off the grid.
Brian: David and Beth Pruett, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcasts.
David & Beth: We are so excited to be here. Thank you Brian, for coming out to our ranch. We’re excited to share our life story with you.
Brian: Yeah, no, I can’t wait to hear it. We’re sitting out here on the deck of their mountain view ranch, right?
Beth: Yup.
Brian: It’s just a gorgeous day right now. There’s a fire going on up North so you could see smoke off to the Southwest South there past a table rocks, here over in Sam’s Valley (in Southern Oregon).
We’re just going to jump right into it. What is it that you do?
David & Beth: Well, we do a lot of things. We have a company called Amp-3, so it’s AMP-3.net and we have preparedness products and first aid.
David is an Emergency Room Physician practicing in the Pacific Northwest and we have had our business since 2011. Hard to believe time has gone by that fast.
It started kind of from a first aid kit, but we also do preparedness.
We have our ranch, which we’re staying here for our two and a half weeks, totally off grid.
We have a little generator and that’s about it for right now. But, we do a lot of stuff. We travel, we have an off-grid trailer and our company AMP-3 started from a YouTube video.
So made a video on how to build a first aid kit, of what I thought was a good first aid kit that I had used for a long time.
I even published a little PDF on how to assemble it yourself with the video and the PDF. You should be able to make this even said where to go get the different items, at least for our local area.
At that time, I know YouTube has changed a lot over the years, but there was a messaging system and I was flooded with requests of like, how do I buy that kit?
And it astounded me. I thought, Oh, you’re just going to go make this and this should be sufficient and I’ll move on to some other video.
Beth kind of got word of that and we talked about it and she said, you should make some kits and try and sell them on that YouTube thing, whatever that is.
So we made 10 kits, which took two weeks to make 10 kits, which was ridiculous.
Thought, ok that’s done for a year, right?
Much like a podcast, you opened the door and step in, who’s going to listen to me? And so we made 10 and I thought that was two weeks worth of work. It will take at least a year to sell those 10 kids. We made a little website.
We made a video and made a website and they sold in an hour.
Beth: David’s like, yeah, those are just my YouTube buddies, no big deal. I said, okay, why don’t you build 25 see what happens with that.
David: It took us another like three weeks to build 25 kids, a little more efficient.
Beth: Remember vacuum packing.
David: At that time I was vacuum packing each individual component. We no longer do that. And we now we can build, you know, quite a few in a shorter period of time.
But slowly that built and then we realized, Oh, we might have the basis for a company, not that we’re any great big company at all, I didn’t even know how many kits we’ve made.
Beth: Thousands.
David: And we’ve gone from that one kit.
Beth: Yeah, the 25 kits sold in an hour and a half. David’s like, yeah, I think you might have something here.
I said, I think you should start a company.
Originally he started it with another friend of his and it didn’t work out.
So then I kind of stepped in and now we do it together. We were traveling a lot all over the country and doing a preparedness shows. We’ve done the Mother Earth News show. We’ve done other trade shows, a whole bunch.
David: Like we were talking before we started, we’ve been doing this seven, eight years.
There is a definitely a waxing and waning ebb and flow to people’s interest in preparedness, which is interesting to us because we just think you should be prepared and self-reliant all the time and not depending upon what your particular view on the world is.
You know, like right now there’s a fire depending upon where you’re at this could be something that you’re watching or something that you’re involved in.
Now I’ve got to evacuate my family from our property because there’s, you know, a mandatory evacuation because of fire danger or earthquake, snow, ice event, flooding depending upon your local area.
So we just think you should be prepared all the time.
Beth: With AMP-3, it’s allowed us to travel the country, which is, we have an amazing country, the USA.
If you haven’t done it, do it. Travel and enjoy all the little towns.
We like antique stores.
David: Yeah, there’s a lot of that.
We’ve done a lot of teaching and classes.
Beth: David’s taught a suture class at a lot of the preparedness shows that we’ve done, David’s taught a lot of suture classes.
He also teaches an introduction to ham radio class.
David: Communications with ham radio is a big component of that.
Beth: Yup, preparedness communications.
That’s kind of the least prepared portion of anyone’s preparedness is really communications and what to do in case of an emergency.
I’m going to give you a little bit of background on what kinda got us started into preparedness because these two major events really affected us. Early on in our marriage.
David: Truly life changing event life changing events.
Beth: So, we lived in Santa Cruz, California and in 1982 we had been married how long? Two years. And, we had a 100 year flood, so we had 24 inches of rain in 24 hours and it was a lot of rain in the Santa Cruz mountains, which is where we live on 10 acres, off grid.
We didn’t even know what off-grid was.
We were homesteading before it was cool.
We had rented this little cabin, we paid $200 a month rent on 10 acres of property.
David: Little wood stove.
Beth: We had a wood burning stove, outdoor shower, composting, toilet on the front porch. And we also had a hand pump for water.
