Lucinda Bailey – Texas Ready

Lucinda Bailey
Lucinda Bailey

Texas Ready

Lucinda Bailey, (aka, The Seed Lady) is a Master Gardener and Certified Crop Advisor specializing in the cultivation of heirloom vegetables from seed.

Join us as we talk about how “old-time pioneer skills” are quickly becoming the hot new desire for many Patriots in our changing economy.

From the value of saving seeds to teaching Mittleider gardening, Lucinda was a joy to chat with and we know you’ll be blown away the wealth of information she has to share.

It’s easy to see she has a passion for the work she does.

Head over to Texas Ready & pickup a Liberty Seed Bank today! – https://texasready.net/

Texas Ready - Liberty Seed Banks
Texas Ready – Liberty Seed Banks

1:51 Beginning of Texas Ready: Taking Back The Reins of Food Production

3:05 Why This Business Gives Me A Personal Connection to My Customers and Community

3:44 Perfecting Our Message – By Going to Gun Shows

      • Building Relationships by Putting on Classes at our Local Community Center
      • Why Quail Is An Ideal Option to Raise for Practical Preparedness and Homesteading

7:21 Heirloom Seed Shortages

9:08 We’ve Seen a Huge Influx In People Wanting to Grow Gardens and Be Better Prepared

10:33 Ideal Customers: Family Oriented and Preparedness Minded

11:33 Top Selling Products: Liberty Seed Banks (Ammo Cans)

12:30 Lucinda’s 3-Skill Sets that Revolve Around Gardening

13:38 Knowledge Is Power: Giving Confidence to Patriots

18:55 The Inside Baseball of the Seed Industry

      • Just How Long Do Seeds Really Last?

22:12 Quality Food Production: The Mittleider Garden Course

24:49 10 Week Hands-On Class: Teaching Family Homesteading Skills

27:07 Follow Your Dreams: Work With a Standard of Excellence and Integrity

29:10 Where to Find out More About Texas Ready (https://texasready.net/)

Transcription

Lucinda: I think we’re moving in that direction. As a society, I think that we’re going to see the importance of networking, and connection, and of helping our neighbors. I’m seeing that happen.

And that breaks down all the barriers, whatever political party, whatever, religious institution, you come from whatever color you are, we are members of the human race.

That’s our first and only group that we need to be.

Intro to show: 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, you want to leave this world better off and you found it and you consider independence, a sacred thing. You may be a prepper, a gardener a homesteader, a survivalist, a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman. This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self reliance, for those living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Lucinda Bailey, aka “The Seed Lady” is a master gardener and certified crop advisor, specializing in the cultivation of heirloom vegetables from seed.

Her interest began as a teenager in Michigan, where she grew posts in her backyard to sell to neighbors. She now spends her time traveling the country attending shows and presenting seminars on the Mittleider gardening and food production.

In addition, Lucinda also enjoys playing the piano, tending to her livestock and working with Texas Ready test gardens.

Lucinda Bailey, welcome to The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast.

Lucinda: Oh, this is such a privilege. It’s good to connect with other fellow patriots and people that are like-minded and concerned about where our country is.

Brian: Absolutely.

So why don’t you let us know a little bit about what it is that you do and how you ended up here?

Lucinda: Years ago, I was in financial services and I realized all of a sudden, there was no good news coming out of the United States or Europe or anywhere else.

I thought, well, you know, there may be something to the need of preparing my family, for whatever might come? That’s how I personally got involved, I thought I was the only one thinking like that. Of course, that wasn’t true and I finally did connect with many others.

My business partner and I realized that God has given us the responsibility of taking care of our own food needs. And when Kroger’s or any number of other big chains, don’t pull through like they should for us, or GMOs are suddenly in our food supply, well, then we may need to take the reins of food production back.

That’s really how we started this doing it for our own family.

But in short order, our neighbors, our church buddies, and relatives all said, Hey, would you pick me up some speed collections as you guys have because we can’t find what we need at the box stores.

And that’s how we began.

Brian: Fabulous.

So you started in 2012. Have you ever owned a business up until this point?

Lucinda: Both my partner and I are extremely entrepreneurial. And so this is about my sixth or seventh different situation from a restaurant to a mortgage company to you know, three real estate companies and so forth.

Secretarial service company, a print company, etc.

But this has actually been the most personally fulfilling because I really feel a direct connection with my customer families and the direct ability to help them get better food, better health, lower bills, and confidence about the future.

Brian: Oh, that’s awesome.

Besides your friends and family and people you already knew how were you able to find the rest of your first customers?

Where was it, just by word of mouth or do any form of advertising, how’d you find those first customers?

Lucinda: That was a great question.

I knew one thing you need to have a 32nd elevator pitch and we’re better to practice this than at a gun show. Boy, if you don’t have a good message and you don’t catch their attention, they’re down the hall and they will not give you the time of day.

So I figured this will be great. And yeah, the first several gun shows you’re making a mess of everything you want to say but you get that message down. Then that’s how we began was just doing gun show, after gun show, after gun show.

And garden shows, you know we’re a little step up and survival shows up with that. Now, all those things have virtually gone away since COVID. So we’ve had to do some additional internet marketing now and you know, some other platforms.

For example, once a month I lease out the community center and I go to feed stores and tractor supplies and farmers markets and drum up attendees, and then I tried to build community within those attendees over the course of the next year.

So they come to an initial gardening class, we teach them about heirloom seeds, if they don’t know anything about it, we let them come on to the ranch rent our space to grow out some chickens, many of them have never held a chicken.

We teach them how to do egg-laying and meet birds and then at the very end, we teach them butchering if they wanted to attend that, so it’s really kind of a neat process.

Then we go back to an orchard item. So we’re alternating agriculture and animal husbandry.

We can teach them anything from quail, turkey, ducks, pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle, in order that they might be able to prepare, we know that not everybody is going to do everything.

They may not have the acreage, but you can run quail on a square meter and produce between 10, 15, 100 pounds of meat, that’s more meat than you’re going to get off of what cow. So it does not require a lot of space, rabbits are also very good for small situations. Rabbits and quail are very, very quiet and a lot of subdivisions would consider those pets and no prohibition against doing them.

We do understand that roosters, you know, are not liked by all the HLS we get that. But we can show you how to have an egg-laying flock that doesn’t even have a rooster in it, that will be very beneficial for the family.

So these are the kinds of things that we’re now teaching. And it’s really true, homesteading, staying away from the pharmaceuticals, expensive eggs, and also the grocery stores if you so desire.

So we’re teaching people the old-time pioneer skills.

Brian: Wow, fabulous.

So that’s all one-on-one, you’re saying that’s just the local community center?

Lucinda: Well, it’s a local community center, we rent that out. So we were hopeful of getting 40, 50 people there. And then from there, we have Friday night classes on our ranch, then we just develop long-term relationships with people, and word of mouth and things like that, or how things are spreading now.

COVID did change our business plan, no doubt. But I think it’s worked out for the better.

Brian: Tell us more about how COVID has affected things for your business.

Lucinda: You’ve been mostly meeting people at shows and so forth.

You know, we were an essential business being that we were in agriculture. So we never did any shutdowns, we know that there were tremendous and still are tremendous seed shortages, especially in the heirloom field, I believe nine out of 10, heirloom seed companies are out of business now.

And that’s because they just could not access it now, some of it was blamed on crop failure. I’ve never seen so many crop failures. So I don’t know, really, you know, we’ll never know the truth is that one.

I’ve never bought seeds from China and never will but was really stunned at the amount of Chinese seed that is in our culture. I don’t feel too comfortable about that, because I don’t believe in nice soils, and lead and all the things that we might find from the Chinese products.

But we realized that things were like celebrated, we had felt like the things economically, politically, socially, were like celebrating and not in a good direction.

We really ramped up our concern and our teaching schedule. And so we have had 10 families that are crack, come through our programs on the weekends and so forth. It’s very hands-on.

So if you’re in Texas, we would love to have you, you know, be part of those kinds of workshops.

But if not try to find somebody that’s doing on studying in your local area. And there’s lots of resources now, very popular to be a homesteader now or get on the internet, and start listening to several of the podcasts you will learn a lot as I certainly have.

And I’m so thankful for the variety of people training on goats, or rabbits or sheep or whatever it is. I’m really trying to listen and I encourage others to do the same.

Brian: Sure.

And with all the growing global chaos and so forth, have you seen a huge desire from the public to learn more of this more so than in the past?

Lucinda: They said that 50% of America is now growing a garden. I don’t really believe it’s that high. But yes, we have seen a huge influx of interest in growing.

Our view is that buying a seed bank that the proper seed bank is step one, that is not where it needs to be. You don’t need to be putting that on your pants yourself and leaving it there.

You need to be practicing this skill. It’s not an easy set of skills.

But we believe I’ve read over 300 AG books, and I believe that we’ve narrowed it down to the five or six most pertinent, most usable, most productive, you know books, so we’re going to have the best canning book out there.

We’re going to have the best.

I didn’t really want to The Amish. But guess what I’m studying Amish books. That’s like an encyclopedia of Amish skills. It’s called the Backyard Homestead. And it’s hilarious.

If you have a short attention span, as I do, it’s just perfect two or three pages on a certain point. But they’re demonstrating what I thought to be impossible initially, that on one acre, you can grow everything that a family of four to six would need.

Brian: Wow, that’s fabulous!

How would you describe your ideal customer for the people that come to you and they’re just it’s just right up their alley?

Who is that person, what’s our mindset?

Lucinda: Well, that’s a person who has begun to get awake or is awake understands that we can’t always depend on Kroger’s, H-E-B, or some of the chains perhaps to supply food, that there perhaps will be trucking shortages and so forth.

A person that wants a better quality food for their family, and the more nutrition’s less pesticides more control over that, that would be a great customer, us and someone that knows that there’s going to be a little bit of elbow grease involved in the production of food.

Whereas in the past, they may not have done that.

I really love it when we have kids, because their eyes are so sparkly when they grow a vegetable that they did not think possible.

They never knew where carrots came from, for example, or how a chicken even lays an egg. These are things that really brighten their experience. And we’re happy to do that for the families. We really want to be family-oriented.

Brian: Well that’s great.

What would you say is your top-selling product?

What’s the main thing that people purchase from Texas Ready?

Lucinda: Yeah, they purchase an ammo can that is full of seeds that will work in their area, we give about 75 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruit. That will definitely grow in your geographical area.

And we teach them if you are going to let cousin Joe and the boyfriend from college and the neighbor down the street participate in your food needs, then you need to buy seeds to cover all those people.

Because if you’re, you know not going to long your four-person kit, but now there are 10 mouths to feed, we don’t want you to be in a position of all of you can starving equally.

So buy seed for the number of people that you anticipate being able to help out. And then maybe if you’re not experienced as a gardener by a little bit more, ultimately we say that gardening revolves around three skill sets.

The first is buying plants, I’m okay with us buying plants in a box store or whatever, and popping them in the ground feeling good, keep them alive for 90 days, give yourself an A-minus report card at the end of that experience.

The next year, we want you to learn the skill set of starting seeds in your seed trays, and bypassing the payment of those costs for seedlings, do it yourself grow your own food, that is an entirely different skill set.

