We were lucky to catch up with Jarom Walz recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jarom, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Have you ever just sat and thought about what freedom really means to you? Is freedom being able to vote for whoever you want? Or being able to say whatever you want? Or when you think of freedom do you think of being able to go wherever you want, to be with whoever you want, and to see whatever you want. This is the kind of freedom we’ve tasted, and we thought it was important enough to share with as many people as we can. It’s such a liberating feeling to know that you have everything you need with you and you’re not tied to a certain place and time. It’s the feeling of looking at a highway sign and saying, “well, we’re already in Houston. New Orleans isn’t that far away… Let’s keep going!” Covid and work from home has opened up this freedom like never before. Whether a person wants to experience that freedom for a day, a week, a month, or the foreseeable future, it’s our goal to help make that a reality for them.

Jarom, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My wife Katie and I love to travel. Our personal motto is “See all the things!” But while I liked to see all the things out in nature far from other people, Katie loved to have a comfortable mattress to sleep on. Who can blame her, right? So we compromised by buying an old Airstream travel trailer that we could take anywhere and have the comforts of home. We renovated it, then tore it apart and built it again, then tore it apart and built it again! After a few iterations and a lot of lessons learned we had a travel trailer we were proud of and that helped us fulfill our dream of going wherever we wanted and to experience it in comfort. But after one especially frustrating trip to Yellowstone Park where we couldn’t find any parking, we decided a trailer just wasn’t the right answer for us. We started researching campervans and quickly fell in love with the convenience and the freedom that came from traveling in a campervan. Campervans are amazing, but we quickly realized the cost of entry is incredibly high. So many options had everything they could pack in to a van, making it heavy and expensive, even though all those extras were rarely used. So we set out to offer rental vans providing everything you need and nothing you don’t. The result is a clean, comfortable, minimalist build that feels open, but people are often surprised by how much they can fit in it. And it seems that people like it! We’ve been in business for 3 years now, and our rental calendar has been packed by some of the best customers we could hope for. We’ve had people take our vans for graduation trips, surprise vacations for their kids, and people from other countries who want to experience the incredible landscapes we have here. We’ve had a few couples take our vans to elope! They had beautiful small wedding ceremonies far from the crowds in the mountains with a few friends. We wanted to share this sense of adventure and freedom with as many people as possible and it’s been so rewarding to see how people have been able to enjoy it.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We wanted to keep costs low when we first started, so our first van was brought from a used car dealer and it had a lot of miles. We spent months building it and just as it was finished the check engine light came on. We took it to the dealer and found it needed a major engine repair. We decided we were already invested and we wanted a reliable vehicle so we scheduled the service. Once the service was complete we drove it back to our shop, readied it for its maiden vacation, and headed down the road. Within 4 miles it broke down again. We found out later that a bolt hadn’t been tightened down in the rebuild. It had come free inside the engine and damaged everything. Downside was that it needed another month of repairs. The upside was that since it was technician error, the dealer would be replacing the entire engine for free! This all happened before our first booking. Over the course of that first summer we had multiple issues with this van. The engine was good, but the transmission went out, the radiator was glitchy, and other electrical gremlins just kept popping up. We were doing everything we could to fix the problems, but it was devastating each time another issue occurred. It was tempting to just call it quits at that point. We weren’t being buried by bills, but we weren’t really masking money either, and we didn’t need the stress. But the potential was obvious. Everything was going wrong but those problems were fixable, and even with all the repairs we were still profitable. With this in mind we decided to double down rather than throw in the towel. We went out and found a brand new van and paid brand-new van money to bring it into our fleet. We became meticulous about our maintenance records to make sure those problems wouldn’t happen again, and we sold the original van, now with a new motor and new transmission, for a nice profit. Now we have a thriving business and a growing fleet of new vans. We haven’t had major mechanical issues since, and having the faith to go forward rather than pack it in while learning from the past has made all the difference.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

We started with one van that we were able to buy with cash. Our only overhead at that point was insurance, so we could afford to take a risk. We had a regular job so it didn’t need to support us financially. Originally we just wanted to see if it would work. It didn’t take long to know we were on to something. We listed our first van in the Spring and within two weeks it was booked up for every weekend that summer! Our focus turned to adding more vans, and by the end of the summer we had three in our fleet. But even at three vans it became difficult to keep up with all the responsibilities in our spare time. Customer questions had to be answered, vans had to be prepared for the next rental, and of course all this had to happen during weekdays so the customers could enjoy their time off on the weekends. We generally worked till 10 pm each night through this time to make everything work. But we knew we had to make changes for the next season because we literally didn’t have anymore time to give. So the plan we came up with was to sell one van. It was our first van and it had caused us a lot of issues, but everything had been repaired and it was in good shape at this point. We also owned it outright, so anything we could sell it for was cash we could invest in our business. We listed it and luckily sold it fairly quickly. With the money from that deal we were able to pay for the builds on two more vans that we purchased on credit, and we were able to hire a full time employee to take care of the day-to-day responsibilities. The new additions to our fleet paid for themselves eventually, but the cash from the sale gave us the buffer we needed to pay the bills while we were getting them up and going. It was scary to go from no overhead to being responsible for payroll among other things, but if we hadn’t made that step it would have forever been a massive time commitment with little return.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.discovercampervans.com
• Instagram: @discovercampervans