Relationship Marketing and Making Connections with Alignable on the Road – RVE #337

What is Relationship Marketing? As nomads, how do we make connections and grow our network? Find out from Sue Brooke, mastermind behind the wheel of the Alignable on the Road tour.

Our discussion this time is for all entrepreneurs hoping to grow their network. Specifically, we’re talking about relationship marketing, and the importance of connecting with others in a genuine way. Building new relationships can be difficult as a nomad. That’s why we’re speaking with Sue Brooke with Alignable. Jim explains how he has made some good connections on the platform – without all the distraction, negativity, and irrelevant content often found on Facebook. And, Sue helps us understand how Alignable differs from LinkedIn to connect you with the people who matter most to you. Spoiler alert: It’s all about relationship building.

Enjoy this deep dive into relationship marketing, network building, redefining success and working with a mission. Sue provides tips for developing our networking skills, when so many of us tend to work in a bubble. She also offers helpful suggestions for breaking the ice with new contacts, and defines relationship marketing with some impressive examples.

GUEST BIO: Sue Brooke, Professional Speaker, Author, and Business & Marketing Strategist, possesses nearly four decades of entrepreneurial expertise. At the core of her business success lies the fundamental belief in fostering authentic relationships. Currently, Sue contributes her knowledge and leadership to Alignable.com’s Advocacy team, where she spearheads educational programs for fellow business owners. Throughout her Alignable on the Road tour, Sue travels the country in her motorhome to actively support and engage with small business owners. Over the past three years, she has covered over 31,000 miles across 44 states, with plans to extend her journey through the rest of the lower 48 and into Canada.

Relationship Marketing and Making Connections with Alignable on the Road

With Sue Brooke

Your Host: Jim Nelson

RESOURCES MENTIONED

Alignable on the Road Group: ⁠http://AlignableOnTheRoad.com⁠

Sue Brooke: ⁠https://www.SueBrooke.com⁠

Alignable University: ⁠https://www.alignable.com/learn/alignable-university⁠

What Is Relationship Marketing? ⁠https://learn.alignable.com/lessons/what-is-relationship-marketing-anyway⁠

RV LIFE Trip Wizard: ⁠https://tripwizard.rvlife.com/⁠

Send Out Cards: ⁠http://cardsfromsue.com/⁠
[Sue’s Affiliate Link]

Listen to The RV Entrepreneur Episode #337

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The RV Entrepreneur #337 Full Episode Transcript:

Making Connections and Building Relationships with Alignable on the Road

SUE: Your intention has to be one thing and that’s to build a relationship.

RV LIFE: Welcome to the RV Entrepreneur Podcast, the weekly show for nomads, work campers, RVers and entrepreneurs looking to earn a living or build a business while enjoying the RV lifestyle. This week’s host is Jim Nelson. Let’s settle in and enjoy the RV entrepreneur podcast brought to you by RV life.

JIM: Hello again, Jim at RV life here with another discussion for any entrepreneur hoping to grow their network. Specifically, we’re talking about relationship marketing this time and the importance of connecting with others in a genuine way. That can be challenging for nomads, and it’s often difficult on the major platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. That’s why I’m excited to be speaking with Sue Brooke today. We met on Alignable, and if you haven’t joined the platform yet, I suggest you check it out. There’s even a group just for RV entrepreneurs. In the short time I’ve spent on Alignable, I’ve made some pretty good connections without all the distraction, negativity, and irrelevant content I tend to see so often on Facebook. Sue also helps me understand how Alignable differs from LinkedIn. Spoiler alert it’s all about making connections, and they have some smart technology under the hood for connecting you with the people who matter most, your ideal clients, and those most likely to collaborate with you. And that comes back to relationship building. As a nomad, it can be hard to build new relationships, but what can we do to develop our networking skills when so many of us tend to work in a bubble? The work Sue is doing with her Alignable on the road tour is just one way. She also provides some tips for breaking the ice with new contacts and defines relationship marketing with some impressive examples. So check out the route Sue has planned for her current Alignable on the road tour. While we take a deep dive into relationship marketing, network building, redefining success, and working with a mission. Right after this quick message.

