The Business.

You see that dream, it’s actually a reality for some people and good on them! The grey nomads whittling away at their super funds, the families who invested cleverly and sold up the house or the ones who diligently saved for years and years to afford a work less, chill more, worry-free lap.

Yeah, we’re none of those. . .we’re the decide one day you want to travel the country in a van with your kids and try and hit the road 6 months later despite the fact that you don’t have a caravan or a suitable vehicle - or the money to purchase such.

Sounds stupid and naive, right? Yeah. We were. To be honest, I’m glad for that too - because if we’d known exactly what we were in for, we might not have tried. True story.

You see - we didn’t have a big savings account, we didn’t own a house, we didn’t have a nest egg. The only thing we had going for us was our existing business (a creative agency and production house) and the quality of our work. It was with that, we figured, that we could generate some interest from companies to produce work for them as we travelled. And to be clear - if that didn’t work. . .well, we couldn’t afford to do the trip. Simple as that.

And so down the rabbit hole we went.

It was really one of the hardest things we’ve ever done - continue running our existing business, build an entirely new brand in Salt, Earth and Sun, buy a van, a car, a canopy, and make sure it was all gear that would support our rather strange requirements. That being a totally off-road, off-grid setup with the ability to run our existing, power-hungry, agency from the road with very little compromise. A lot of people called us crazy - I’d like to thank them for that. Because it drove us even harder and well, here we are.

Sounds pretty intense, but the vision was strong. We had this mental story we told ourselves about how we would view things when we were on our death beds. Would we look back and say “Jeez, you know what? So glad we didn’t do that trip around Australia with the kids. It was so worth staying on the Sunshine Coast and working in our business like we did every year before that!”. . . Yeah, exactly - who would say that? We knew that even if we broke everything and achieved it in some form, it would likely be the best thing we’d ever done and only remember the amazing bits. So. . .we gave it everything!

It was that level of commitment that allowed us to press on, I think, even through the hardest parts. There was no Plan B. We just made a list of things we had to do and started doing them in the order that we could. Put it this way - at one point, we’d cancelled the lease of our primary residence, our office, sold our car, had no new place to go to upon the lease end date and still didn’t have a caravan or a tow vehicle sorted. Every single thing we could do to commit was done when it could be done and a lot of what we needed was worked out along the way.

Smart? I don’t know. It worked. So maybe. . .but yeah, it was so epicly stressful. There was always something hanging out there in the wind that would have made or broken the entire exercise and every speed bump felt like Mount Everest.

But as we progressed, we formed great relationships with some wonderful people and businesses and the vision slowly started to become our reality.

As we started to imagine the trip, what it was we wanted to do, what we could do differently and all the rest of it. It dawned on us. . .

To truly do this differently - it couldn’t just be about us. It couldn’t just be “family in van travelling country doing cool stuff”. That’s been done to death and to be honest, it didn’t really sit so well with us. We’re not usually the “look at us!” kind of people on Social Media and don’t really go looking for attention, trying to live our best life and all that stuff.

For us, it seemed that the idea of blowing through regions in a cloud of vlog dust and insta-selfies was not very enticing. If we were going to put ourselves in the public eye, we wanted it to be with good reason and bigger than to just ‘follow’ us. So we decided to put our talents and our brand to good use.

We decided that we would look for opportunities in the areas we travelled through to produce pro bono films. Imagine short documentary pieces about causes and charities in that area to help them with raising awareness and produced in the hope that it would assist them in realising better outcomes for those they represent. We had quite a bit of experience in this kind of work before with our existing business and loved the idea of what this aspect of our journey would teach our kids about our interaction with social media, the platform we were building and the positive impact we and it could have on the lives of others.

So it was with that realisation that Salt, Earth and Sun suddenly became a mission bigger than just a lap. We now had ourselves a purpose and a real reason to grow our platform outside of personal gain. On a personal level, that sat a lot better with us and we started to feel really good about what we were setting out to accomplish.

Once we’d worked all that out, we went to all the companies that we wanted to work with, shared the plan and the vision and asked for the world.

Most of them listened politely, most of them told us we were dreaming, some laughed. . .some told us to go away. But in the end, after much persistence and a large helping of humble pie (for me 😳) most of them decided to help us in some way.

Salt, Earth and Sun became a commercial reality. Yes, we have some commercial partners, or sponsors. . .but before you go freaking out, nobody owns us. . .we are who we are, we say what we want and the people we work with chose to work with us because they believe in our work and our mission and those things align closely with their own brands. It was with their assistance that we managed to access some of the awesome products that we’re taking on the road with us.