Beers & Beans +1 – We’ve Grown!.

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Kate - The first Beers & Beans employee!

Since we’ve been traveling the last couple of months we’ve learned one thing: 24 hours in a day is not enough.

Last year when we jetted off on the big trip it was fine – we had enough time to sight see and work on the blog. Fast forward one year and after 3 months of constant movement on the road and we quickly realized that we needed help.

Fortunately Beers & Beans has grown by leaps and bounds over the past year. We’re still in awe – it was our dream to become full time travel bloggers and we didn’t realize it would happen so quickly. We also didn’t anticipate the immense amount of work involved. Travel blogging is not as easy as you think. It’s more than a full time job. It requires that we move continually and work at the same time. Every tour we take, every place we stay – we document it all. Social media, back end techie blog stuff, editing photos, interviewing people, coordinating with other bloggers, conference calls with sponsors, reviews, writing & emails. We do it all.

We love it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining. We LOVE our lives. It just takes a lot of time and we simply can’t do it all. It’s possible that if we weren’t traveling we could get everything done and work on our other projects at the same time but trying to keep up with everything while traveling has been tough. Our other projects – two new sites and new ebooks that were supposed to be completely finished for the holiday season got pushed to the back burners.

We’re at the awesome (yet scary) part of any new venture: we have too much work that if we do it all ourselves we end up limiting anything else we might be able to do but we are still small enough that hiring full time help would be a financial strain for us. We’ve talked about our options over the past couple of months and we decided to make the leap and hire another person to help us out part time! We’ll be tightening up our bootstraps in order to swing the expense but with a little part time help we could take on new work and (hopefully) break even on the cost while freeing up a little time.

We were going to make an announcement on the blog to see if anyone would be interested in working for us but my little sister Kate decided she would climb aboard our little dream ship and be a part of our crew! One of the first things she’ll be tackling is speeding up our site since it’s slowed to a crawl and hopefully as time goes on she’ll be helping us with emails, PR & maybe even writing a story or two! We’re really excited about this. We have big plans for 2012 and without Kate’s help it’s unlikely we would be able to branch out successfully.

She recently followed one of her own dreams and moved to Colorado 3 weeks ago. She decided to write an introduction post and I can tell it’s going to be great having Kate as part of the Beers & Beans gang because she appears to be flattering me online in ways she NEVER does in real life. This could work out really well for me…. 🙂

Without further ado – here is Kate’s introduction:

“If I’ve learned anything since becoming an adult and choosing a path in life, it’s that nothing is set in stone.  Opportunities are at every corner and the road can change and send anyone in a complete different direction.  My family really seems to represent how you can take a dream and turn into something many people wish they could do but have never been able to take the risk.  My sister Bridgette started her own successful invitation/stationary business and Beth & Randy have turned traveling the world into a full time job.

Who would’ve thought?

In the beginning her vision was not easy for anyone in my family to see but she made it happen.  She took this vague idea of traveling the world indefinitely, ran with it and seemed to create a pretty cool business out of it at the same time. No one really knows how – I don’t even know if she knows how she did it. But she did.

Along the way she taught me that if you want something bad enough you can make it happen. Beth is always pushing the envelope and doing things (like quitting great jobs, moving cross country 4 times, starting various businesses, living off a travel blog) that other people might think were a little insane or at the very least just plain dumb initially.

When she first came up with the idea of traveling long term it became clear she was going to have to figure out a way to travel, experience more than the typical tourist and not run out of money. Enter WWOOF’ing.

I’ll be honest – when she first told me that she was going to volunteer abroad on farms in exchange for housing and food, I thought that ‘Why would anyone want to work for free on a farm?’ It sounds like hell. No one else I knew had even heard the term WWOOF before – leave it to Beth to find this strange concept online.

When they started traveling last year I think everyone in our family was a little nervous about how everything would work out for them. But after their first leg they came home and told us about how they worked on the farm and met all these other awesome people doing the same thing from all around the world. She said the farmers were very nice and invited them into their home with open arms and amazing food.  I never admitted this to her before but she definitely piqued my travel curiosity. Of course the fact that they had unlimited bottles of wine each night on the farm might have had something to do with that as well…

I always wanted to travel but never really thought it was something I could do – or anyone could do without a fat bank account. Listening to their stories and realizing I could find charity work abroad to see the places that are financially out of my reach was pretty exciting although I definitely would never have admitted that to her!

I just recently moved to Denver, Colorado and while I might not be traveling the world this is definitely a new adventure for me. This is the first time I have lived so far away from my family and the first time I’m exploring a new state on my own. Watching Beth & Randy live their dreams inspired me to make the leap, quit my job and move here. Now I’m working part time for Beth (something else I swore I would never do) and that’s actually been pretty cool too. Who knows what will happen next…”