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JIM: Com Sue, thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to our chat. Thanks for being here.

SUE: I am too, I’m excited to be here.

JIM: So technically this is the RV Life Entrepreneur podcast, so I tend to ask all my guests two quick questions to kind of get to know you there. When were you first introduced to the RV life and what does that look like now?

SUE: Oh my gosh, it’s just something I wanted to do for so long. And I’ve owned a lot of businesses throughout my life, and I had a little hiccup with a business that I had sold. And anyway, long story very short, losing everything. And um, about that time I found out I had a sister on ancestry and I had sold my business. I had a school that I owned, and I moved to Northern California, and she said, why don’t you move up here? And I said, where am I going to live? And she said, we have a fifth wheel RV on our property. You want to live in there? And I said, I have been writing in my journal that I’m traveling across the country helping and supporting small business owners and in my RV, and I was in this really crazy time in my life, and I didn’t really know how I was going to do it. And then all of a sudden, I have this RV I could live in to see if I liked it, so fell in love with it through a series of a lot of crazy things. I ended up with my driving RV, the one I could actually move and uh, yeah, that’s kind of how it got started.

JIM: Serendipity is great. Sometimes there’s that silver lining that changes our lives for good. I know how that goes. What about being an entrepreneur? What does that mean to you? What does it take to be an entrepreneur?

SUE: Oh my gosh. So I went to college to be a school teacher, an elementary school teacher. My mother died when I was eight years old and was raised by my dad, who was a teacher, and I just knew I was going to be a teacher, just like my daddy. And I got out of college and my first job was Fred Astaire Dance Studio and I. So I’m teaching dance lessons. But I kept noticing that people pay a lot of money for dance lessons, and I’m like, wait a second, this is a business. And I knew nothing about business. But I was hooked. And one of the other dance instructors and I went back to my college town and opened my first business when I was in my early 20s. It was a ballroom dance studio, and I didn’t know anything about business, but I. I learned really fast how to run a business.

JIM: But you’re feeding the fire, as they say. So about those businesses you mentioned. You call yourself a serial entrepreneur and you’ve founded several successful businesses. Can you give us just kind of a brief overview of what those endeavors were and tell us how you define success?

SUE: Oh my gosh. Okay. Well, like I said, the first one was the dance studio and I was young. I learned how to build that business. Fast forward through out a few years. I did get back to teaching. Ended up in California working for Sylvan Learning Center. So I’m back to working for a business and saying, okay, this tutoring thing is pretty, uh, you know, this is something that could be really big. So I quit that job. I went back to teaching a year. I put one out in the paper, decided I was going to start my own tutoring business. And that’s really my claim to fame, is starting a tutoring business. Literally got one call, one student back in the newspaper days. And from just building relationships with that client and networking and learning again how to build a business, I built two businesses. Well, I had two locations. I had a big learning center in Santa Clarita, California, and a tutoring business in San Diego. So I was pretty busy for quite a few years when I sold that business. I just decided that my purpose in my life, my passion, was to help small business owners. So that’s what I do.

JIM: A lot of people tend to equate success with how much money they make. How do you define success?

SUE: I love this question. I love it because like I said, through the sale of my business, I ended up losing everything I sold my business. It’s a long story, but I basically financed the woman who bought my business. She never paid me and got away with it. I lost everything and I kept trying to start new things. I’m really good at starting businesses. I’m one of those. It’s like, oh, I could do this. I could do this because it could make some money. I can do this because it can make money. And you know what? All of those might have made a little money, but they never sustained. And it wasn’t until I decided and realized my purpose and my life was to help other people. And I just started doing it, and I got money out of that equation. That’s when success happened. That’s when I got everything that I wanted. And everything that I wrote in my journal was when I was in the terrible time of my life, when I didn’t have anything, all came true. I’m doing exactly what I wrote in that journal when I decided I was going to live my purpose.