Now, in the third year we want you to learn to save properly so that you can keep this circle of life going and never have to buy produce seeds or seedlings again, to a great return on investment from these ammo cans. boxes that come into a person, four-person, six-person 12, and oh my God the church 30 people, 30 person kit.

We size them according to the number of people that you intend to feed.

Brian: Wow, that’s incredible!

Who came up with the ammo can design?

Lucinda: That’s a classic. I was tasked with finding good packaging. Okay, so I spent a week going here there, whatever. And I came back with a couple of nice little Chinese plastic containers, a paint can that we could customize, or this or that and I presented them to my partner.

Oh, he did not like any of it, which really ticked me off after a whole week of work on this right?

And so I slam my fist down and I go, well, gosh, darn, you’re not going to be happy until they’re in ammo cans!

At which point we both fell off the chair laughing because we knew that ammo cans came in various sizes and it worked out. We went down immediately to The Army Navy Surplus Store and bought every size cam they had.

When we put together the kits we don’t just throw in Oh, well it looks nice, yeah, 35 of these seeds 100 of that. No, we did it all on a nutritional model.

So how many calories would your family can we maximize out of the backyard?

We did this nutritionally and agriculturally. We’re the only Seed Company that’s ever done that you back engineer, what will I need? What does my family eat? How much space will it take to grow the number of plants it’s going to require for me to have one cup of beans, once a week for the whole year?

That’s how we put our kits together. And coincidentally, based on the number of the two for the small kit, the four for the average kit, etc, the size of the ammo cans matched perfectly, which was crazy.

So we just said, this is God, we’re doing this and that’s how we got started.

Of course, now we’re buying by the tractor trailer load, you know, a huge amount of ammo cans at a time.

Brian: Great.

Overall, what do you like best about your business and industry?

Lucinda: I’ve really loved the fact that we can help a lot of people. And if they don’t see the immediate ability for us to help it, let’s just wait and see where this economy goes, I believe that they’re going to be saying, I feel a lot more comfortable.

I am sure that I can feed my family and I really like that because we should not be living in fear, fear debilitates us it stops our creativity.

God hasn’t given us a spirit of fear, but of wisdom, power, knowledge, love, and a sound mind.

If you’re in fear, that’s just simply not the right energy way that you should, you know, have your mindset.

So I believe Texas Ready is one of the things that takes a big serious problem off the table and gives confidence to the Patriots. I mean, after all, the pioneers do the thing of all this, they were given a handful of seeds from the groom’s family and a handful of seeds from the bride’s family, hence, heirloom seeds and they knew they had to make a go of it.

That was going to be the way they fed their family much of the time, except for hunting.

So they couldn’t afford to be making mistakes, and they didn’t make mistakes and they could do it as pioneers and settlers. I believe those of us can do it.

During World War Two women and children produce 50% of the agriculture of all America. So tough times bring out tough attitudes, and they bring the strength of character.

I believe that that’s the kind of time and season that we’re moving into.

Brian: Oh, yeah, the Victory Garden model. That’s very cool.

Lucinda: Exactly. Good job.

Commercial Break: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I want to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible?

Most people don’t and if not, the real question is why?

And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?

Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. I’m going to talk about the second way, which is called being consistent.

I covered this all in chapter two. And I’m not talking about being consistent in a very generic way, I’m talking about specifically being consistent in your communications with your customers, not just customers you’re looking to have but customers you’ve already had, and getting them to know like, and trust you. Now, you could be doing this through paid advertising.

But you could also be doing it organically through social media, via videos, via blog posts via podcast like this, getting out there so that people can get to know like, and trust you so that when they do become customers, they don’t just become customers that enjoy and love your products or services they know like and trust you as a person that’s a value they can’t get from big companies.

I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business. Basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com. So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. And now let’s get back to our show.

Brian: On the other hand, if you will fit your business or your industry as a whole, if there’s one thing you can change about it, what would it be?

Lucinda: I would like people to be honest, they always say stand over those well diggers and watch how many rows of pipe they put in because that’s what they’re charging you by.

Don’t trust the well diggers, you know, is the model and I know the inside baseball of the seed industry, and I am alarmed at the stupidity and gullibility.

I’m just hoping that these were not dishonest people but misguided promoters, saying the seeds can last 10 years 15, 30 I’ve even heard 50!

No, that is absolutely bogus.

First of all, that is possible in a nitrogen-based refrigeration system, something that you and I will never own to their $1 million starters. They’re expensive and the US government only has 30 day supply of nitrogen to run them.

So I do not believe that that is a good expectation to take something that works in one venue and say that will reasonably apply to my backyard when it absolutely will not. If you have no refrigeration, you will have a shortened life expectancy of foods.

Oh, well, I’ve heard that they have these giant warehouses.

Yes, they have seven giant warehouses in the world. But if your name isn’t Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates, you are not getting speed out of there.

So the average person needs to have their own personal feed bags. I would like it if the nongardening Seed Company owners would be honest about how long seeds last at 40 degrees.

The US Department of Agriculture says that they will last four to six years. That’s what we have, and always will tell our customers, we’re going to tell them the truth. We give a five-year guarantee on our seedbanks on our seeds, and we will sell people all my peppers didn’t work, I bought your kit. If it’s within that five-year deal, will send you fresh pepper seeds.

We’re a little different than the average company. We want integrity to be something that’s stamped everywhere. Excellence.

And this is something that we are feeding our own families with. We’re growing, I’m in the garden today, pulling weeds. We’re living the dream.

This isn’t corporate America saying you know, I think we can make a buck here. No, we’re homesteading, we’re patriots, we’re sacrificing just like you are.

We’ve had the fear function debilitate us for several months. But we’re on the top side of that and now we want to share and testify to you how you can get your confidence level back.

I’m reminded that in Genesis six, God says I gave you the seed, you know, he gave it to us. If he said that he gave it to us, he gave us absolutely the means of production.

It also says in Scripture, my people perish for lack of knowledge.

And we would agree that you do something foolhardy or stupid, or you skip a step or you don’t know what we don’t know, that can really hurt us. That’s why we have the training program.

The Mittleider Garden Course is the most productive, survival-oriented growing system that’s in the earth.

Today I taught 40 methodologies of gardening at the college level. This is by far the only one that I can recommend with no integrity. It’s been around for over 50 years. It’s a proven, quantifiable system.

And if you’re concerned, you know, hey, thanks might be disrupted for five years, you can get right now, all the trace elements and minerals that you would need to keep your plants healthy for whatever period of time you’re anticipating there to be unrest.

You cannot do that in an organic system because a family of four would need a literal shipping container full of compost to refresh his beds. And he’s always going to be playing catch up. He is not getting a dump load of manure from past farmer Jones, who’s not coming to your house because there’s no diesel to drive his wagon.

So there’s no way that you can compost enough to refresh your beds. On a annual basis. We require shipping containers not logically not going to happen.

Yet all the minerals and all of the nutrition for your plants that are needed per year will fit under one card table. It is we can stockpile security items.

We all know what that is and we recommend we stockpile the nutrition that your garden will meet. And nobody’s jumping the fence to steal your minerals and your rocks, they’re just not going to do that that would not be considered value valuable to them.

So we believe that a prepper, someone that’s concerned about the economy wants to have better tasting foods, more nutrient, nutritive dense food, once a great family activity wants to save money.

Any of these or all of these reasons would be great causes for you to go and get your own seed bag and begin using it and grow it now.

I’m out here today and I’ve harvested three times three weeks on my cucumber row 20 feet. I have harvested today. 158 pounds of cucumbers. I think garden method works a lot better than anything I’ve ever tried.

So we can really with a clear conscience, recommend it wholeheartedly.

Brain: Wow, that’s great.

That’s really good stuff.

Lucinda: I hope you like pickles. Pickles and sweet butter chips are going to be Christmas gifts this year.

Brian: If you and I were talking a year from now and if we were to look back over what had happened over the past 12 months, what would you say happened that leave you feeling happy with your progress, both professionally and personally?

Lucinda: It’s a great question. And at the beginning of the year, I wanted to take our training a step higher, I realized that sitting in a classroom for three to five hours on any of our topics. While we think that’s good, it’s interesting, it’s really the hands-on experience that people need.

So at that time, I said, Hey, it will be a successful year, if I’m able to take a 10-week class and take 10 families, and train them in animal husbandry, all topics chicken.

And then I wanted to rinse and repeat, give myself three weeks of reprieve, and then beef up the class or whatever I have learned as an instructor, and then, you know, do that again.

So I want to do four classes, I will have trained 40 families in my immediate area, in how to have an egg length block or a meat flock, and then how to butcher if necessary.

So for me if that if I can get that done, I’m on track to do it.

If I can get that done, I will consider this a marvelous year.

Brian: Oh, that’s great.

So what are the obstacles that stand in your way of getting there?

Lucinda: Always finding the right people and making sure that well, I can’t make sure of anything, but that their schedule would allow them to come to all 10 classes, that would be good because we have a lot of people making commitments.

And skipping out on half the classes, you get what you invest, and we realize that but I think with the kind of class size because we can families, that would mean an average of two kids per family.

So you got a lot of variables swimming around there.

If a family actually gets to the point where they’re competent, can go into Tractor Supply, or get online and order the right breed and, you know, do it order for chicks and let’s just see how this works, I will consider that a success.

But I am finding a lot of acceptability to the hands on approach as opposed to the lecture approach.

Brian: That’s great.

This is The Off-the-Grid Biz Podcast, so we have a lot of people that have an interest in business, and enjoy kind of the self-reliance into that.

What advice would you have to older business owners listening there, if you have any blanket advice that you could pass along?

Lucinda: Yeah, whatever you’re passionate about, you are going to be good at you are going to be able to help others in that. So don’t do something that you don’t like Gods designed it a certain way.

You built certain interests and desires within you for a reason, that’s a wonderful thing.

Follow your dream, follow your heart, and work with a high standard of excellence and integrity. And you will be surprised my customers from all around Texas, they look if you are driving into this little Podunk 500 person town, will you stay in our guest room when you come by?

This is craziness. I sold them a seed bank at one gun show. But we develop long-term relationships because we have compassion and love for that family.

We want to be givers but we can not out-give God. So that’s what I would say to a person that, you know, wanting to start a business it’s a very wonderful aspiration. And it’s really a little bit more in alignment with how God organized society back in the day, right?

Somebody was a carpenter, their son generally was considered a future carpenter himself, a carpenter in training or there was an apprenticeship with the neighbor across the way, but there was a lot more community.

I think we’re moving in that direction. As a society, I think that we’re gonna see the importance of networking, and connection, and of helping our neighbors. I’m seeing that happen.

And that breaks down all the barriers, whatever political party, whatever, you know, religious institution, you come from whatever color you are, we are members of the human race.

That’s our first and only group that we need to be thinking of.

Brian: That’s a great message I appreciate you saying all that.

What could the listeners do who’d be interested in finding out more about Texas Ready and your products?

Lucinda: Oh, we’d love them to go to our website, www dot TexasReady, that’s one-word spell Texas out dot net (www.TexasReady.Net).

And that’ll give you a lot of places to go.

It’ll give you some book reviews, some things that you’re going to want in your library. If this thing goes down or goes away, you’re going to need some reference material, because gardening is not intuitive. So we’d love for you to hit the site.