David: You know, they one you have to pour the water into climate and then pump, pump, pump, pump. And then slowly a little stream of water comes out. So underneath the cabin was a spring fed. Well, spring fed, big concrete cistern. So we’d have to pump that up from down there.
Beth: That’s how we got our water.
David: It was totally off-grid, before we didn’t even know what that meant. It just was how we were living.
Beth: We didn’t have a lot of money back then and it was a beautiful piece of property in the Santa Cruz mountains, lots of redwoods. And then we had this guy who lived next door to us, Ted, we called it Mountain Man Ted.
Mountain Man Ted never wore shoes. He had long hair. He was probably about, I don’t know, maybe five years younger than we were at the time.
David: One of those jack of all trades type of people.
Beth: Oh yeah, Ted could fix anything, do anything. And he walked everywhere. He had a car but he hardly ever drove. We lived five miles out of the nearest town and Ted would walk to town like almost every day. Yeah, it was crazy.
David: The bottom line of the story is we were living way up there way up in the mountains, the storm happened.
Beth: The storm happened and Ted and David and I decided to get in our land cruiser.
David had a 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser that we wish we still had.
David: I do wish I still had that.
Beth: It’d be awesome to have that.
David: No this was totally stupid. So we had no clue about preparedness or self reliance. So what did we do?
Beth: We drove into Aptos to watch the ocean, right? So we wanted to see the ocean because we wanted to see the storm. So we’re driving down Trout Gulch and we’re driving down the road and there’s a river directly next door to the road that we’re driving on.
David: There’s normally not a river there.
Beth: There’s no stream, there’s not even a stream there. And there is a gushing raging river. And we’re like wow, that’s kinda cool. You know, we’re driving into Aptos and we kind of get near the bridge and the river is just raging and the mountain is starting to like crumble away from these houses.
And we saw a house fall into the river and then we drove down by the ocean.
Luckily we had the land cruiser because the water was all the way past the wheel wells of the land cruiser.
David & Beth: Totally oblivious to the fact that we were young and stupid. So We were witnessing this storm. We thought we should probably get home because we were now getting a little nervous.
Beth: So we got home and we probably had been in our house with Ted probably about 15, 20 minutes and we started to hear a rumble and a roar that, I mean I could still hear it today. We looked out the front window of the cabin and the whole mountain side was coming down towards us.
David: So if our cabin was here, the access road that comes into where our cabin was in the main property went right in front of our cabin. And then there was a little bit of a gully and then the mountain went straight up and it was just beautiful redwoods.
Well that, all of that slid at one time. All the redwoods and they just slid. The redwoods kind of laid down against the mountain and the whole thing just slid. And we were standing there watching it, but then being stupid we should have like
Beth: We got out of the house.
David: We stood there and watched it and then it all just stopped right in the gulch.
Beth: But we got out and we remember we ran down past Ted’s house.
David: Yeah.
Beth: Because we weren’t sure exactly, we thought it was going to actually take out our house. So that was a huge eyeopening.
David: It was very effectively roadblocked our only access out.
Brian: Oh wow.
David: So this is how stupid we were. We actually drove downtown. That was the last time we saw civilization for about a week and a half.
We drove downtown, didn’t go to the grocery store.
We didn’t go to the grocery store to pick up food, did not pick up water. We drove all the way back, witnessed the mountain slide, roadblock us. And then so we were trapped. Literally trapped there.
No power. It took out our power. It took out our water supply.
Beth: So we had nothing and back then you didn’t have a cell phone. You had just a landline.
And so we were pretty stuck.
David: Yeah. We had one little wire, 60 amp service to the cabin, and that was it.
That was gone.
Beth: Everything was pretty much gone except the houses were still there.
So now you might ask us how much food and water did we have in our pantry and how many months where we prepared for?
We weren’t prepared for an hour.
We had to combine our food with Ted.
David: Right. I mean we literally had no thought of if you were to say, oh you need to have water for three days.
That would have like been three days more than we had.
Beth: We did still have water because we still had the pump and the water.
David: Yeah, we had water.
Beth: We had water, we had that. We had no shower water and plenty of firewood and plenty of firewood. But we had no, no other water.
So we did pull our resources with Mountain Man Ted, and we made it through. And so about a week and a half later, my brother Steve comes walking down the road saying, your mother’s kind of worried.
David: So he hiked in.
Beth: He hiked in.
David: Your mom’s worried.
Beth: Yeah, he hiked in about six miles. No, not that far, probably three miles.
Anyway, he knew a way to get out. So we hiked out and went into town and that was fine.
That was our first major kind of disaster that we were not prepared for.
The second one, we were more prepared for the second one. David was a fireman for Santa Cruz County Fire Department and we lived four miles from the epicenter of the 89 earthquake.
David: Became a fireman because of the a hundred year rainstorm and Beth’s mom, and I love her to death. She called us and she said, SoCal Fire Department is looking for volunteers, you should do that.
And I thought, oh, I should do that. I had no idea why.