JIM: You know, I relate so much to that. It really resonates and purpose being the key takeaway there. Because Renee and I sold a business and planned for a year on the road and a kind of sabbatical, and that turned into two. And then we started little things to try and make money. But we eventually found our purpose and followed that passion and turned it into a full time labour of love. So we may not be making the money we used to make when we ran a full service marketing firm, but we live just such a more fulfilled life there. I can totally relate to that. There’s one thing else you mentioned in there. It’s about relationship building. So what are the some some of the key strategies for relationship building? How does that process begin? Where do you begin to build relationships, especially nowadays and especially for nomads?

SUE: Yeah, exactly. So I built all of my businesses through building relationships when I was young. I started my dance studio. I didn’t know anything about marketing. I knew how to do everything else, but I didn’t know how to market my business. So I learned how to go out and start meeting people. And I learned to build relationships. I didn’t have marketing money. Same kind of thing happened when I started my school. I started that after a bad divorce and after a really terrible car accident where I shouldn’t even be standing, let alone speaking today. And I had no money in the bank again, starting a brand new business. And I just went out there, started meeting people, building relationships, and I’ll give an example. So I had a school, so I had tutoring and after school program, summer camps. There was a local teacher supply store. Well, what a better business owner to build a relationship would be a teacher supply store where everybody that goes in that store is asking if they know any tutors. So they referred me to everyone. So networking, building relationships, relationship marketing is the best way to build a business, especially in this digitally dominated world these days. And all the I.

JIM: O for sure. And we recently had the RV entrepreneur uh, online kind of workshop recently. It was a, it was a virtual networking mixer, and we kind of went through some steps about how to break the ice. But do you have any like key point of advice for the people? You know, we don’t go to those chamber mixers anymore, especially when we’re nomads and it’s an online world. What’s our first step? To try and break that ice with someone and build a relationship with someone you might want to collaborate with?

SUE: Yeah, so it should always be about getting to know the person and keeping the business out of it. You know, networking. You run across a lot of people that you say, oh, let’s, let’s have a meeting. Let’s meet 1 to 1. Let’s jump on a zoom or meet at the coffee shop. And it’s the people. I’ll just tell a quick story. This lady that always comes to my mind was someone that I would meet with her at a coffee shop and I’d say, hey, how are you doing, Sharon? Tell me all about what’s going on. In your life. And I’d ask her, you know, all kinds of things about her and her husband. And she’d yak and yak and yak, right. And then she’d turn around and say, well, what about you, Sue? And as soon as I would start talking, she just looked the other direction or look at her phone, and she was not even listening to me. She didn’t care anything about me at all. Obviously the energy was there, and then she just turned it around and tried to sell me whatever it was that she had. So it should just be about getting to know each other as a person. And what’s really cool about the nomad world is we all have something really cool in common, so it’s easy for us to network with each other, right?

JIM: It is. It’s kind of like that virtual campfire. Whether you actually meet up with someone at a park or you get online. We do have that thing in common and we the conversation will always, you know, diverge down to black tanks, but you have something in common to talk about there. You mentioned a minute ago about a certain relocation in your life, but I was browsing your website, and I wanted to ask you about how your relocation led to the, quote, swift establishment of a tribe of raving fans within a few months. I mean, how did you build so many relationships and what kind of relationships were they and how did you do that so quickly?