The other thing we offer that no other Seed Company does is you pick up the phone, you have a garden question, I will direct you to the proper book that’ll answer that, or I’ll solve the problem.

If I don’t solve the problem, you get yourself a free book.

But there’ll be a very good question because, in 10 years, I’ve only sent out two books but I think I can help you in three to five minutes. If I’m not cheating, then I’m going to work with you.

Even if I’m out in the field, I’ll stop what I’m doing and we’ll try to fit that in. That’s for customers or noncustomers, I don’t care. Any patriots that wants to be growing, we want to be of assistance to.

Brian: Awesome, that was a fabulous conversation within the thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Lucinda: It was my privilege, I look forward to hearing from some of your constituents.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: That was a really great talk with Lucinda, she made a lot of great points that I’d like to try to tie things back to and point out, and hopefully, you could see how you can use something similar in your business.

One, it’s the ability to not make it too much about the end product itself.

Yes, she has a lot of knowledge about the seeds that they’re selling. But it’s more about the reason why someone would want the seeds and then she has the education, or information tied along with it, that people can take and run with.

So the classes that she puts on the information that they make available through their website, and so on and so forth. And they don’t just tie it to seeds, they tie it back to the reason why someone would want seeds, if you’re concerned about basically the structure that’s in place, being able to stay in place through all the craziness that can happen.

Like so much of what we saw through the COVID-19 Pandemic, these types of things lead a person to want to do homesteading, to want to do all these other items. And so she plays into that she gives the audience what they’re looking for if they’re able to sell seeds off of it fabulous, but it’s all toward the same end, which is really cool.

She really goes into psychology without getting too deep. She goes into the psychology of what they’re trying to promote.

They’re trying to push people away from the fear mindset from the fear energy, and more towards being confident being self-reliant, knowing what you’re doing, having the knowledge, and having the skills built around the knowledge to actually be able to do what you know that you can do. That’s really cool.

I also like the way that she discussed how they were able to build the business, just from one person to one person just from one event to the next. Building up that 32nd elevator speech.

If you’re able to do these simple ideas in marketing, you can apply it anywhere it you don’t have to go to gun shows, you don’t have to go to live events, you can do the same thing. Online principles are the same.

People are the same whether you’re communicating with them in person or via the internet.

Really great stuff across the board from Lucinda, I’d love to see what Texas Ready does in the future. This conversation is definitely worth re-listening to.

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.

Joe Rieck – Emergency Essentials

Looking past the amazement of people lining up for full carts of toilet paper in the month of March. The real underlining concern for most Americans was for safety for their loved ones yes, but also an all too real lack of practical preparedness.

Join us today as Joe Rieck of Emergency Essentials (BePrepared.com) shares what life has been like since sales started to climb in the month of February. From challenges the company has faced to the customer letters of gratitude Joe’s received that help him and the staff know they are making a difference in tough times.

Our hopes align with Joe’s that in light of these challenges, people will view preparedness as a practical and safe thing to do in the future.

Find out more at their website and be sure to pickup a QSS certified, 1-Month Food Supply – https://beprepared.com/

Full Transcript

Brian: Joe Rieck is the VP of sales for Emergency Essentials. It can be found online at BePrepared.com.

He’s been involved with emergency preparedness for over 14 years, and he has helped thousands of people to become better prepared. Joe Rieck, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Joe: Hey, thanks Brian for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Brian: So why don’t you let everyone know a little bit about what it is that you do?

Joe: Okay, so emergency essentials, we specialize in long-term emergency food, and this usually consists of freeze dried items as well as dehydrated items. We have a wide selection of fruits, vegetables, meats, ready made meals, MRE’s, we have a wide selection of emergency gear, 72 hour backpacks, water filtration systems, anything you can kind of think that you might need an event of an emergency or disaster. We try to have you covered.

Brian: Great.

How did you personally end up here? What’s your life story up to this point?

Joe: Well, you know, about 10 to 11 years ago, I was involved with a company that we started a long-term food storage company that grew. And we ended up selling that off a couple years ago.

Typically once companies get in the hands of private equity groups, the mission kind of changes a little bit.

I was lucky enough to be found with a group called Emergency Essentials. And I’ve been here for over two years. It’s a great little company, we’re a privately held, there’s no private equity group that is responsible for to.

We have one owner and that’s the only person that we listen to, and that we kind of take advice from. And so it’s very, very simple.

We try to just be there for our customers the best that we can. So I actually love what we do here at Emergency Essentials and it’s been a lot of fun over the past couple of years.

Brian: Oh, fabulous.

So what where do you find new customers at?

Joe: Well, let me just tell you right now they’re coming out of the woodworks with this whole COVID-19 pandemic that we’re going through. It’s like, a flip was switched and everybody in the world kind of became well aware of the need to have a backup plan.

As you can imagine, with this COVID crisis that’s going on just our industry, our business, I mean, we’ve been hit tremendously hard, you know, in a positive way, because the amount of interest that we have in our products. And so it means it’s caused a little bit of hiccups from a business perspective as far as having the capacity to produce and to make the food and to get it packaged and prepared and shipped out, which caused some trouble that way as far as having a backorder list.

But as far as the knowledge and the need to educate people, the media has done a great job of showing what happens in the event of a disaster with the shelves being cleared off.

I think we all kind of went through that several months ago where we couldn’t even find toilet paper, for crying out loud. These things happen and it brings your awareness to a different level of, “oh my gosh, our system is so fragile.”

People don’t understand how fragile our economy is, just the grocery stores the logistics, you know, the inventory control systems that people get their shipments in these grocery stores the night before they sell it.

It’s not the way that it was 30, 40 years ago, where they had all the backroom full of supplies, it kind of brings to light, like I said, what people kind of realized, “Oh, my gosh, things are super, super fragile. I need to get prepared. I need to be self sufficient emergency essentials.”

We’re here to help people do that.

Brian: Really makes sense that you’d be going through that type of growth right now, especially with everything that’s going on.

At what point did you start seeing change from the business perspective? And how did that all come about?

Joe: A lot of our customers they’re kind of in the know already. And so I kind of feel fortunate in the fact that once we started seeing an uptick in sales and more traffic and more talking behind the scenes with our customers and kind of their feeling of what was happening.

We started to see sales increase the first part of February or the end part of January, we saw a significant increase the last two weeks of January and right on into February.

A lot of our customers, they’ve been prepping for years. And they’ve been kind of seen and kind of watching what happens and they’re proactive. That is one thing that our customers are very good at is they are good at kind of seeing stuff that’s coming down.

They’re being proactive and kind of hedging that curve, if that makes sense to get the things that they need. So that way they can be self sufficient if they needed to.

It didn’t become mainstream until February 26.

That was the day that everything just kind of blew up where it became mainstream. Everybody was concerned about it. Everybody wanted to kind of get prepared. It’s been that rise ever since February 26.

But we felt that probably about a month before the mainstream population really felt that something was going to be happening.

Brian: Makes sense.

So apart from your online business, are there other places where you guys do marketing or advertising?

Joe: There’s really not. Emergency Essentials, believe it or not, we’ve been around here in the Salt Lake City area for over 30 years here locally, people would come into our retail stores.

We have three different locations throughout Salt Lake City, Utah, and in the Wasatch Front, unfortunately, two years ago, we closed down those stores because we would just do more volume through our website, and more business outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, to where it just didn’t make sense to keep those stores open.

We are strictly online we are at BePrepared.com is our website. We do not have a lot of resellers or other companies that are authorized to sell our products.

It’s something that we’ve kind of shied away from on purpose, because we always want to be there for our direct to consumers.

We want to be the source. We want to be the place where they go to get it because once you start involving wholesalers and distributors, it increases the cost for everybody. So we want to be your one stop shop your direct source to the product from the people that actually manufacture it and make it

Brian: Absolutely, boy, that’s great.

What would you say is your ideal customer? If you had to describe them if they were out in the audience, what would they consist of?

Joe: As simple as it sounds, I would just say moms and dads, somebody who has the responsibility to care for not only for themselves, but they have the chart of other people, whether it be their own kids, whether it be their stepkids, or whether it be their their aging parents, anybody that has to continue to survive and look out for others, I think is our ideal customer.

Most of our customer base is going to be a little bit older generations, grandma’s grandpa’s, just because they have a little bit more of that disposable income.

They can afford to to purchase this stuff because there’s a lot of younger families that it’s a struggle for them to make ends meet a lot of these younger families, they’re still going to school. They’re not really establishing their careers.

So nobody really thinks about wanting to be prepared except for those who have already passed that point in there life.

A lot of our customers are in fact grandparents who see the need to help out their kids and their grandkids and say, “hey, let me get you a month supply for you and your family.”

That way you guys can have it just that way they know that they’re okay, and that they’re going to be okay, if that makes sense.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely.

So what’s your top selling product?

Joe: Our top selling products is going to be our month supply packages.

The really neat thing about these things is that we focus on making sure that you get the calories that you need for survival.

Brian, there’s a lot of companies out there who sell emergency food, don’t get me wrong, and there’s some really good companies out there. But one thing that they fail to mention, and they fail to really focus on is providing the right amount of calories, as well as the right amount of protein for survival.

If you were to do it, like just a general question to a lot of your audience, you’d say well, how many calories you need to survive, and everybody’s just kind of their top of their mind.

They’re gonna say we 2,000 calories, and they get that information from the USDA. They get that information from the FDA based off the studies and so to that calories is kind of like the tipping point, yes, some people need a little bit less, some people need a little bit more.

But 2,000 is what we consider what you need for survival.

The other part of that is also going to be the protein, you got to have at least 40 grams of protein per day for survival. You don’t want to just have to struggle during any type of an emergency.

But you got a lot of other things going on that you have to worry about and focus on it. So we try to take that guesswork out and make it simple for you.

So our best selling packages, they’re going to be our month supply packages that are QSS certified. And what that QSS certification stands for it stands for quality survival standards, where if you see that symbol on our product, you know that you’re going to get a over 2,000 calories per day and be over 40 grams of protein per day.

And that’s really where we stand out is no other companies can compete with having 2,000 calories per day as well as 40 grams of protein per day for the price point that we offer it out.

Brian: Wow, that’s great. That’s really cool. Kind of a mouthful, but it is interesting

Joe: Because that isn’t discussed a lot because of the difficulty of having to bring proteins into emergency prep food. Because a lot of companies will be like, “well, hey, look, look how many thousands of servings you’re gonna get for you and your family.”

But when you do the math on it, you’re living off of five 600 calories per day, and I’m sorry, Brian, you’re not going to survive off a five to 600 countdown, you’re just not going to. Like I said, we want to just provide an outstanding product for our customers where they know that what they have sitting there in their pantries or in their closets, is going to do exactly what they intended to do is to get them through those rough times.

Brian: Make sense, makes sense.

Joe, what do you like best about your business and your industry?

Joe: Honestly, I was asked that the other day, and what I love about this, and I know this is gonna sound like a major cliche, and it’s gonna sound really, really cheesy, but I’ll be honest with you, Brian. It really was brought to light over the past few months because we get hundreds of letters on a daily basis from our customers and going through those letters and actually seeing our product being used for what it’s intended for.

That’s the reason why we do it.