I went down there and I filled out the application and they hired you right away and I got hired in and went through training. And so by the time our next little major event, I had been on the fire department for awhile,
Beth: For awhile, few years.
We lived four miles from the epicenter of of the 89 earthquake.
David: Everybody calls it the San Francisco earthquake was the Loma Prieta earthquake.
Beth: Exactly. I was at work at the time and it was about five, a little bit after five and it literally felt like a giant was outside the building, shaking the building as hard as he could.
David: And we got earthquakes in California all the time. But at the time when they happened you were like, oh, it’s an earthquake and it wasn’t a big deal. And with like shake and that was it.
This was like….
Beth: A major jolt.
I was at the office, had the earthquake, everything literally came off all of the walls. And I worked for a dentist at the time. So we had charts, you know, charts on the walls.
We had pictures, we had an extra developed fixer and developer. Everything came off the walls was all on the floor.
The sprinkler heads in the ceiling pop down.
David: It was a directional earthquake and it was interesting to look at the ceiling and you know how the sprinklers pop down. The way the building shook, it actually made a long cut from the sprinklers moving in there, so it was like a slot cut in the drywall because of that.
Brian: Wow!
Beth: Yeah,
David: That was pretty impressive.
Beth: One of our patients, Martha, I won’t say her last name because she’d be really embarrassed, but she was in the restroom, which is right, you know, right in the office. So she’s sitting on the toilet and she walks out and she is white as a ghost. I mean she literally was shaking.
David: Literally when that happened she had just flushed.
Beth: And she said all I did was flush.
David: Her perception was, can you imagine that you get up, push the lever to flush and a 7.1 earthquake gets unleashed because you pushed the lever. That was hilarious.
Beth: Yeah, Martha.
Oh boy, The look on her face.
David: Bottom line is from that earthquake. Again, it was about a week of no power.
Beth: It was more devastating than the flood because it affected so many more people.
David: And you felt it at nighttime when the sun went down, suddenly there were no lights in the buildings. It was like dark everywhere except for flashlights and stuff.
Beth: And a lot of the, you know how you have those overpasses on the freeway. Those had all collapsed, you know, they collapsed. There was so much more to that than the flood. The flood was bad.
David: The little local grocery store for our community, was stripped of everything, you know, within the first few hours.
Beth: However, because David had to go down to the fire department so he can tell you about his stories down there. But I went to the grocery store and Henry and Ethel owned the store. And Henry was actually my school bus driver when I was growing up because I grew up in SoCal.
They were giving food away to people like what do you need?
It was like not like how much money, you know, how are you going to pay? There was no ATM. So if you didn’t have cash, nothing worked.
David: So that’s another area of self reliance and preparedness. Right. If something happens, what do you do?
Beth: Do you have small bills?
David: Do you have small bills and things set aside so you can negotiate purchases.
Brian: Great point.
Beth: Henry, I mean, there were kids there, so he was giving them ice cream, you know, so Henry and Ethel were literally stripping their store and giving whatever the community needed.
The church was right across the street from the shopping bag, they were open.
David: But that store was empty in…a few hour.
Beth: In an hour, it was totally stripped.
So from those two major events, we became a lot wiser and a lot better prepared, for sure. To not have food, to not have water.
David: So now we always have food, we always have water. We always have gas, cash.
Beth: We always have cash.
David: Communications.
Beth: Communications is important.
David: I’ve never been without a four wheel drive since those events.
Beth: No, no, no, no.
And so if you go to our website at Amp-3.net, and go to our resource page, you can download my list of 100 essentials. And literally I put that together from kind of thinking about things that you need to have, on hand, in the event of an emergency.
David: We have people come up to us during trade shows or when she’s talking on the phone and for some reason the switch got turned on and they say, I need to get prepared.
So she would have these like long conversations and people want to know like, where do I start?
And you probably have experienced this, but when someone makes that decision, “I need to get prepared, I need to start thinking about this.”
It’s like looking behind the curtain and realizing there’s this vast space that now you have to step into and where do I start?
People get anxious and panicky with it and like where do I start?
This list was started so that you could start and just, we always tell people, do something once a week or do something once a month, depending upon your resources.
Then in a year you’ll be able to look back and say, look what I’ve done. So it’s the little steps, but doing it, every month, consistently over time.
Then you build preparedness.
Beth: Yeah. Every paycheck you will always have, even if it’s $5 of discretionary money. Think about putting preparedness in your budget.
David: Yeah. When you’re shopping instead of buying one can of food, buy two, if that’s all you can do is I’m going to double the cans for that shopping trip and then start putting those away.
Beth: Start putting those away.
There’s so many things to think about with preparedness, whether it’s batteries and flashlights and you know, you want to have lanterns, you want to have lamp oil.
I mean the list is pretty vast, but if you do it every month or every week or you know, whenever you get paid a little bit at a time, it makes a huge difference. And David and are very well prepared.
Do we have everything? No.