SUE: Oh, I would love to say that. So okay, before I moved, I sold my business, my school that I had in Southern California, and my new sister that I had met on ancestry lives in Northern California. So I move up there. I’m starting my brand new, basically business coaching, marketing type business, and I didn’t know one single person there. My sister had a business, but she had to work all the time. So I had to go out figuring out how I was going to network and go meet business owners that were my ideal clients. Right. So I just started going out networking, and I knew that business owners were who I wanted to meet. I had a specific niche in mind a woman business owner that was a certain age and all of that. But I needed to make friends. So I figured out the business owners were at Chamber of Commerce mixers, networking mixers, meetup groups, whatever, and I would go there and get to know them. And one of the things that I did, I just had this idea, people, you know, they always pass out business cards and those just go in the trash are they go in a big bucket and they just don’t do anything. So I learned really quickly I would meet someone, get to know them, and I would take my phone and I’d say, hey, can we take a selfie picture of each other so I don’t forget what you look like? And then when I went home, I would take that picture. Or sometimes I would do it at the event, and I have an app on my phone that I can upload the picture into an app on my phone. It’s an app that makes a physical greeting card that’s going to be sent in the mail to them.

SUE: So I put the picture on the front of the card and this is all an app on the phone. I swipe over, I voice text a message, it prints it out. That’s going to be printed on the card. I always say, hey, it was so great meeting you wherever I met them. I would love to learn more about you and your business. Call me when you get this, and let’s set up some time to get to know each other. And on the back of the card has all my contact information, my picture, everything. I can push send on this app. It prints stuff, stamps and mails out a card that they’re going to get in the mail in a few days. They open it up. They say, oh, I remember her, I remember Sue, they see the picture they read. Wow, she wants to learn more about my business. Call me. Well, of course, who’s not going to call me? And I’m actually an introvert, believe it or not. And so I don’t want to make phone calls. I don’t want to do all that calling thing. So people were calling me all the time saying, Sue, I got your card. And yes, I’d love to meet. And then it just snowballed. I kept getting phone calls and then recommendations would be shared. I worked for a company called Alignable that is a big, huge networking platform, and then people would write a recommendation or I’d write recommendations for them, and then my phone would ring and they’d say, hey, Sue, I saw that my friend recommended you on Alignable, I’d like to hire you. And that just kept going and that’s where it all kept coming. And I just kept in touch with them that way. So that’s kind of my secret.

JIM: Awesome. We love sharing resources here. Do you know the name of that app?

SUE: Offhand I do, actually. I have an affiliate link that you can go to cards from Psu.com and it’ll take you right to that app. And you can just get a free account and try it out and feel free to contact me, I love it, I’m constantly on Facebook finding people’s pictures of their pets or, you know, a vacation they’re on or whatever, and I’ll find the picture, you know, I’ll upload it onto the app and send cards all the time. And people just love it. That’s a good relationship builder right there.

JIM: That’s a great idea we’re going to look into, because it sounds like the service prints and mails the card for you. You don’t necessarily have to do that, but you do have to capture an address. What’s your trick for getting someone’s mailing address when you take their selfie?

SUE: I love this question because everybody asks me that and I just say ask them. Here’s the funny thing why I think this is so funny. People will not give you their email address anymore. They don’t want to be spammed with their email. You can ask them all day long for their phone number or email address. And they’re like, oh no. And I’ll say, can I get your mailing address? I want to send you a surprise in the mail. Everyone will instantly send me their mailing address, so it’s pretty funny.

JIM: Everyone likes a good gift. Yeah, everyone likes a good gift once in a while. We did connect on Alignable or via Alignable, and I do want to get into what you’re doing with Alignable on the road in more detail. But what is Alignable and what sets it apart from LinkedIn? Honestly, I’ve just been kind of lurking around and I’ve been growing a good network, but not engaging much there as much as I do on LinkedIn. How is Alignable different from LinkedIn and what’s the primary purpose of that platform?

