The Workamper Show Podcast

Bill and Laura Hoak have enjoyed several workamping experiences in recent years. They have worked sales jobs, maintenance jobs, retail jobs and checked people into campgrounds. The Hoaks spent the summer working in Lebanon, Maine, and are either in Florida now, or headed that way. A love for travel attracted them to the workamping experience. The Hoaks talk about how they find jobs on Workamper.com, and describe what it took for them to get on the road back in 2016.

Delaware North, a federal contractor that staffs the food service concessions and retail stores at Yellowstone National Park, is looking for several hundred full- and part-time people to work 32 to 40 hours per week as cooks, cashiers, managers and supervisors. Workampers are needed from April to October, and can work an entire season or a shorter 60-day stint. Hundreds of thousands of people flock to Yellowstone every year to enjoy the wildlife and natural scenery. You can, too -- and get paid for being there.

Mike and Yvonne Hall have been full-time RVing and workamping for 18 years. They lived in a fifth wheel for many years, and loved it. However, they just acquired a motorhome, and love it, too. They’ll explain the advantages of both and why they opted for a 40-foot motorhome at this point in their adventure. They have had plenty of experience working as campground hosts, which is a popular workamping job. Te also get into technical aspects of workamping, such as selecting a domicile state, setting up a mail forwarding service, and managing banking from the road.

Our guests today are Amanda Burleson and Ermin Husidic. Prairie Berry Winery has won more than 1,000 international awards. They not only offer traditional grape wines, but also wines produced from locally-grown fruits, or prairie berries, as they are called. Workampers lead customers through wine-tasting events to find the best wines to pair with a variety of foods. Prairie Berry also staffs a kitchen that creates a variety of handmade sandwiches, pizzas, salads, artisan plates, and desserts.

For the past nine years, Macgyver Hlad has found a workamping niche. He’s a storm chaser of sorts who travels around America to areas impacted by natural disasters and finds jobs helping to remove storm debris. It sounds like tough work, but Macgyver loves the freedom working outdoors offers – even when the circumstances are less than ideal. Like other millennials, he realizes that the scope of work has changed, and he’s embracing what’s called the gig economy where people work short-term jobs and move on.

Our guests today are Shauna Hansford and Erin Redington, with Alaska Excursions or Alaska X for short. Their company caters to guests who arrive via cruise ships. Alaska X offers several fun excursions for the cruise passengers, and the firm hires workampers to guide, drive and escort them as they have some fun. Based in Skagway, Alaska X offers a dog mushing experience as well as a zip line adventure, horseback riding and a wilderness adventure. The firm hires about 120 workampers for a variety of jobs.

Mary Shinn loves to camp. She and her husband bought their own RV in the 1980s and traveled all over America. She even drove an RV down to Honduras. It was one adventure after another. But, when her husband died five years ago, Mary didn’t want to sit at home all day. She went camping in Missouri where she encountered her first workamper. One thing led to another and she wound up working as a campground host out in Washington state. She has never looked back.

Adventureland is a family-owned and operated theme park that features more than 100 rides, shows and attractions. It offers everything from roller coasters and kiddie rides to a full-size waterpark and live entertainment. It also has a campground and several retail stores as well as food service options. Bri Fors is the human resources coordinator who hires all the workampers. She is joined by two people who spent the summer working at Adventureland, Sherry Hicks and Lou Axt.

Anthony DeAmaral has been attending this year’s event with his wife, Angelina, and their 3-year-old son, Colton. After years of planning, the young family is weeks away from hitting the road to begin their RV dream. Angelina will be operating a children’s clothing business from their fifth wheel, and Anthony will be attending classes to learn how to repair RVs for other people or inspect them for new buyers.

A major announcement was made this morning with the launch of the Small Business RVer initiative, which was developed in collaboration with Ziglar, Inc.

It will help people start, grown and maintain an RV-based business anywhere that someone has electricity and an internet connection. CEO Tom Ziglar and Howard Partridge, who heads up the company’s business training, show that, yes, it is possible to run a business of your own from an RV. They also identified more than a dozen examples of businesses ideally suited for a mobile lifestyle.