David: I don’t think you ever will. And that’s part of that right, is to realize, yeah, I’m just going to keep working at this, it’s like golf, right?
I’m not a golfer.
But you’ll golf your entire life and you’ll still be perfecting that skill.
I’ve not even gotten on a golf course.
Then from communication.
So during that earthquake, I didn’t wait for a page to go out. I knew that something bad had happened and I went immediately down to the fire department.
First thing we do is get all of our rigs out of the building so that they’re safe and can be used to respond to emergency.
I remember standing out on the apron, we’d gotten trucks out and I was standing out on the apron and this lady, I still remember this lady came driving up really quick in a little Subaru.
Her husband was laying in the back clutching his chest. He was kind of pale and sweaty. She just like drove right to the fire department. Now that I’m a doctor, I look back on that and I say to myself, that guy probably was having a heart attack.
I always wonder like, what happened to him?
So we tried to get on the air to call, you know, naively call an ambulance. Well, you couldn’t get on the air to save your soul because there was so much radio traffic. And then we made a decision, the only thing to do for him.
We were in our little community, it had kind of a little dip in where our fire department was in the lower part, but up on the hill is the hospital.
We loaded that guy up and put him on a back board on the hose bed of the fire truck. Outside on the hose bed.
Brian: Wow.
David: Sweating, holding his chest.
We drove him to the hospital and unloaded him. And then we were just like doing calls and responding calls.
I always wonder what happened to that guy.
But now I’m this far down the road and have different training and different eyes. I bet my life that he had a heart attack or that he was suffering from a heart attack.
Beth: Going through the 89 earthquake.
You know, they had this large earthquake in Southern California recently. I kind of thought, I wonder how many orders or phone calls we’re going to get. And I was really surprised that we had very few, which means either people aren’t concerned about it or they’re already prepared.
David: Or I think also, we were talking about this earlier, but I think people’s sort of angst or drive to be prepared or to be doing something, waxes and wanes with life events.
Then I think also….and not to be political, but there is a political sort of magnetism if you will.
And depending upon how you look at things and what’s going on politically, you feel more of a sense of, okay, something I need to be prepared because of potential social unrest or whatever might happen from your political view.
Then as those things change, you get more comfortable and you kind of sit back a little bit. And don’t worry about it.
I just think no matter where you are on that ebb and flow, that when it’s ebbing, that’s just a little grace period and you should not let down.
You’re just continual, you know, preparedness. Even if it’s practicing an evacuation plan, like we’ve talked about this all the time.
We live in Portland bridge city. A lot of people live on one side of the river and work on the other side, or they live on one side and their kids go to school on the other side.
If we have an earthquake, you’re not gonna be able to cross the river. Right?
Even if the bridges aren’t damaged, they’ll be closed until city engineers say this is a safe structure, we can now allow traffic on it or they may actually be physically damaged. So we always ask people and when we do shows in the Portland area, what’s your communication plan?
What’s your safety plan for your family?
And you can tell when you ask someone, you know, like where do you work and where do your kids go to school?
You say, oh, so you’re on two different sides of the river and if we have an earthquake this afternoon, how are you going to get in touch with your kids?
Do your kids know what to do if they’re on the other side of the river, mom and dad are on this side. How are they going to get in touch with you?
What’s the plan to get reunited and you can see the light go on. It’s like, I’ve never thought about that.
Commercial Break: We’re going to take a quick break from this conversation.
You know when people ask me what I do, I tell them I’m a business growth strategist and they say, well, what the heck is that?
It’s all about standing out against your competition, standing out within your industry, standing out in front of your most ideal clients so that there is no competition. There is no comparison.
There’s nobody else out there that can do what you do in the way that you do it, whether that be product services or otherwise.
One of the toughest places to stand out is when you’re discussing the concept of competition, so whether your customers see it as competition or whether it’s only you that sees it as competition.
If there is competition out there, it’s going to be standing in your way and there’s no competitive force out there that I see as common as you ubiquitous as Amazon.com.
Amazon.com has become the devil to most e-commerce based businesses for sure, and it’s certainly putting the squeeze on offline businesses.
That’s why I set out to write the book nine ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, how to stand out in your industry and make all competition completely irrelevant.
Now, whether Amazon.com is your competition or not, or whether you’re teamed up directly with Amazon.com, this book will help you to look past anyone as your competition, nine ways to Amazon-Proof your business.
This book is not out as of this recording, but if you want to find out when it’s available and how you can get your very own free copy, I want you to go to BrianJPombo.com/AmazonBook.
If you leave me your information, I will let you know as soon as that’s available. And not only that, but anything else that we end up offering having to do with this book.
For example, how you can get a hard copy of this book, how you can get the audio version of this book, how you can take part in workshops related with the concepts within this book. That’s nine ways to Amazon-Proof your business.
Go to BrianJPombo.com/AmazonBook.
And now back to the conversation.