SUE: Oh, I love it. So yes, completely different. So there’s social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn and all of the social media Alignable is not a social media platform in any way, shape or form. It’s a networking platform. It’s actually if I wanted to really tell you what it is, it’s a network matching platform. So when you fill out your profile on Alignable, you are telling Alignable who your ideal customers are and your ideal referral partners, and then you choose the tags on your profile to tell Alignable who you want to meet and who you want to network with. Alignable algorithm goes out and finds the people that you say you want to meet. There’s almost 9 million members on Alignable, and then they give you a page that says, here you go. You want to meet veterinarians, you want to meet chiropractors, you want to meet real estate agents. What do you want to meet? Who do you want to meet out there? And they’ll just show them to you. And there’s all sorts of networking opportunities. We have speed networking called Smart Connects. I host a mastermind every Friday that’s completely free. There’s an RV entrepreneurs group on there. We’re just kind of getting started with my friend Kimberly, who’s a full timer, and she’s starting to do networking events on there and masterminds, so it’s pretty amazing. It’s nothing like LinkedIn.

JIM: I’ve just joined the RV entrepreneurs group over there and have been lurking about, and I do want to meet veterinarians in since you mentioned that. So I’m going to be paying more attention about how those connections are made and paying closer attention to those tags I can do in my profile there. But in your alignable on the road and on your website, you say you’re meeting and supporting small business owners across the country. We’ll get into the traveling part and how you’re doing it, but what exactly do you do to support business owners?

SUE: Okay, so like I said, when I was writing in my journal back then and that I was traveling across the country helping and supporting small business owners in a motorhome, that I was doing all of this right when the pandemic hit, I’d only lived up there, up in Northern California for a couple of years, and the pandemic hit. And, well, first of all, my heart shattered for all the businesses and Alignable called me about that time because I was on Alignable and there wasn’t anything on Alignable back then. It was like a, I don’t know, advice column. It’s really all it was. But I got to talk to the co-founders of Alignable because I told them I was doing this mastermind, and they started talking to me and I said, you need to do more to help the small businesses. And they said, can we just hire you to help us? And I’m like, okay, that sounds I wasn’t even looking for a job. And I’m like, sure, I’ll help you do that. This sounds amazing. And I said, but my dreams to live and travel in a motorhome, I want to go across the country and help the small businesses. And they said, okay, tell us when you get your motorhome and when you’re leaving. And I was kind of shocked. And so the end of 2020, I got my first motorhome and I just took off. And basically what I do is we have alignable alliance groups all over the country that are growing. And so I go to the different areas, I travel to different areas and host networking events or relationship marketing summits, which I’m just doing this week. I did one yesterday in Salt Lake. I had to fly there from Dallas and tomorrow I’m doing one in Dallas. So yeah, so that’s what I do. I just go and teach networking and relationship marketing and um, yeah. And how to use Alignable to to make it all happen.

JIM: When you attend these, is the audience nomadic or are you more or less the the nomad in the room?

SUE: Yeah, yeah. It’s not very often I have met Kimberly Henry, who runs my RV entrepreneur group. I met up with her in Colorado last summer. I guess it was. I’m going to get to meet up with her again in Branson in a couple months. So it would be my dream to have some more RV entrepreneurs following me around, or I could meet up with them. I would love to do that.

JIM: So we talked about the traveling Alignable ambassador thing. Do they have a fleet of these people or are you?

Speaker4: It.

SUE: I’m it.

JIM: Fantastic. Otherwise I would have said, hey, everyone, go here and join the team because it seems like they could get a fleet together and have help more people across the country addressing their needs. So let’s talk about you’ve met so many different small businesses all over the country. What are some of the most common challenges small business owners are facing today?

SUE: I think it really started with the pandemic and it’s getting a little bit better, but it’s still a problem for business owners to find help. There’s so many business owners that are just having a heck of a time finding really great employees. That’s been a really tough one. I think the rent and the money kind of thing is getting better. I know that Alignable does a lot of research and polls for all of our members, and gives them out to like, New York Times and things like that, and we are finding that things are getting better for entrepreneurs. So it’s good. I think there’s more opportunities than ever before to be an entrepreneur and to create a business, which I’m a big fan of. Obviously.