We got stories of parents who were unable to go to the grocery stores because they had loved ones that were susceptible to COVID. And they needed this help to shelter in place. They didn’t have enough food to get them through from the grocery store and guess what they were using.

They were literally using our product, they would go to the buckets, they’d grab up the pouch of the macaroni and cheese, add it to board and water and bam, they’d have dinner for them and their family, hearing those stories of people actually needing using our products.

That’s what’s so satisfying about this. That’s what keeps me coming back to work when things are hard and things are slow or whatever. But just knowing that we are really making a difference. It’s a feeling that I had that I felt the first time I ever sold my first mergency bucket, believe it or not, was just knowing that that family has something that they can fall back on if they ever need to do it.

Over the years, I’ve learned Brian that it doesn’t take a national pandemic for you to want to be prepared.

You think about if dad or mom were to lose their job, the income earner for that family, and they don’t have the ability to go out and purchase the food is that not an emergency for that particular family?

Just by having something stored away, whether it’s a week supply, whether it’s a month supply, whether it’s a year supply, having something that you can fall back on, that provides a peace of mind, for any parent, any any person out there who has to really provide for others?

Brian: Yeah, great. So that on the other end of things, if you could change anything about your business or the industry as a whole, what would it be?

Joe: 10 years ago, you would be considered one of the crazy preppers are one of the crazy guys, the conspiracy theorists out there. The guy that thinks that zombies are going to start walking around, you know, and capping off people. You don’t have to be like that.

I’m a person that I do believe that bad things happen. I do believe that earthquakes happen, that tornadoes happen, that economic things happen, and I don’t think anybody’s immune to those types of disasters.

Just creating that stigmatism isn’t away from that crazy conservative, grab your guns, nobody’s going to come take my family type of mentality. That is completely washed out the window.

Today, I look at it as like car insurance. We don’t buy car insurance hoping that we can get into an accident. We buy car insurance just in case if we find ourselves in that situation something to kind of help us out.

Same type of concept with this food.

We don’t buy this product hoping that the world is going to fall apart and that the US dollar is going to fail or that zombies are going to walk around. We buy this just in case something happens.

There’s a flood, the power goes out If dad loses his job, if there’s a national pandemic and they say, “Hey, stay in your house” or whatever. That’s the reason why you buy this stuff.

That’s the reason why we have it is just to prepare for those times. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to be better prepared.

Brian: Hmm. Well, that’s a great point.

If you and I were talking and a year from now, we got back to the let’s say did another show and we looked at over the past 12 months, what would have had to have happened for you to feel happy with the progress in both your life and your business?

Joe: Number one, probably to be caught up with all of our past overdue orders.

We’re still behind as far as being able to fulfill those orders, you know, and we’re hopeful that we can be caught up here the next little bit. When I say that we have been working around the clock, we literally have been working around the clock.

I mean, here at our facility, we are open. We’re only shut down for three hours in a 24 hour period.

And that’s just to stop sanitize, clean the equipment. Get ready for the next shift to come in.

We’ve been going like this since February, there’s one thing that I really want to happen is I want to be able to have the capacity if there is a big emergency or national pandemic or something like that, we could actually be able to help out everybody who needs help.

We look back at the past five months, there’s a lot of missed opportunity because there’s just not the capacity for equipment for machine times to produce the amount of food that was really needed. And I don’t Anybody any fortune 500 company could have prepared for this type of increase in business increase in demand for your product.

I think other companies would have failed to where I pat ourselves on the back that we’ve done a tremendous job of being somewhat in front of the curve a little bit.

And I think we fared a lot better than a lot of our competitors.

Because we control the manufacturing, control over what we do with our machines and how we produce our machine. What items we produce.

It’s just a matter of having that extra built in capacity, having a backup plan for our backup plan that had a backup plan. It’s just nobody could prepare for that.

That was one thing that if we were to have this conversation again in a year, would be to, hey, I want to be able to be caught up and go back to our two day delivery time that our customers are used to having.

Brian: So what are the obstacles standing in your way of getting there right now?

Joe: Commodities and just the way to get it because when you talk about a commodity, you know, you’re looking at our industry in the emergency preparedness industry.

We’re not like a grocery store, we’re not like the big box stores like a craft or like Uncle Ben’s rice, when those items get sold off of the shelves, because those guys do millions and millions of dollars worth of product, we’re just a small piece of that.

They get priority over those commodity items. It’s just kind of waiting our turn. Even though in the industry, we’re one of the largest in the industry. But when you do it on a larger scale, we’re just very, very small fish. The Costco’s of the world, the Walmarts of the world, those guys get first priority to the raw ingredients to the actual supplies before we do just a matter of kind of fighting for our space and making sure that we have what we need to be able to cover for our customers as well.

I think right now people are more understanding of emergency food and the need for it.

So I think hopefully with time, people can start to understand, “oh my gosh, this is not one of those crazy things to do anymore.” But more of a practical safe thing to do.

Brian: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So many things that go into all the mechanics and logistics with it, I can understand. Doesn’t take much….especially with nowadays with all the demand, the increase in demand, it doesn’t take much to slow things down.

Joe: I hope going through this it kind of helps our customers understand how fragile our system really is.

And you think about what just look at like the semi trucks that haul product back and forth. I mean, those guys seriously are the lifeline of this country.

If the trucking industry were to go down for some reason, or some form of another customer get product, how do grocery stores get food?

How do businesses get the materials, the raw materials that they need in order to produce to produce a product, everything is so critical, and everything is so intertwined, that if one piece falls off, the whole system shuts down.

We experienced that as well.

We have suppliers that provide us our film that we put our food in, and if we can’t have the film, we can’t put the food in it. If we can’t get the buckets are the width for the buckets if we can’t get those in.

I mean everything just stops and everything like I said is so intertwine that it’s a very very fragile system and it’s a juggling act to make sure that you can coordinate with the bucket supplier coordinate with the film supplier coordinate with the wrong ingredients supplier coordinate machine time. It’s a tremendous feat to do that.

Brian: Absolutely. Wow, that’s incredible behind the scenes look at things. Appreciate your help here, Joe.

We have a lot of people that listen to this for the perspective of business, even though we play within the self reliance field and cover everything for emergency preparedness on so what blanket advice would you have for someone either in your position or similar that you could leave us with today?

Joe: The overall piece of advice is just keep plugging away knowing what you’re doing, there’s a phrase that I absolutely love, Brian, it’s this, “The small and simple things make you the greatest things.”

So it’s a small and simple things that you do in day to day that you got to grind away and eventually you’re going to have this big huge thing at the end of the day at the end of the week or the end of the month or the end of the year.

Keep going, it’s a constant battle.

But I think going through this exercise with COVID, and really seeing how fragile things are, it’s not a crazy idea to be prepared.

It’s not a crazy idea to have a backup plan.

You know, we talked about having evacuation plans for the elementary schools, we talked about having all these little different backup plans, but it’s not a bad idea to do it.

And I hope it doesn’t take a national emergency like what’s going on right now, for people to understand that it’s okay to get prepared, be self-reliant, because the only person that really cares about your survival is yourself.

People think that the government’s going to come there to bail them out.

While the government does a great job as much as they can. Guess what, Brian it’s gonna take a long time for them to actually come to your door and be like, Hey, what do you need?

And that’s just not gonna happen.

Be self-reliant, be self-sufficient, and do what feels right, follow your gut.

That is one thing that is interesting is before all of this started, I can tell you numerous times I got a phone call saying, “Hey, Joe I don’t know why calling you, but I feel like I need to get something just because something’s going to be happening.”

I could tell you countless times, Brian when my phone would ring and that would be the conversation before this whole pandemic thing happened. Follow your gut.

If you feel like you need to do something, do it and act on it. Don’t just listen to it, but you got to act on it as well.

Brian: Absolutely. Great advice. Joe, where can people go to find out more about Emergency Essentials and anything that you guys provide?

Joe: Right you guys visit our website, go to BePrepared.com, browse our website.

It’s a very, very simple website. Don’t feel overwhelmed.

We have also preparedness specialists on the phone that you can call our toll free number. You can talk with myself, you can talk with you know some of the other preparedness specialists that can guide you through different plans and different options.

Because there’s just not a cookie cutter size. There’s not a one size fits all package because every family is going to be different

Brian, every family’s gonna have different needs different wants different habits.

Talking with a preparedness specialist. They can guide you through the things that you need.

They can help you get your basics covered.

They can help you get your more advanced stuff covered, help you come up with a plan to follow does take time to do this.

You can start off small and grow it up over time so that we can be prepared for it. Give us a call.

We’re more than happy to walk you through this. We’re happy to talk to you happy to share with you what we’ve discovered over the past little bit, what works best for us.

We can help you with whatever you guys need.

Brian: Fabulous. Okay, Joe Rieck from Emergency Essentials, thanks so much for being on the Off the Grid Biz Podcast.

Joe: My pleasure, Brian. I hope we can do this again sometime.

Brian: Absolutely.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: There it is another great conversation. I really enjoyed my time with Joe and there were about three things that I think stood out.

The first thing, he has a great ability to present his ideas, he clearly understands it and has all the facts and figures right on the tip of his tongue. That’s really good.

I know a lot of people might see that as kind of shallow praise, but it’s not because you need someone like that you need somebody and remember, he’s the VP of sales. He’s not the owner of the company.

He’s the VP of sales. And so that’s his job.

If you’re not the one that’s out there, doing the promoting, and you don’t have anyone that is ideally set to be the promoter, you need someone you need someone like Joe on your team, and I appreciate him for his ability to be able to do that.

Second thing is when he was discussing their ideal customer, as anybody that’s responsible for somebody else. So whether you’re talking about parents, or whether you’re talking about children, taking care of their elderly parents or anything of that sort.

Those are the type of people that are their ideal customer.

Now that obviously that doesn’t mean this their only customer. But he knew exactly what I meant. He knew I meant ideal customer who were the people that are your slam dunk customers.

And that’s really neat to see because oftentimes when people talk about ideal customers, they talk about demographics. So they talk about their age, or their gender, and all that stuff’s great and it’s important to know all that.

But it’s also important to know the psychographic which is the things that describe how they think and feel.

That’s where he went directly to and that was really key and something that you should take note of when you’re talking about your ideal customer or thinking about or designing your ideal customer. Really think not just about who they are on the outside, what’s going on on the inside, what’s the conversation going on in their head.

The third thing is how well this company is doing during what is basically a recession brought on by the COVID-19 situation and the fact that their demand is going through the roof.

It’s not uncommon in certain sectors.

Obviously, if you’re in emergency preparedness, anything of this sort, these type of companies are having increased demand during this time, especially in comparison to where it was just before, I would recommend that you at least have some element of your company that may not be doing great all the time.

But when times get tough, it’s where people run into.

I saw a lot of people in the emergency preparedness and survival niches that were having a tough time during the good economic times leading up to 2020. And then as soon as COVID-19 hit and you had forced quarantine and so forth, you had everything being pulled back, and all of a sudden things like emergency preparedness go through the roof.

So it’s an important thing to keep in mind with your business. You have an element of your business that though it may go bad and good times should have an element that goes good and bad times if you get my drift on that all these points and plus all the other little nuggets that Joe brought up.

I think it makes this worth relisting to, again and again. So go back and re-listen to this conversation sometime and I think it’ll be helpful to you too.