David: I remember driving home from the hospital one night during, you know, we get like horrible, I shouldn’t say horrible for the Northwest, horrible, but we get snow storms and then ice events.
And I remember, big red snow tires on. I’m totally prepared. I’ve got snow boots in the truck, you know, and I’m making my way back home.
It’s dark and all these people had pulled into one of the grocery store parking lots.
There was a lady, I still remember her because the streetlight was lit up and she’s getting out of her little BMW.
She’s got on this gorgeous little black business dress outfit and high heels and I could tell she was gonna like walk home and I’m thinking, I’m going to bet you don’t have in your car a pair of shoes with tracks on them so that I can walk on the ice.
I mean sometimes you can’t even walk on the flat ground without slipping and falling.
And this is on, you know, the Portland Hills, it’s all steep.
I just thought all these people in this parking lot aren’t prepared. So they went to work and then the snow event happened and then they got off work and now suddenly you can’t get home.
Beth: It’s not like they didn’t know the snow event was going to happen.
It’s all over the news.
It’s gonna snow. We may have four to six inches of snow. Be prepared.
Nope. Nope, Nope.
One interesting thing after the 89 earthquake, and this was really interesting. So the doctor that I worked for, again, I worked at a dentist office in California.
The doctor I worked for lived out in Watsonville and it’s usually about a 20, 25 minute drive.
Well, because where we live in the Santa Cruz mountain area, there’s a lot of Redwood trees. It took him three days to walk home, three days.
One of the bridges that he had to navigate across, not a very high bridge, you know, kind of a little gully and just the road continued on and just a supporting bridge because of the shake.
All the pilings for the bridge perforated through the road deck and the road deck set down in the gully. He made it across, but he had to kind of navigate his way around down and over and up.
But I mean he had actually had to park.
David: Yeah, you can’t drive.
Beth: There were certain areas he couldn’t drive. And then to get home to a house that is totally destroyed by the earthquake, totally destroyed.
It shifted totally off of the foundation.
So you know, those kind of things, you got to think about, is your house ready for an earthquake?
Are you ready for an earthquake?
Are your pets ready?
Don’t forget about your pets.
David: And we talk about earthquake here, but I mean, we’re living on the rim of fire. The major event for us will be an earthquake.
It will be an earthquake. Yep.
Beth: Yeah, I mean, we live in Oregon and we live kind of at the end of the Cascadia fault. And they say when that ruptures, it could be a 10 point plus earthquake. That’s massive.
Having been through a 7.1, that’s massive.
But it’s also going to be really a devastating earthquake, but that’s why we have our ranch. Lol.
Brian: And it’s one of those things that if they happen more often, people would be used to it.
David: And they actually happen more often than you know.
There’s some apps that you can get, if you’re interested in following those things.
But the little ones happen all the time.
Brian: The last big one before 89 was about 80 years before that, right.
David: But there’s been a 7.1 off the coast of Gold Beach.
Beth: Right at the Cascadia fault. Yeah.
They’ve been cluster earthquakes down there where they’ve had, you know, five or six in a day that are. 5.6, 5.7, 6.1 and we’re not speaking doom about earthquakes, but I mean, you just never know.
You just don’t ever know what’s gonna come your way.
It could be loss of a job.
How are you going to be prepared if you lose your job for six months or whatever?
How are you going to take care of your family?
If you have food, that’s going to really help you.
If you have like freeze dried food, we love Honeyville.
Honeyville is a great company.
They have a 25 year life.
David: We have no connection with them.
Beth: We have no connection with Honeyville, but it’s my favorite, favorite freeze dried.
David: The interesting thing is, you know, pick your poison. This is another benefit of our little company and traveling around and going to a lot of trade shows.
A lot of people will buy, and I’m not speaking bad about any company, but we’ll buy like one of those buckets of freeze dried food with all the meals, you know, and it’s a great idea in concept.
That’s like one person’s meal for three days or whatever.
If you got four family members, you get four, that’s three meals for four people and then you can build on that and they stack and everything.
Beth: But have you tasted it?
David: So have you tasted it?
So there was one event that we went to that I thought was really cool and they had all the vendors that had, freeze dried food or food products set up like a banquet.
Brian: Oh, wow!
David: The vendors went to a dinner. Was it the first night before the show or the night in between, or whatever?
Beth: It was the night before the show.
David: We went in and you’d get a plate and then you’d go down the line and your dinner is basically all these freeze dried food products.
So it’s interesting to sample from the different companies and they’re all palatable and they’re all going to provide, you know, the nutrition that they advertise and everything.
Beth: Some of them are really salty though.
David: Not just some of the though, a vast majority of them are salty.
Beth: Over salty and they were not palatable. They weren’t good.
David: Yeah. So that’s, that’s why she mentioned Honeyville.
Beth: And there was one that actually tasted like dog food.
Remember that one?
David: Oh that was the stroganoff.
Beth: Yeah.
David: I don’t think stroganoff is ever really super good.
Beth: Remember the little cans, it almost looked like little tuna cans?
