Today, I am going to interview a couple who runs a business from their RV helping other small business owners with their accounting needs and by serving as a virtual assistant.

Former Boston residents Don and Pat Hawes have been RVing for about 25 years and traveling full time for five years in their Class C motorhome. They started Workamping before they even knew what it was by helping the owners of a campground they regularly visited with cooking or other tasks on busy weekends.

After realizing that it was becoming more difficult for them to do physical work as they got older, the Hawes started Camping Keepers as a way to earn money by applying their own skill and talent toward helping other people who didn’t have that same level of comfort with accounting that they had.

Camping Keepers specializes in providing bookkeeping services to RV-based businesses. The Hawes have always kept the books for the other businesses they own and consider themselves to be masters at Quickbooks.

Their services are geared for small business owners who typically don’t have to contend with big payrolls. But, they will help business owners with invoicing and keeping track of who owes them money or to whom they must pay something. Camping Keepers prepares a set of financial reports so the business owner can better gauge the health of their company. Having good books also helps immensely at tax time.

The Hawes also added virtual assistant services to their offerings a few years ago. Now they will help business owners with routine or specialized tasks, like responding to email on the owners’ behalf. They can respond to customer inquiries or help by sending out marketing emails to help grow a company’s clients.

It’s like having a helper so that a busy business owner can pass off some routine tasks to a virtual assistant to save time in order to be able to work on essential tasks. For example, if a person provides RV repair services for a living, he or she might not have a lot of time to respond to calls and emails that come in throughout the day. Rather than doing it at night, business owners can hire a virtual assistant to do it for them.

By establishing several unique businesses, like RV inspections, RV repair, accounting services, working as a virtual assistant for other small business owners and helping people get started in the RV lifestyle, Don and Pat Hawes have created multiple income streams to help finance their own travel dreams.

I appreciate them sharing their story with us today because it shows there is another aspect to Workamping that doesn’t involve changing jobs every few months.

Having a business of their own gives the couple a great deal of flexibility to travel when and where they want to go. With Camping Keepers, the Hawes can help other small business owners better manage their own companies, and providing their services lets the Hawes share their expertise with others.

It’s a win-win for the Hawes and their clients. Their clients have more time to focus on the things they specialize in doing – like fixing RVs – and the Hawes can provide a level of expertise to accomplish important tasks like accounting.

They can also help business owners get important things done, like sending out marketing emails, that owners know need to be done, but can’t seem to find the time to do the tasks.

Don and Pat also serve as instructors at the new Small Business RVer School that was developed by the Workamper organization in cooperation with the Ziglar Company and well-known business attorney and CPA Mark Kohler. The Hawes help teach business owners how to keep track of their books so they have a good idea of what’s coming in and what’s going out each month.

Helping to build strong businesses provides an essential service and enables other RVers to fina...