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.

David & Beth Pruett – AMP-3: Part 2

Amp-3.net

Episode 31.

When it comes to your business, what are you good at, and what do you need help with? Are you ACTIVELY searching for help?

In this episode David and Beth Pruett discuss with host Brian J. Pombo all the highs and lows of building an “accidental business.” When their first product became a run-away seller, they inadvertently found themselves in the growing world of eCommerce.

A load of live events, rampant customers and a hugely popular YouTube Channel later, David and Beth are looking to take their website and business to the next level.

What do they recommend for growing businesses? Listen Now!

Beat out your competition – EVEN if it’s Amazon.com: https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook

 

Full Transcript

Beth: David and I have always had the theory that we are not here to sell you something. We want to teach you something, from day one. If we don’t sell anything, that’s fine. If you learn a skill and can take that home with you, that is more important to us than us selling you a product.

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: Welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast, I’m Brian Pombo.

What you’re about to hear is part two, in a two part interview series that we’re doing with David and Beth Pruett, owners of AMP-3.net and host of the YouTube channel, USNERDOC.

The first conversation went deeply into the life story and background and what drew them both into the arena of emergency preparedness and true emergency preparedness. Not just the prepper stuff that you see on TV, but really preparing for specific emergency situations.

It’s very interesting. If you did not get a chance to listen to it and make sure and go back and listen to that part one first, you could get that over at offthegridbiz.com.

This is part two.

In this one, we focus much more into the details of their business and what makes it work, what they’d rather be doing better in their business, and we go into some of that, although we mainly focus on the areas that they’re wanting to improve in.

But David and Beth’s frankness and openness about where they’re at and where they want to be was really refreshing.

Great to listen to and I hope it will help you to develop where you want to take your business to.

Now let me set the scene. This is a second interview that took place months after the first interview.

This time we did the interview from inside of their new camper trailer that they call Liberty. You get to hear a little bit of the back and forth of them referring back to Liberty.

They’re talking about where we’re sitting right there.

So have a listen, enjoy and I’ll be back on the other end to discuss some of what I got out of the conversation.

Brian: When you first started putting kits together, what were you thinking was going to happen?

What actually happened?

David: The first thought was that we would build 10 and that would be good for a year. That was because we had put a video out on how to make kits including a downloadable PDF.

At that point I wasn’t even thinking about making that a document that we could start a business and download a document, collect an email, start developing an email list so it was free on YouTube, download the PDF of the IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit).

Now start thinking about another video.

Beth: And it’s still on there, it’s still on our YouTube channel.

David: But we get so many quests like, where do I buy that kit?

Instead of, oh, I’m going to go build my kit. Thanks for putting that out.

How do I buy that kit?

Long story short, Beth said, you know, we should make some kits and put them online and see what happens.

So we made 10 and it was a huge struggle to build 10 weeks. We had to get all the little pieces and it was fairly expensive to do and we built 10 kids.

Beth: Back then you were shrink wrapping everything.

David: Vacuum packing everything. Everything was vacuum pack, so we did all of that.

Made little red tear seals, they’re very labor intensive and I thought, okay, we may 10 of these and their going to last a year. And the website, we made a little funky website and literally sold them that day, gone.

Beth: We sold in an hour.

David: We were out and about, I don’t know how long,a short period of time, but the website, we didn’t know, kept selling kits, just kept selling them.

We turned the website off, and took a breath and said, okay, what do we do here?

We built more kits, satisfied all of that and then made a decision, do we want to start a business?

Beth: Then you thought, well we should build 25 and see how it goes. Because we weren’t really ready to start the business yet.

David: I said, oh that’s all my YouTube buddies buying kits, yeah. But as fast as we can build these kits, we’d sell them.

Beth: Yeah. And it was at that point that we thought we would start a website and we really had one kit that was, that was it. Then David’s like, well we should probably add like a blood stopper to it.

Because David was in the military, and you did you use those in there? In the Navy.

David: Yeah.

Beth: Then we had two kits. So we had the bloodstopper and we had the IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit), and then we added the EDC, the everyday carry. And we had three for a while.

David: We went to gun shows. That was the big thing is just set up a little table at gun shows. My first show that I did was CPAK, for Ham radios.

I had a little table and I had…

Beth: Little white tubs.

David: I had little white tubs that I got from the hospital.

They were basically throw away tubs that all the flushes for IB and the tech’s would just like save piles of these and then they would discard them.

So I looked at those and thought, oh, I could use those for organizing bins.

My table at CPAK was a little foldable. I think it was a four foot table, four foot table, but like you get at Costco, whatever the company is,

I didn’t even have a drape on it, just the table. I had a whole bunch of these little white tubs with a little postcard tape to it and this is this, this and this.

It was very rudimentary, but it was successful.

Beth: But you sold out!

David: But we sold out and then I started doing gun shows with my first partner who were not in business anymore. It just didn’t work out.

Beth and I have been business partners ever since that time. We travel all over doing gun shows, Nevada, Tulsa.

Beth: People would travel to come and see us. It was just kind of like interesting because David USNERDOC (Youtube Channel), so people would come from Texas and kind of all over, especially to Tulsa.

David: Very humbling thing to have people travel and come and visit and take a look at our products was I think rewarding and very humbling.

Beth: And we have great, great friends because of going to the gun shows. When we go to Reno we have friends there and we go to Tulsa, we have friends there and then we started doing preparedness shows.

David started teaching suture classes, so he teaches a wound care management suture class and classes have been like kits.

We started off with one class and one of the shows asked us if we do any classes and a friend of ours that we kind of do shows with said, oh here’s the thing you need to do.

Beth: You have to do classes.

David: Do a class and it helps your sales at the show.

We watched her, she sells a Texas Ready (Lucinda Bailey), but sells seed banks and she would do a class, and the entire class would get up and follow her in mass, like ducks right over to her booth.

We always go out to dinner with her and she said, hey, you guys need to come up with a class.

So driving home we kind of talked about what can we do and we thought, because I’ve taught suture classes in the military. I said why don’t we just do a suture class?

I didn’t think about how complex that would be individually, not with the support of the military. Sure enough, a show asked us, do you do classes? And we said sure we’ll do a suture class.

Beth: Well they called us because another company was scheduled to do classes and Vinny said I’m in a panic and a pinch, and I need to see if you can come and teach that suture class.

We were kind of already on our way to the show, because it was in Missouri.

So I told David, you’re going to have to teach this suture class.

David: I’m literally typing the class as we’re driving to Missouri.

Beth: And I’m ordering supplies to ship to the hotel to get to Missouri. Then I asked Vinny, I said, here’s the list that I need you to get. And he did. He went and got everything else we needed and we taught 40 farmers.

David: They came in wearing their, literally, overalls, muddy boots, dirty boots, you shake their hand and it’s like, oh you work for like living.

Beth: We also taught the Amish and that was really, really cool. That was kind of our first introduction to the preparedness industry and teaching classes.

David: In those days we taught suture classes with frozen pig’s feet and we taught that way for, I would say two years?

Beth: No, only a couple of shows.

David: Really. I thought it was more.

Beth: On we only did a few shows with the pig’s feet.

David: It was always hard to get the pig feet in the right sort of thaw. Get them to thaw enough that you can suture on, but not so frozen that you can’t.

And not so unthawed that they’re kind of yucky.

Then all the stuff had to be collected and sterilized because you know, it’s just not clean after doing that.

Then everybody had to work gloves and that’s how we taught classes in the military was on pigs feet or sometimes we would get a hide and lay the whole hide out on on a table and people would come around and that was a big old smelly thing that you’d roll up and discard.

So we finally graduated to artificial skin and then we started giving the kits away that included the artificial skin so people go home and practice.

It was an evolution. So one class led to another, just like one kit led to another. I think now we have six or eight classes that we can do.

Brian: I think I understand this, but just for the people listening, can you explain why, as somebody that’s already going to one of these shows, what’s the advantage of putting on a class?

Beth: There’s a couple things. We get to showcase our products to a customer.

And David and I have always had the theory that we are not here to sell you something.

We want to teach you something, from day one. If we don’t sell anything, that’s fine. If you learn a skill and can take that home with you, that is more important to us than us selling you a product.

David: If someone wants to buy something from us, they’ll buy something. It was a way for us to showcase things, but it was a venue to share and teach.

Like one of the classes we do is sort of a MacGyver approach to wound care out in the field. And like people will buy like for instance, a SAM Splint at REI, or Sportsman, or wherever.

Most people have never taken it out of the package and used it. So how do you use it and then what are the MacGyver things you can do to sort of make it even more useful?

We do demo on tourniquets and trauma dressings. You know, I always ask how many people have one of these? And I hold it up and all the guys raise your hand, oh I’ve got one of those.

Then I say, how many have actually used one and then all the hands would go down, except maybe one or none.

So I said, you know, it’s not helpful to have one if you’ve not used it because if you actually need to use this, that means something bad happened and now you’re doing something that requires a little bit of forethought and some hands on and you’ve never done it.

We would bring people up from the audience and take out a tourniquet, take out a Israeli trauma dressing and put it on and then have them put it on me or have them put it on somebody else.

Then they walk away going, oh I know how to do it. Now I know how to use that.

Because a lot of those guys would have it in their range bag, but they’ve never taken one out to use it. I say, don’t buy one from me, here’s how you can go to Walmart with a couple of buddies and buy maxi pads, ACE wrap.

How to put together your own trauma dressing for, I don’t know, it was like five bucks. You can do that. So that kind of was a fun class to teach people how to do that stuff.

Beth: Well, and then we started getting into Ham radio. David was on the disaster committee at the hospital and they were offering a Ham radio class.

David: I forgot. Are you a ham radio operator?

Brian: No.

David: Oh, you got to do that. I think every guy that’s somewhere n your bucket list. Right, I want to be a Ham radio operator and I’d always wanted to do that and just never had done it.

One of my techs who’s the lead Ham radio operator in our system, would call me and I’m always, my schedule’s weird and I’d always be working.

She called on a weekend and said, hey, we’re doing another Ham radio class if you’re free, you know, come and attend. And it was free.

The hospital was putting these classes on to get Ham radio operators. So if we had a disaster, we’ve got this sort of sideline communication group that can keep the hospital communications up and running.

Sure enough, I didn’t have anything going that weekend and I went and took the class and literally changed my life.

Beth: Because you really….I mean you’ve talked to the space station 33 times and the people that you meet.

David: It just opens up this whole room in the world if you will. And if you’ve got a radio in your vehicle, if you’re traveling, you’re like a microphone away from getting help or whatever.

Beth: And then Matt and I went and got our Ham radio licenses. It just kind of made sense that we should be talking and teaching

Ham radio but also selling Ham radios. And so we started our whole line and that promoted us being contacted by the prepper project.

The proper project happened a few years ago. They were looking for experts in the field.

David: In various fields.

Beth: Yeah. 20 different categories or something. And David was the medical.

David: So that was the first time we ever did anything like that. They wanted video and area of expertise. And so I made a little home video in our kitchen on trauma dressing in a tourniquet or something, and it was very well received.

Some people just went on for like 40 minutes with like a PowerPoint slide throwing on the same tone of voice like this and a slide going on.

Beth: Yours was the number one video.