JIM: Having been a nomadic entrepreneur, can you identify any specific challenges that the RV nomads, RV entrepreneurs out there are facing? Anything specific to being nomadic?

SUE: Yeah, the only thing that I could tell, I mean, a lot of the Facebook groups and I see a lot of posts, and the thing I see more than anything is people wondering how to make money on the road. And something that I would love to do is maybe get some people together. And that’s kind of a superpower of mine, is to learn about someone and find out what their superpowers are, and figure out how you can create a business around it. That’s kind of a fun thing that I love to do. So I think probably with nomads and I’m just guessing here is just a lot of them probably have been working for someone for a long time, so don’t have that entrepreneurial knowledge on how to start businesses. But there’s just so many opportunities, so many that you can create. I created my own job. I literally told this company that this is what I wanted to do, and they said, okay, and so they pay me to do this. So I’m pretty fortunate and very grateful for sure.

JIM: And growth comes back to the relationships you build. So I noticed from looking at a few of the past events that you’ve done, I noticed relationship marketing and networking summits. Can you give us a broad overview of what relationship marketing is you talked about, like how to build relationships, but then what do you do with it to proceed with successful relationship marketing?

SUE: Yes. And actually there is an Alignable university if you go to Alignable university.com. I’ve done a lot of trainings in this, so there’s recordings. I’m going to be doing a lot more of those virtually, so people don’t have to actually travel to the summit. But relationship marketing basically, in a nutshell, I guess, is when you get customers. If we were just talking about customers is taking really good care of them, making sure that they are appreciated. I’m actually working on my talk for tomorrow, and there is a huge percentage of people who are customers that they leave because they don’t feel appreciated. And I’m sure we’ve all learned that we’ve had a restaurant, maybe that we’ve gone to, that we’ve always been welcomed and they remember our order, and then you start going in there and then nobody remembers anymore and you just feel like a number. You’re going to go away. So it’s keeping those customers happy, feeling appreciated and taking really good care of them. That’s really what it is. It’s like I remember this guy who was a realtor who posted something on a in a Facebook group or something that said he made the most expensive mistake of his life as a realtor, and he said it was like the holiday season. And he said, I sent out holiday cards this year, and every year I send holiday cards to my prospects and my current customers. But I’ve never sent holiday cards to my past customers. And what happened was he decided to do that, and he got all of these envelopes back saying, not at this address, no longer here at this address. And he went to the MLS and found out they had all bought and sold houses with other realtors, and he actually went through and figured out how many millions of dollars in Commissionable sales he lost by not staying in touch with those customers. So that just makes oh, it makes me all hot, sweaty because I feel so bad for him. But don’t forget about those people, the past customers, your referral partners, and take care of them. That’s really the bottom line, I guess.

JIM: And we’re kind of talking about CRM here. Customer relationship management. Do you have any particular tools you could share that people would want to start using to manage those relationships?

SUE: Uh, not really, because I’m not really doing that for myself anymore. There are so many of them out there. I will tell you a little secret. That I was in a meeting with Alignable, and they’re actually building something pretty darn cool to be able to have that be a part of Alignable, where you will have your own little CRM system. I’m probably not supposed to say any of anything, so.

JIM: Well, we’ll be keeping an eye out for that and we won’t tell anyone. But you mentioned the Alignable University about relationship marketing. What about the solopreneur that really doesn’t know where to begin? How do they start developing the networking skills? I mean, we talked about some icebreakers and stuff, but if someone wanted to learn about networking and they didn’t happen to attend the recent RV workshop, where would they learn?

