Joe Yoder’s Bio

Chris’s Solar Series

BeesWrap

*Intro and outro music are from an original piece by

Carl Zukroff of The Blue Hotel

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Happy New Year! You have stumbled onto another episode of Get Your FILL, Financial Independence and Long Life where we explore ways to achieve those two goals. The music you’ve been listening to is from an original score by Carl Zukroff of the band The Blue Hotel. You’ll find a link to his info and website on GetYourFILLPodcast.com.

Today is part two of our conversation with Joe Yoder of Tiny Solar Vermont. In part one, which aired on December xx, Joe helped me to understand the difference between off-the-grid personal solar and a grid-tie system and to design an off-grid solar option for my house then continued onto talking about a life without debt. Today, we’ll be continuing along that track into the realm of long life with a quick detour into how solar energy will help you survive the zombie apocalypse. If you visit GetYourFILLPodcast.com, you’ll find links to all of the things that we talk about, a link to the video interview, Joe’s bio and anything else we thought might be interesting and relevant.

J: You know, on the upscale side of things you’ve heard of Bees Wraps?

C: Yes.

J: Neat company from what I could tell. I ran into some of their products a few months back or last year, actually. Somebody gave me some of the products. I’m like: “Great, I like this, I’m gonna buy some of this.” And I went to their website, everything on the website was sold out. Everything.

And then at the Tiny House Festival event that you and I met at, Bees Wrap happened to be sitting…

C: They were right across from you.

J: Yeah, yeah, so I got to talking to her, I told her about this and she said… Yeah, she said we had just been featured on… It’s like some web show. It was kind of a high profile show, I don’t think it was Oprah. It would be like you’ve been featured on Oprah or something like that. So then there was an interview and some good exposure on some kind of high profile media outlet and they got floored. Absolutely got floored – they just, they got wiped out of inventory and they couldn’t recoup for a while, but they are now, I think, and they’re probably a better company for it.

C: Yeah, ’cause that can be the kiss of death for a small company. They get overwhelmed and people think… Oh no, there’s no product, there’s no customer service and they don’t wanna come back, especially if they haven’t – if they just saw it on TV if they haven’t had a chance to actually handle the product and understand what it actually is, and have a real introduction to it. Like you could have had it at the Tiny House Festival.

J: Relating to that in the early 80s. I was a manager for Domino’s Pizza for a couple of years out in Ohio. I’d moved from here back to Ohio for three years and I… That’s my original home… My brother was into management at Dominos, so it’s just… Something I did, to make a living for a few years and… That’s when I started my family.

We had these rushes at Dominos. Predictable. Every Friday the store I managed in Trotwood, Ohio is gonna get blown away. All four lines would light up for three hours and we could never handle all the business we were getting. And usually, Saturday too, sometimes Thursday.

And then if you had a special event, like the auto show in the mall across the street or Super Bowl Sunday, again, blown away more business than you can handle and somebody explained this to me and it was obvious, too, that when you… During those worst times when you can’t ha