David: Oh, that was billed as a protein, carbohydrates, sort of package and you could just pop the top and eat it. But it was……you can imagine.
Beth: It was like dog food.
Honeyville is the food to buy.
I love their products and they have sales all the time, but they also have like flour and I mean they have a lot, their variety is huge.
David: Cook your own recipes if you wanted to.
Beth: Yeah, and I like to get the number 10 cans and there’s a great, like they have great recipes on their website as well. But they’re tortilla soup, their chicken tortilla soup, and then you can just put it in a jar.
David: She should do a podcast.
Beth: It’s all ready to go, that’s amazing food.
But there’s also one called Nature Valley. They’re out of Utah as well, and they have a great product line.
David: All of that conversation I think aims to practice what you preach and if you’re whatever preparedness stores you have, you should eat this.
Because the worst thing would be to have a disaster and then to pull this food out and say, Oh I wish we had tasted this.
So I mean, you should periodically cycle through and have a meal or a day’s worth and say, okay, this is what it would be like to live on this.
Beth: Here’s one of my classic stories of somebody who’s unprepared and Bill has now become like one of our great friends. He lives in New Jersey.
I call him Jersey Bill.
He came to PrepperCon, which is a phenomenal preparedness show in Utah.
They didn’t have it this last year.
I hope that they come back and do it next year. The best preparedness event we’ve been doing, number one, preparedness event and the nation.
Bill came out from New Jersey and he happened to come to our booth.
This was what, three years ago. Bill came to the booth and he looked at me and he said, what do I need?
David: So Beth, you can tell how enthusiastic she is in this subject, but as a business owner, with a company.
It turns out now that we’ve met Bill, he is a very wealthy man. And he comes up to her and says, what should I buy?
Beth: Bill is, like David said, incredibly wealthy.
So money’s not an object.
He went through Hurricane Sandy and it was like his disaster, and he lost everything.
He lost his house, he lost everything.
Fortunately he’s very wealthy and so he could rebuild his house, rebuild his life. His business is amazing.
He really wanted to be prepared and heard about PrepperCon. He booked his ticket the day before he flew out.
So you know how expensive that was. He flew directly from New Jersey to Salt Lake, drove. Drove to PrepperCon, was going to walk the booth and was flying home the next day.
This was like a one day shop at all. I can get it all, I can have it shipped, whatever.
Bill came and he said, what do I need?
And I said, what exactly are you looking for?
Then he kinda told me a little bit about his story and I said, I don’t want you to buy anything here. Nothing.
I want you to go and talk to vendors and find out what their specialty is. And that’s going to give you an idea of what you need to have for your particular needs. Everyone’s different.
It’s not a one size fits all kind of thing.
I walked him around and there’s tech protect is a phenomenal company.
David: These are EMP people.
Beth: EMP proof bag and you want to put in like your electronics and that kind of stuff.
We went and talked to Brian, and Bill bought some products from Brian.
Texas Ready is a phenomenal company. Lucinda Bailey is a very good friend of ours and she sells seed banks, you know, so you need to be able to grow your own food, have some freeze dried food. You need to have a variety so that you don’t get bored because who knows how long you’re going to have to be preparing for.
If you lose your job, you may be preparing for six months to a year. So you want to be able to grow.
David: Yeah. So some people would say, why do I need to add a seed bank or that capability to my preparedness?
Some might look at that as extreme, but like we were talking about earlier, there’s so many things that could affect you that would have you activate your preparedness plan.
It may not be an earthquake where you’re disabled for a week or two weeks or might not be a weather event where you’re incapacitated for two or three days.
It might be you suffered a financial difficulty in your family, maybe a loss of a job or whatever. And now suddenly your world has changed and you now need to be prepared to deal with that.
It might be a longer period of time. And so having the ability, I think to grow food as extreme as that may sound to some people, is not that unrealistic. You wouldn’t want to be eating freeze dried food for long, long periods of time. That’s not what it’s meant for.
So I look at that as a bridge to being able to produce your own food. If you needed to get into that situation.
Beth: And gardening’s fun.
David: Yeah.
Beth: Gardening’s a lot of fun. It’s very rewarding. And then you get to do canning after that and that’s a whole nother subject.
Because I love canning too. Take some classes.
When I walked Bill around to the various vendors, he was like, wow, no one has ever done this for me before.
And I said, you can’t just walk up to a booth and just say what do I need? Because they’re going to try and sell you something.
David: And there were a lot of gadgets. Men are gadget people, right.
A gadget is not going to save your life.
Beth: Bill has bought radios. He and his family are going to get their HAM radio license.
He’s bought first aid kits from us. He and he’ll buy four, he needs outfitters, he buys for Outfitters because he’s got two kids. Two away at college. Think ahead for yourself and your family.
David: But I think most importantly he’ll call and talk with you and say, what do I need to think about in terms of being prepared for this type of thing?
A great thing to ask people, water, they’ve got like a five gallon thing of water and that’s their water.