David: It wasn’t because of me, but mine was the only like dynamic video. You know, people have an attention span of like a gnat.

If you’re listening to a monotone with slides going like this, I remember the Navy when they did that, people would, not often you have to stand up and go in the back of the room.

I made a like a real video and it was well received and that ended up being a little door for us to do videos on medical stuff. And then also radio, because we would do a radio class at prepper shows.

They said, can you do a Ham radio class?

Well, if you’re a Ham radio operator, you can’t do like a one hour class and it’s not useful for him. Ham radio is a very complex subject at least to get into.

So I said I’m happy to do class introduction to Ham radio, but also communication for preparedness. What’s the menu of things that you can look at?

We talk about scanners, shortwave radios, FRS, GMRS and Ham radio. And I brought all that equipment and we lay it out on two tables and people could play with it and see it. Some places we even got on the air with the repeater and let people talk to somebody locally.

They had their first like ham radio experience without a license, which I think was pretty helpful.

Beth: That was huge and that turned into a video. A DVD. So you didn’t preparedness communications.

David: Yeah.

Beth: And then you also did your suturing. So we did a suture class video, DVD, and we also did my DVD on our outfitter, which is like our biggest kit, which basically has components of all of our kits plus more.

David: They came in videotape for like three days, but we MacGyvered stuff. So we’d say here’s how this works and then here’s what you can do with it above and beyond.

Beth: That was all through the Prepper Project and also Survival Summit.

Those two, AMP-3 has taken kind of a life of its own.

David: Which it never was meant to do. I mean literally the YouTube video has made a company and if I could go back, I would change so many things.

Like AMP-3, is like the worst business name you could come up.

If you want to start a business and you say, I want to be very successful with it, then pick AMP-3, because people have no idea what it means.

Beth: But it’s easy.

David: It was a playlist. It was a name from a playlist, the Austere Medical & Practical Preparedness Project.

So I just started putting these videos in this playlist and when we started the company I thought, Oh, we’ll just call it the Austere Medical & Practical Preparedness Project, which is too long of a name.

It got shortened to the acronym AMP-3 and nobody has any idea what is AMP-3, what does it really mean?

Beth: But I mean, we’re not going to change the name now.

David: We’re kind of stuck with it.

Beth: But people know, they know AMP-3 so I can’t tell you we have a really, really loyal customers.

David: I think because of it we’ve become a niche. I mean we have a very loyal customer base and because of those customers that base is growing.

But we are a slow growing thing and mainly because we’re like a little niche. You can go buy a first aid kit anywhere or you could buy one of ours and there’s differences.

If you go to REI or Sportsman and buy a first aid kit, nothing against them but the quality is not there.

And that’s how I started making these kits because I would buy one as a doctor, I would add things to that kit to make it like, okay this is a real first aid kit.

That’s how we started doing this.

If you look at the paper inserts and some of those store bought kits are just paper and what is it doing outside right now as we’re doing this podcast, it’s raining.

If you’re going to be using one of these kits out and about, I assume worst case scenario that you’re going to be in inclement weather. Our kits are designed for inclement weather. All the labels are laser printed on right in the rain, waterproof paper. They’re packed in waterproof flock sack bags.

We try and give the best quality individual items and whenever possible. We always try to purchase things that are made in the USA.

Beth: That’s kind of our big thing. You could buy a first aid kit pretty much anywhere, Amazon, whatever.

But the majority of them, other than I think maybe one other company, they’re made in China, we really do have that American made product.

David & Beth: Although some things are hard to get that aren’t made in China, between bandages and gauze pads, you can’t find them, you know, bandages, that kind of stuff.

Beth: But our quikclot is made here, the swat tourniquet made here. The Israeli trauma dressing is made actually in Israel. Yeah. So we buy direct from the manufacturer in Israel but we also support like several other small companies like ours, lock sacks, those are made in the USA and Linda Kennedy has been a God sent to our company .

David: From day one.

Beth: From day one.

David: We could not afford them initially.

Beth: No.

David: So when we made kits, we would buy five at a time. Lock sack bags, that was all we could do for that two weeks as by the five lock sack bags.

Beth: Because we have cash fund in our company. So we have zero debt.

David: Our customers have funded the company.

Beth: Yeah, exactly. The profit just goes right back into our company and we really strive to try and make a US made product

David: Even went so far as we design and manufactured our own bags and we’ve had people say you could do that cheaper, send that bag overseas. And honestly we could, we could take our designs which are now fairly mature and pretty solid.

They don’t need any changes and we can have them contract sown overseas for like much less and the overall cost of all of our kits could certainly be better if we were to do that, but we have resisted that.

Because number one, we’re a customer for another business that does contract sewing and we like that direct contact with them and control over the quality. We like the quality and we like the fact that it’s made in the USA.

Beth: That’s been a huge thing for us.

Yeah, we started our company with made in the USA. We want to keep our company made in the USA and the quality is different. We have a line of Ham radio bags that are manufactured for us here in the USA.

There’s all of David’s design so all of our bags were designed by David and they’re manufactured here for us.

David: We can’t keep them in stock, but occasionally we’ll get an email from someone who says that is a ridiculous price. Initially, I would say, you know, if I didn’t know because of what we do.

I’d say that is kind of a ridiculous price, but actually making these bags and knowing what goes into them and the details that are done that we have specified with the sower, they’re very complex bags.

It’s not an outrageous price, but you have to kind of know that to know that.

Beth: And our bags are unique, like our tactical transceiver bag, there’s nothing else like it out there. And that’s for the Yaesu 817 or something comparable to that radio, but it has lots of compartments.

David’s really thought that out. It has a backpack straps on it, so it’s portable and ready to go wherever you go.

Even our little radio buddy that was designed and that’s manufactured. So we have a line of Ham radio bags, medical bags, Ham radios.

So the product line went from an iFAK to kind of what we are today.

I think we’re pretty proud of where it’s gone.

David: It’s been fun and we’ve enjoyed it, we really do.

Beth: We love to travel. And traveling all over the USA. We’ve been to North Carolina. We went out there for a show. We went to Tennessee for a show.

David: Georgia or Alabama, one of those.

Beth: Yeah, we went to Georgia, Texas.

David: But we’ve met so many great people and we like teaching. We like sharing and we’ve given away so much. I think that’s the fun thing to do in business too is if you’ve been blessed, is to recognize when it’s right to share that blessing. And there’s many times that Beth will walk over to someone and….

Beth: Like the little Amish kids, remember that they were just so cute. This Amish family that we met in Springfield, Missouri, they had seven children and super well behaved and Buddy, the dad took David’s suture class and the mom was constantly with the seven kids the whole time.

So I gave them all rite in the rain books, with their own pencils and they were like so excited.

Oh my gosh, three full days. Every single day. They were at the show and they had their book and they’d come over and they’d go, look what I wrote down today and you know, I’m taking notes from this class. And that’s the neat thing about the preparedness shows is there’s so many great classes.

Unfortunately we never get to go to them.

David: So that goes back to your question. So what do people gain and why would they want to do that if they’re going to a show?

I don’t know, I guess I look at it as something that you walk away from, that show that you’ve got. We don’t charge for our classes except for the suture class, because of the materials, which are expensive, but they only pay for the materials.

They don’t pay for my time teaching. So in our mind, it’s something that you walk away from that event that you can put in your pocket that’s free, that’s valuable is how we look at that.

Beth: Well, knowledge is everything. And if you’re knowledgeable about something, or you gained skills or you look at products.

Unfortunately some of the classes at preparedness shows the people are really just trying to sell you their product.

And that happens I think more than not, which is unfortunate. But then there’s a group of people who are really good friends of ours who are really there to teach a skill or like Lucinda from Texas Ready Seed Bank, she wants you to grow your own food.

She’s going to teach you how to do that, whether you buy her seed banks or her books or whatever. And some of the shows are awesome.

Brian: You talked about how you have a lot of ongoing customers and ones that you know personally and so forth and they come back again and again. They refer other people.

When you’re talking about new customers, for people that find you for the first time, they’ll find you through a friend recommending them. They’ll find one of your YouTube videos. They’ll stumble across your website via Google or something. They’ll see a class or see you set up at a show.

Where else are you getting new customers?

Are those the main places?

Beth: Some of the main places. Once in a while, I will advertise on like Instagram and Facebook, I don’t do that that often.

Brian: And what do you advertise on there? What are you saying?

Beth: Mainly preparedness. Like have you downloaded our list of 100 essentials?

Brian: Perfect.

Beth: You know, check out our resource page. Usually it’s not to sell a product. It’s really to give information.

Like California’s a great example right now, with them turning off the power.

David: We had a friend, a good friend of ours from California call, they were in Nevada, but it was right the very first time when California and PG&E was turning off power because of the wind loads.

And they were trying to, you know, obviously prevent fires and that sort of thing.

But they were saying powers can be turned off. We’re anticipating turning it off on this date potentially could be off for a week. I remember Patrice called Beth…

Beth: In a panic.

David: Patrice was like, what do I need to do?

Beth: What do I need to do?

David: And we’ve talked to them about preparedness before, but now suddenly when you have a reason, and it’s impacting your life. Now it’s like, oh, now I’ve got to do something.

Beth: Patrice has my list of 100 essentials. And I said, Patrice, you have the list.

What have you done?

She said, I really haven’t done anything. I’m going to go to Costco and buy some flats of water.

I said instead of that Patrice, go to like a farm and ranch store. You’re in Nevada, go to a farm and ranch store and buy some blue five gallon jugs that you can fill with water once you get home.

Luckily they have a well, and Rod, her husband is very knowledgeable and he already had the generators going.

David: And you couldn’t buy generators in their area to save your soul. They were sold out.

Beth: Sold out. So she actually was buying five generators and taking them back home to give to her tenants that rent from her so that they would have a way to power like their refrigerators and that kind of stuff.

But you have to think about this stuff ahead of time and not be panicking like Ms Patrice. Try and think ahead like this could happen.

In California you have to really be prepared 100% of the time for earthquake, for PG&E shutting down the power, for a fire.

David: If you have that five gallon container of water, how long will that keep you or your family going?

So then it’s always fun to ask people how much water, minimum, water do you need per person per day.

And most people don’t know the answer to that.

Beth: They think one gallon will last a whole week.

David: So it’s a gallon, per person, per day.

So you’ve got five gallons, that’s enough for you for five days, not even a week or a family of five. That’s enough for one day. And that’s not doing dishes or hygiene.

And so, you just think, okay, now I’ve got a multiply that out. How much do I need for a family of three for seven days of PG&E turns my power off?

Just the water and then a generator.

Well, what’s the safe way to run a generator? What can I run on that generator?

So you buy a generator, maybe it’s one of these Honda 2000 watt generators. That doesn’t mean your entire house can run on 2000 Watts.

Like here, Beth turned on the microwave and the generator is powering our trailer right now, but it’s also running power out to our barn and she exceeded the power without thinking about the power of 2000 Watts, what are we doing with it?

So, and then how long can you run it? How long does a tank a gas last?

We run into that a lot with radios. So people will buy radios or they’ll say, oh, I’ve got four of those on my shelf.

And they’re in the box sitting on the shelf.

I can tell you I feel pretty comfortable with radios, but if you don’t use them for a long period of time and then you get a little bug and say, oh, I’m gonna get on the air and talk on a repeater, or I want to try and talk to one of the satellites and practice.