Well, how much water does one person need per day?
How many people know that answer? Not many.
Then you say, okay, and you’ve got four people, a family of four. Well that five gallons of water is like one day’s worth of water plus a gallon for one person. That’s if you’re not doing hygiene.
Beth: Jersey Bill, he also drives into Manhattan. He lives in New Jersey, works in Manhattan, he has I think 50 employees.
It’s not just you that you need to worry about. You need to also worry about your employees. Are they prepared to be able to walk if they have to walk home, especially like Manhattan, I can’t even imagine trying to walk around that place, it’s a nightmare anytime. I can’t believe he works there.
People need to just kind of take a step back, think about their preparedness, what do they personally need for that and work on getting that done. Make a plan and work on it. That’s the biggest thing. Just don’t, you know, just don’t think it’s going to happen on its own because it’s not.
David: Even a plan like a communications plan.
I teach a little class on preparedness communications just to open people’s eyes and perspective to the need for communications in a disaster or a preparedness situation.
In talking with, with people. It’s amazing how many people think, oh, I have a radio and I’ll just turn the radio on and I’ll be able to know what’s going on and I’ll be able to communicate with whoever I want here I’m in San Francisco, and then in Chicago.
If you’re a communications guy, you just realize, whoa, what you just talked about is a huge multilayered space of communications and there is no one device that’s going to do that.
Then, if you want to talk to someone, there has to be someone listening somewhere else. On the same frequency, with the same capabilities, at the same time so they can talk with you.
What’s your communication plan and when you talk to someone….
Beth: A blank stare.
David: Or they’ll say, well you use a cell phone. What’s your mother’s phone number?
How many people know the number?
Because what do you do when you call someone, do you actually type in the number?
If I want to call Brian, I just look on my contacts list and I put my index finger on Brian’s face and then it dials.
A lot of people don’t even, on that basic level, don’t even know the phone numbers, right?
So our kids know that if something happens and like our daughter lives out of state, my son lives in state with us. But if something happens, there’s two points of communication, local and outside the state and those numbers are written down.
So that if whatever your ability to contact that person, if you don’t have the ability to use a cell phone might be the old fashioned landline that you know what the number is and you know who you’re going to call that you’re going to call, Uncle Jim and he’s in another state to say, hey, this is Kelsey.
If you talk to mom and dad, let them know I’m safe and here’s where I am. So there’s a sit rep and the kids know that they want to let us know where they are. They’re safe, what their plan is, where they’re going to go next if something were to happen and we’re separated from each other.
That you have some way of getting that information.
Beth: Yeah, it’s like communication is probably the number one thing because if something happens and you are not with your loved ones or you know, if something happened in California and I couldn’t get ahold of my brother or my brother from another mother, Rodney, if I couldn’t get ahold of him or or them, I would be kind of panicking.
And sometimes my brother Steve does not call on a regular basis and it drives me nuts.
David: That angst is worse than a disaster because honestly you want to know is that person safe and if you’re not talking with them, right.
Beth: So one thing that we’ve done is we’ve come up and this is one of my preparedness tips. We’ve come up with a code, a four digit code, that you have a family meeting. This isn’t something you do over the telephone.
This is a private meeting between you and your loved ones and your family members. We have a four digit code.
I’m not going to tell you what ours is, but say it’s one, two, three, four. If one, two, three, four pops up on my phone from Kelsey or from David, I know that immediately I need to call that person. There’s been some kind of, something happened, there’s a family emergency, something happened, whatever it is.
I immediately drop whatever I’m doing and pick up my phone and call. And that happened.
About five years ago, my brother passed away and I put in our code and Kelsey was gone to college and Matt was away and they called immediately and I told them, you know, what had happened. And so those kinds of communications can be shared immediately with whoever it is.
If there’s an earthquake, if there’s, you know, I broke down on the side of the freeway and I don’t have AAA, you know, something like that.
You need to have that communication with your family. Have your family code and share that with your family and come up with a plan as to when you’re going to use that.
Because there’s some times when you’re like, I didn’t really want to have to use it for that, but I knew that I had to.
David: But it was also nice to know that it worked.
Beth: Yeah, it worked well.
But anyway, so that’s, that’s kind of a preparedness thing just for you, your family. You want to keep that private. So yeah.
David: How much money did that cost? Nothing.
So I mean that’s something someone could do today and add one little layer to their preparedness and it didn’t cost them anything.
We will talk to people at events and they’ll say, oh, that costs a lot of money.
Well, yeah, there are some things that are going to be expensive, but that doesn’t mean that that’s where you have to start today.
Even if you had a family meeting and came up with a simple communications and everybody had a copy, now that’s something that you’ve checked that box off and we’ve got that. And then practice it maybe every six months or at least once a year. But that didn’t cost anything.
And you had a family meeting, which is nice to have a gathering of your family. But you’ve done something.
It didn’t cost anything.
I could give you a list of easily a hundred things that don’t cost any money or very little money and they actually significantly help your preparedness. So there’s no excuse not to be prepared.
Beth: One thing with preparedness too is it’s not something you can do alone.
In the event of a disaster or something like that.
Those of you that have been through a natural disaster know that you cannot do it by yourself.
You have to be in community to do that. And with preparedness, it’s kind of the same thing whether you have a group of neighbors and you say, okay, we’re going to do some preparedness and we want to make sure that everybody’s kind of on the same page and not that you’re going to be the only one that has the food and they’re going to be the only one that has the water.
Because you’re all gonna have your own stuff. But if someone runs short, you want to be able to share that.
David: You’re going to for sure have people that have no preparedness and I think charity and take care of your fellow man as part of preparedness.
There’s someone who is going to come across your radar that is not prepared and we have stuff that we’ve put away just to give someone, to help them in a time of need. And I think that’s part of preparedness as well.
Beth: Yeah.
One thing that Lucinda has shared. And I think that this is like a really great thing, is if you have a garden and you have somebody who needs food, start giving them one of your plants and show them how to garden.
Show them the skills that you have and get that person excited about something because gardening’s a lot of fun.
David: Teach a man how to fish.
Beth: That’s right. Teach the man how to fish.
Have a canning day where you’re teaching your neighbors how to can, and a lot of the colleges have extensions, especially like here in Oregon, the OSU extension has a canning class and, you know, take a class if you’re not sure how to do it and you want to get more knowledge.
The Mother Earth News Fair is coming to Albany, Oregon, first weekend in August. That is a phenomenal place to go to get classes. Their book library is probably bar none the best one out there.
Beth: And Brian, you’re going there, but I mean, you’ll see the list of classes.
First of all, you couldn’t take all the classes. There just is not enough time, but the amount of free.
Again, you could say, I’m gonna start my preparedness today.
David: Go to the Mother Earth News Fair and take four classes. There are easily four classes to pick on that curriculum that they offer and that are with leading experts in their field of interest.
You’ll walk away from there, having gone to a great event, enjoyed yourself and then walk away with knowledge and knowledge is power and that has added to your level of preparedness. It didn’t cost you anything.
Beth: Yeah. That’s it. David and I have done the Mother Earth News as a vendors two times. We did the Albany show. We also did Belton, Texas.
Just the vendors that are there, huge amount of knowledge. The classes are amazing.
Yeah. Ask them questions. There’s going to be a lot of gardening classes, take one or two if you can.
There’s, how to raise beef, how to raise goats, cheese making. I mean, I can go on and on.
Canning, all sorts of classes, but the book library is really important. Bee keeping, all these things that we want to do, right?
I want bees really bad.
All these things and, and that’s a really good, um, thing that’s happening in Oregon and next week, next Saturday.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: So that’s David and Beth Pruett from AMP-3.net. And I know what you’re thinking. How can we stop it right there?
Well, we have to stop it right there because the conversation was going on so long that we had to extend it to another day.
We have another episode or two coming up for you with David and Beth Pruett where we get into the depths of their business.
But I want to point out some things here. We’ve got two people who are extremely well-spoken and have a lot of character. They’re just interesting to listen to, aren’t they?
If you have that type of personality or you have someone in your business that has that type of personality, you’ve got to put them out there. If you don’t have them out there representing your business, you’re doing yourself a great disservice.
Also, look at their focus on their origin story.
These life changing events from the flood that happened in Santa Cruz to the Loma Prieta earthquake that happened years later. These are things that completely molded where they went from that point on.
Taking them into the preparedness field, taking them into the first aid field. This origin story is remarkable.
It’s specific to them.
It’s something that no matter what, when you think of them, you’ll think of those stories and you’ll relate it back to their products and services that they provide on their website.
Look at how they talk about Jersey Bill, the ideal client, and how money is not an object for him. Are you going to be ready when Jersey Bill shows up in your business?
When you have someone that comes by and says, tell me what I need to buy. I trust you. Just tell me what I need to get. I’m ready. I’ve got the money. That’s not the problem.
What I need you to do is tell me what’s best for me?
That’s powerful and that’s something that you have to be ready for. If you have not met that person, you will. If you’re in business long enough, look at how their passion is so strong and they have such a knack for the information.
They’re just a complete wealth of knowledge.
We’re going to be talking more about how they can use that later on and be able to build that into their business and into the future.
They’ve done some, but using that information to make their brand stronger and also create products is of going to be a real key thing that we talk about in the future with Dave and and Beth Pruitt.
So stay tuned for the next episode.
Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets. That’s BrianJPombo.com.
If you or someone you know would like to be a guest on The Off The Grid Biz Podcast, offthegridbiz.com/contact.
Those who appear on the show do not necessarily endorse my beliefs, suggestions, or advice or any of the services provided by our sponsor.
Our theme music is Cold Sun by Dell. Our executive producer and head researcher is Sean E Douglas. I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.