You look at that radio and say, oh, where’s the menu for this?

How do I do the repeater offset?

Where is the tone?

Then I always ask people, do you think you’re just going to pull it off?

And now just, Hey Brian, where are you?

I mean, so if you’re going to talk to someone, one, they’ve got to know that you’re going to be on the air at X period of time. You need to know how far away are they?

Is the radio going to make that leap?

There’s so many things.

Beth: Preparedness is, it can be very expensive, if you want it to be, or it can be very affordable depending upon what you need to get on your list.

The trauma dressing thing is, is an example of that. I tell people, if it’s expensive, don’t buy our tourniquet.

Don’t buy the Israeli trauma dressing. Get a couple of buddies. Go to Walmart, buy a bulk package of maxi pads. Buy a bulk package of four inch ACE wraps. Get Nitrile Gloves and put pair of gloves, ACE wrap and a maxi pad in a Ziploc bag.

And at least you’ve got that tool and now you know how to use it.

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.

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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.

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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.

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And now back to the conversation.

Beth: Everybody should have a first aid kit. Everybody should have the ADC talked to Brian about your ADC that you carry every single day.

David: Oh my web belt, my flashlight and knife. I mean everyday.

And if I don’t have it cause I’m flying, I feel uncomfortable.

I look at it in layers and it starts with what do you have with you every day that you can count on. Maybe it’s on your key chain, maybe it’s in your pocket, but everyday you pick up your wallet and whatever.

Some people even include a firearm in that and all these tools you want to be proficient with. And then the next layer out to me is, you know, your backpack or my work bag, my briefcase, I’ve got another layer of things in there. Then my next layer is my vehicle and the next layer is what do I have at home?

Wherever you are, you know, okay, I’ve got what I’ve got on me. And then close at hand, I’ve got my backpack or my carry bag for work.

Beth: You’ve got you Go bag with you all the time.

David: I’ve got my Go bag in my vehicle, I’ve got other things in my vehicle.

These things kind of build and give you a robust sort of preparedness.

It might be just maybe your preparedness deal if you’re driving back to Grants Pass and something happens. Well, I’ve thought about this, so I’ve got these things with me.

One day I was driving to Sisters, OR, you know, and we had a winter snow storm. I mean it was like coming down.

I come around a bend and there are some guy, a Ford Explorer spun off the road, nose into the snowbank off into the ditch and he is wearing ahh, sneakers, shorts and a t-shirt and he’s right on a bend. Tthe first thing I did is I asked him, are you okay?

Then I reached in my side panel of my truck and I grabbed a handful of flares and I set a flare pattern. He was like, Whoa, where did you get those?

I said, you know, you’re on a bend. This is winter your driving conditions?

There could be a semi-tractor coming around that bend not knowing that you’re here because there’s no warning and you’re like dangerously close to the edge of the road and could get hurt.

Now at least there’s a flare on the other side of this bend in a couple more so that someone coming around that bend says, oh, there could be something happening around that bend.

He had no toe straps. So I had a toast trap. I pulled him out and he had no winter gear. And I thought, you know what if I’m 22 gets shut down and there was one time where there were two avalanches and there were people caught in the center and they were there for, I forgot how many days.

Brian: I remember that.

David: I’ve got water, I’ve got food, I’ve got a little alcohol, toilet paper. Peter, you could die in your vehicle and you could die only because you weren’t prepared.

Beth: Well and a full tank of gas. I mean we always fill up when we have half a tank, that’s kind of our rule of thumb is to, we have half a tank of gas and that’s preparedness.

Just thinking ahead and not waiting until you are on fumes.

Especially in California where you have no power, you need to make sure that you have a full tank of gas. Talk to Brian about your little, about the kerosene heater that you built.

David: Oh, on my YouTube channel (USNERDOC). But it’s basically a court paint cam that you just get from home Depot, a roll of toilet paper, cheapest that you can get.

You put your finger in and twist and pull the core out, fold it kind of in thirds and just stuff it in the can, and then fill it until it can’t take anymore of rubbing alcohol. Put the lid on.

I always tape a paint can opener and a lighter with tuck tape on that. With an extra bottle of alcohol.

I’ve had one in my truck for, I don’t know how long ago I did that video. Yeah, I mean it’s still, because it’s in a pant can it’s still air tight. It works totally fine.

Brian: Fabulous.

David: I’ve people comment on YouTube, oh that’s so dangerous and you’re going to set your car on fire. Well, if you’ve actually used one, it’s just this little teeny blue alcohol flame.

It’s not some raging bonfire inside your vehicle. It makes minimal byproducts.

Does make some CO and some carbon dioxide that is minimal and makes water vapor.

You crack a window a little bit, you’ll be totally fine, but you’ll have a heat source and you’re burning for maybe 30, 40 minutes and then, you know, put it away and then light it again.

But that could save your life and it actually is on the Minnesota department of transportation website as a recommended vehicle safety device.

Brian: Wow, fabulous!

David: For people because you could die.

Brian: In just in the short period of time we’ve been talking, you’ve discussed all these different things that you have available on your website, so I’ve got to ask a question that we ask everybody.

What’s the top selling product on your website?

Beth: iFak for sure.

Brian: That’s your original signature kit.

Beth: Our Signature kit, the iFak, we sell it either the iFak by itself or the iFak and Molle and that is probably our number one seller.

Our number two seller is our outfitter. It has I think, 382 different items in it.

David: We call it a clinic in a roll.

Beth: It rolls up. It’s less than eight pounds. It’s perfect for the camp. It’s perfect for your car.

That’s a great one, but also our Range Medic. If you own a firearm, you need to have a really good first aid kit and the Range Medic has in it, a chest seal for gunshot wounds.

It’s got your blood stopper with your quick clot, your Israeli trauma dressing, your sweat tourniquet, and our iFak and a great set of field towels. So that’s a great one.

Our Ham radio bags, I mean all of the bags that we sell are very popular.

I have a hard time keeping them in stock.

Brian: Great.

Beth: Yeah.

Brian: In the whole emergency prep industry and your business as an entity, what do you like best about it all?

Beth: The people are amazing. They’re like sponges.

They want to learn more and more and more and more and more. With the preparedness shows and even at the gun shows, you know, they want demonstrations, they want to know how to use the items.

But I think that that just builds that relationship. And I think David and I are about relationships, whether it’s a relationship with another vendor, which we have a lot of friends that are vendors.

But relationships with customers and customers that come back. Customers that want to come and see us at a show, you know, they’ll call ahead of time, hey, you’re coming to town, can we do dinner? Absolutely.

So that kind of stuff. And we’re just like one big family and just kind of ties us all together and that’s the fun part. And traveling. David never really liked to travel and you know, we shoot videos along the way.

Brian: So we talked a little bit about what you like best. If you could change one thing about either your business or the industry as a whole, what would that be?

David: Besides the name of our company?

Brian: Yeah, besides the name.

Beth: I really wish, really much that there were more preparedness shows.

David: People aren’t worried right now, so there’s not a lot of preparedness shows.

I think you looked on that website that we use to decide if we’re going to a show.

Beth: Yeah, there’s a website called prepper shows USA and currently they have three shows listed, a couple of years ago, 25 shows listed.

It’s unfortunate that people are not thinking preparedness all the time.

Not that we want to sell products, we want people to be informed, prepared. And the shows just helps with getting more businesses and vendors together to share that information.

David: If I were to change something in the industry would be the term prepper and zombie apocalypse. But Beth and I were preppers before I even knew, or either one of us knew the term prepper, although I think it’s a great term and it certainly is descriptive.

It has a connotation attached to it that actually does the industry a disservice.

And that’s gone so far as even on television. You know, the shows that make people that are in there….like in every pursuit in the world, there are like reasonable common sense people. Then there’s kooks and so they highlight those kinds of people.

So the whole idea of being prepared and self-reliant ends up being attached to this term prepper, which has a bad connotation.

Consequently, I think less people are prepared because they don’t think about it and they think, oh, that’s a 10 hat sort of thing. And, oh that guy down the street does that where, if you were to go back in time during the development of our country, this would be a total ridiculous conversation that we’re having.

Your podcasts would not be of any interest because people are like, this is part of our normal, common sense that I need to be prepared.

Beth: Well it’s kind of like the Amish, the classes that the Amish were interested in more were skills. Not like gardening, not product.

I mean they know how to garden, they don’t have to grow.

David: They wanted to get other skills that augmented with what they already know.

Beth: Exactly.

David: I remember I talked to this guy, Beth told you about the family, the husband, his name was Buddy and we were talking and I said, what will you guys do if there is a social economic collapse?

And he said, we probably won’t know.

Laughs.

Brian: That’s a good point.

David: And I said, wow!

Not would he not know, that it wouldn’t effect them.

And I thought, okay, that is the gold standard to be prepared. That it won’t affect me.

I used to put videos for woodworking on YouTube and I never thought anything other than it’s just a place to host videos for my blog.

I remember I got an email from someone who wanted to meet me and I thought people on YouTube are kooky, I’m not going to meet a YouTuber.

I thought about it and he emailed like a number of times and I said, okay.

Then I met this guy and he’s like super nice, like a normal common sense person. And he said, I’ve watched all those videos.

I wanted to ask you this….and we talked for a long time and I realized that this is a whole other group of people that are kind of fun to interact with.

So YouTube has been like Ham radio for me. It’s been a playground, but because of YouTube we have two businesses now.

Beth: We have two businesses, yep. We get to do what we love and we have our ranch and that’s going to be really fun to really do some fun stuff next year.

We’ve got a lot of plans with that and life’s good. Life’s really good.

Brian: That’s awesome.

If you could change the word prepper to something else, do you have an idea of what that would mean?

Beth: I like the practical preparedness.

Brian: Practical preparedness.

Beth: I want everyone to be prepared.

It just makes sense to, if you have a list, knock off a couple of things each month or every paycheck on that list and just work towards being practically prepared and have your kids prepared.

One thing that I remember when our kids were little, they were at a small little public school. They had the kids bring in at the beginning of the school year preparedness items that they then kept in 55 gallon garbage cans. So that if there was an earthquake or an emergency, then the kids had something from home with us with a snack in there.

It had a juice box in there and have like…

David: A note from mom and dad.

Beth: Note from mom and dad, and one of their favorite toys and at the end of the year they got it back. And I thought, why aren’t they doing that everywhere? Everywhere.

David: Yeah.

Brian: So if the three of us were sitting down 12 months from now and we were looking back over the last year, what would have had to have happened with your business and everything else for you to feel happy in your progress?

Beth: That’s a great question.

David: That’s a great question because I think we feel like we’re at a plateau with business and we need to make the next step, to make it more successful. So we need to increase sales.

Beth & David: We need to increase sales, market exposure. Yeah, we’d probably need to do more marketing.

Not necessarily, having your products on Amazon is….I don’t know if that’s right for us.

David: I think it would help us, but we’ve had a couple of people that do that contact us. We would have to make an ordinate amount of product to have available to be in the Amazon warehouses, at least as we understand it and we are a cash based business.

So we could do that, we could take a loan out I guess, and build those kits. Building the kits is not the issue, it’s just where do we get the financial resources to do that.

So that I think has been the fulcrum or the slow part for us is that we have intentionally not taken loans out and we’ve been grassroots funding, cash funding our business and that has definitely made us slow.

Beth: That’s why we’re still mom and pop shop.

David: But some people like that. So if you call Amp-3…

Beth: You talk to me on the phone.

David: You ended up talking to like the real meal deal. There’s not push this button, press one for this department does to talking with Beth and frequently I’m at work.

Beth: The question Brian is what you know, I mean we’d love to see more sales and make that happen. Probably through advertising.

We do some, we’ve talked about writing a book. I think the podcast help, I mean I want to do a podcast. Time is also a consideration, we’re at the ranch.

We have a lot of stuff going on like everybody does.

It’s a matter of making a priority and growing the business. But that’s a good question.

Brian: If we just zeroed in and if you don’t have an answer to this, it’s fine, but if we zeroed in to the sales area, how much more sales would you have to do for you to feel happy with your progress, within a year?

Beth: Oh, 20% maybe. I’m not not happy with how we’re doing.

But you know, a business is always wanting to grow and expand and I would love to hire. That’s kind of my big goal is, I want to make enough money to where I can hire employees and have more people working.

It’s all about, you know, the economy. I think that’s probably the next thing for us is to have more money in the business that we could support hiring someone.

What would that b 20% more or?

David: I think quadruple.

Brian: You’d have to quadruple sales for you to get to that next level.

Beth: I think so.

David: Personally, if we got to the point where we said we can hire someone, but more importantly if we hire someone, we want them to be a part of our business and we want to support them.

Not just a little blip that we go, oh, we need help, but that we can hire someone who’s going to be a part of our business and we can support them.

Beth and I have not taken a check from Amp-3 at all.

Now Amp-3 is successful enough that it’s buying a vehicle.

So I know that we’ve, I’m a bit of a armchair aviator, so I have the analogy of where wheels up and we’re just off the deck and we’re slowly gaining elevation and we’re getting safe away from the ground, but I’d like to be up at cruising altitude.

To me that would be like, you know, what Beth said, we can hire someone in support someone.

I think we have a great product line.

We’re an online business so we don’t have a brick and mortar.

Brian: Don’t have to deal with a lot of the overhead that other companies deal with.

Beth: We don’t have to deal with that. But also then we don’t have a brick and mortar where people are coming in and going, oh, what’s Amp-3?

Or you know, I saw your ad. There’s a double-edged sword there. We don’t have that.

But yeah, I mean would we like to see a lot more sales?

We would love to see a lot more sales.

Brian: So let’s say you were able to quadruple your sales. Just for sake of argument, let’s say that was where you were going. What are the obstacles standing in the way of getting there?

So you mentioned time. What else?

David: So I think a number of things, recognition.

Brian: Explain that.

David: Having people recognize who we are and oh, I need that.

Recognition, more exposure on the internet. I think more and more, at least my perception is more and more business is done in cyberspace and not, oh, I’m going to go drive somewhere.

People are very, like we talked about, attention spans are short, they’re very gratification now, immediate, etcetera.

Someone wants to type something in. I think they used to say on the first page of a search, now I think you want to be in the top three or four on that little window because people aren’t going to scroll down and look at that four that are underneath, that are still on that first page.

So more, oh, I’m going to click on that and then have people look at our stuff and say, I need that.

Part of it is better marketing on our behalf. Better presentation, we’re always working on that, but marketing and presentation and exposure so that people can see the marketing and the presentation.

We know that we’ve got a good product because we have at least our measure of that is we have repeat customers now I may be able to fool you once and you’ll buy one of my kits and you’ll say, oh, why did I do that?

But Beth and I are successful when you come back spontaneously, on your own, and buy more kits from us.

We know that we have a good product and that we’re successful.

Because Beth could give you, I don’t even know how many names of people that have bought from us, not once or twice, but four, five, six, eight times. We have a couple of customers that bought on a monthly basis the same thing.

And Beth said, uh, what are you doing?

I am getting my family prepared.

Each month I’m buying the same list and I’m sending it to them in different parts of the country. I may be able to sell a kit to you one time, but when you come back month after month after month and are buying a list of items from us and sending them to family members, then you know that you have value.

Beth: Yeah.

David: I think.

Beth: And also then they refer their friends. Not only are they purchasing then their friends are purchasing multiple times, but we get a lot of new customers and so then I need to know like, okay, Ryan, you placed an order, thank you so much for your order.

How did you hear of our company?

And usually I never heard back from them.

Brian: Is that via email.

Whether it’s YouTube, which we have supporters of us. Sootch, he’s got a huge YouTube channel. He has sent a lot of people. Richie from Boston has a huge YouTube channel. He sent a lot of people. A Wranglerstar, he’s huge, you know, he sent a lot of people.

David: Yeah, were blessed with these guys on YouTube, there are channels that eclipse ours.

That are generous enough to mention us and I know a couple of those personally and I know that they don’t make those recommendations without actually believing in a product.

It’s not like saying, oh, I’ve got this huge audience. Let me mention you, even though I think your product is not worth anything, they don’t really get anything from us per se.

Beth: And I get emails all the time, send me your product and I’ll do a review. I’m just like, no.

David: We have done that though a couple of times and it did nothing.

Beth: But if you want to purchase our product and do a review, I would love that and I would support you with that.

But probably sending you something else. But it’s the ones who just want it for free and then it doesn’t really go anywhere and we’ve done that.

Then there’s people like Sootch who has purchased and done just awesome reviews of our products. And also Cody from Wranglerstar. He’s been a great customer and just a great friend. And Jessica.

David: We’ve also given those folks things when something bad has happened to them. Like Sootch had a break in his house and Beth and I just packaged up a bunch of stuff and, and sent it to him and said, you know, this is just a from us to you. So sorry that happened to you.

That’s on their friendship level of things. I’m a firm believer if you are honest with people and take care of people that at least the way I look at the world, then good things happen.

Beth: I think that’s probably something that we’re lacking is how did you hear about us?

That’s something that we need to really work on in this next year, whether it’s a survey.

David: If look at the grand scheme things and you want it to be objective with us and say, here’s the realistic view for you guys for Amp-3. If you look at everything, we probably have the narrowest little beam of light that is out there.

It’s by happenstance that someone stumbles upon it and looks at the light and says, oh, I’m interested in that.

How do we get people to see us to then make a decision?

Beth: Yeah.

Brian: I think that’s great.

That’s the next one kind of business people by mistake happened to do this.

What works for us?

I think word of mouth probably is our number one reason that our business is done as well as it has.

We really have been blessed by great people and great shows and we have a lot to learn.

You know, like SEO. That’s like, that’s like this black box that I look at and say is there a tag that I’m not doing.

Laughs.

David: Same thing on YouTube. Like my channel is again wheels up. But it’s, and then you think is there like, is there some hashtag I should be using? Have no idea how all that works and some people know I’m just not one of those.

Beth: Yeah, exactly.

Brian: In wrapping up the discussion a little bit here, what do you have as blanket business advice for the people listening that either own a business or looking to start a business in a similar industry?

Beth: You need to do what your passion says. I mean, if you want to start a first aid kit company and you are passionate about first aid kits, do it.

David: Or whatever the passion is.

Beth: Or whatever it is. It don’t be hindered, you know, don’t say, oh gosh, I can’t do it. Because I mean if we can do it…

David: And then something we’ve not done is get some business experience or training or seek out some, we just don’t know who to talk to or who to say, hey look at this. What do you think we should do?

Because you could ask me about first aid kits and or Beth and we could talk to you and we’ve talked your ear off a number of times.

It’s something we’re passionate about. We just don’t know business.

I think that’s the one thing that we’re lacking is the expertise to make us more successful. I think we can be successful. We just don’t have the expertise and you have to go seek it, I think.

Beth: Yes.

Brian: That’s great. That’s really good.

So really love having you guys on the program. What could listeners do who’d be interested in finding out more about Amp-3 and everything else that you provide?

Beth: Oh my gosh. Our website is www.amp-3.net and you can follow us on Instagram. You can also subscribe to David’s YouTube channel at USNERDOC.

David: And you could talk to the real deal and call Beth.

Beth: Give me a call. Do you have any questions? Give me a call. Our number is (503) 318-5672 we hope to see you again sometime down the road.

David: And that number is not to sell something, but if you have a preparedness question and you want some insight, I’m happy to talk, but Beth is usually the one that’s on that phone.

If I’m at work, call an ass because preparedness is a passion for us just like our kits are and we would love to share or help and not sell something.

Beth: One thing, if you have questions, really don’t hesitate to call. Check out our resource page. There’s some information there and we’re going to be hopefully putting up some new resources on our resource page soon.

Yeah, we really appreciate Brian coming out and loving having him on the ranch, so thanks Brian, we really appreciate it.

Brian: Thank you, David and Beth Pruitt Amp-3, thanks so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Closing Thoughts With Brian: What a great conversation. I’ve re-listened to this audio a few times and each time I get something different going back over it, so I’m just going to point out the handful, the things I noticed.

First, I want you to look at the journey that they went through and how anyone of these areas you can take right now and use in your business.

David originally started with a blog and was using YouTube just to host his videos as he went along. He started getting attention via YouTube from these videos he was posting that ended up leading to building a product.

The product ended up leading to them selling it via an eCommerce based website.

That website then ended up taking them and the products to trade shows.

The trade shows led to speaking opportunities.

The speaking opportunities were videotaped and they sold DVDs, which they can then resell on their website and at the trade shows and it’s leading them to more things, beyond that.

They’re now looking into books and podcasting and everything. It’s amazing. Any one of these areas you can pick up and use and all they did was jumped from one to the next to the next.

They went from a physical product based company to now going very much in the direction of more and more information.

Information based products are great because they could be delivered digitally now and people enjoy getting it because they can view it or listen to it anywhere.

And that plays into David and Beth’s love of teaching and the fact that that led them to doing the YouTube that led them to doing the speaking and it’s going to lead them to doing the next iterations of their business.

There’s a couple other areas that I think make them not unique, but definitely in the minority of most business owners.

These are two areas that I think anybody can use more of, especially if you compare David and Beth to most people out there in business.

The first thing is David and Beth know where they’re going next.

They have an idea of what they want to do next. You can hear them talking it out and coming up with where they want to go in the next year.

And that’s very important to be able to do first and adjusted if you need to, but at least having a concept of where you’re going next. The other thing that they displayed is they know their shortcomings.

They know what they’re lacking, they know what they need to get better at or to have someone else come in and help them with.

So as a business owner, you need to know your weaknesses. It’s more important to know your weaknesses then your strengths.

Your strengths are relatively simple. They’re easy to find out.

People are always telling you how great you are at your strengths. That’s the easy part.

The tough part is finding out that you either don’t have a natural ability in or have a skill set in and you don’t necessarily have the time to go out and learn every single skill set out there.

So this is when you start building out your team and start putting in the right people. It’s based on your weaknesses, not on your strengths.

I could go on and on so much great information here. So many great examples that can be used transposed into other businesses regardless of what industry you’re in.

I hope you found this helpful. I look forward to seeing what David and Beth are gonna do in the next year and in the years ahead.

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.

David & Beth Pruett – AMP-3: Part 1

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!

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.

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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.

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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.