SUE: Well, like I said, they can go to Alignable University and watch some of my recordings. But I would just say this take out of your head that you’re going networking to get customers your intention. I this is in all of my trainings. It’s your intention has to be one thing and that’s to build a relationship. So go out there to network with people and just get to know them. Just go out there and and say, you know, let’s let’s make some new friends here. You know, go with that intention, a giving heart, you know, a servant heart. I will tell you that. There’s a guy that called me not too long ago. He’s actually one of our ambassadors on Alignable, and he’s got a marketing company. And I met him virtually, and he never really talked too much about his business. He was just a really cool, nice guy. And he said that he went into one of our Alignable Smart Connect meetings, met somebody. It’s like a speed networking. You get beamed into a room with, with somebody you get to talk to for a few minutes. And he talked to this guy and the guy was new and he just said, I don’t know how to use this, Eric said. I just went and helped him and we just got to know each other. He turned out to be a $200,000 a year client for his marketing company, just because he had a servant heart to give and help somebody. So that’s my best tip, is give, give, give and more is going to come back to you.

JIM: Yeah, you always have to offer the give before you ask. So I think I can totally relate to that. Since we were talking about apps and platforms a minute ago and you’re always traveling, how do you plan your routes? Do you have a specific app that you use for planning your destinations?

SUE: Yes, I do use RV Trip Wizard and I kept track. I have several different routes. I keep track of my entire route. I’ve been about 32,000 miles now and since 2021 and about 44 or 45 states, something like that. But yeah, RV Trip Wizard is awesome. I can plot on the map where I want to go and and I watch the weather.

JIM: That’s good to hear because you can add active fires on the map levels, as I’m finding out as I dive into that tool as well. I ask because I noticed you shared your entire route. How do you logistically plan where you’re going to stop? Is that up to alignable or do you have some freedom in where you’re going?

SUE: I get complete freedom where I’m going, but I kind of have my own. I want to hit all the lower 48 states at least. I’m not quite sure about Alaska right now, but I may get there one of these days. I am getting into Canada this year, so that’s pretty cool. So I kind of pick it, and it does have to a little bit to do with where our alignable alliances are and where people are. So I can go and plan an event and help them grow that alliance and teach whatever I can to help people.

JIM: And how far ahead do you plan that route, or do you plan it in full or in segments?

SUE: Well, I plan sort of what I want to do. My idea for it, of course, we all know things change all the time. My dad lives with my sister, he’s 92, he has dementia, and he lives in Arizona. So you know, that can throw a wrench into something once in a while if I need to go see my dad. So it really depends. But I have pretty much the next two months figured out and then I have the other ones ideas. So then it just kind of goes like that. I kind of keep at least two months ahead of time, because we do have to plan the events.

JIM: And things definitely do change. As our our RVers, we tend to say that plans are set in jello. And I was talking with RV life podcast host Dan and Patty and they say the current plan, that’s the current plan because they can definitely change. So let’s get back to our discussion about purpose, because that’s what businesses and relationships are all about to me. You know, serious growth and success is dependent upon my purpose and fulfilling needs of others. I noticed a quote on your website I want some feedback on what does this mean to you? You say the most extraordinary people in the world today don’t have a career. They have a mission. What do you mean by that?

SUE: It really just goes back to what happened in my own personal life where, you know, I’ve lost everything more than once. So I was basically 54 years old, I. I had sold my business, which was every single thing I had into that. I lost everything and I didn’t know what I was going to do. And, you know, when things like that happen to you and things like that happen to everyone, right? People go through all sorts of, of adversities in their life. And I just remember, you know, of course it was hard for a long time. And I just journaling is such a big part of my life, especially since everything that I wrote in my journal when I didn’t even know how I was even possibly going to buy an RV. I didn’t know anything about it. And now I’m doing exactly what I wrote in there. And again, going back to what you and I were talking about earlier, that I tried, you know, I was in that really deep rut in my life and trying to find every single thing I could that would make money.

SUE: I kept thinking, money is going to help everything. You know, if I just had a little bit more money. I have a couple of friends going through this right now that’s just going to make my life so much better. And I’d make a little bit of money, and then it would go away and nothing ever sustained. And when I found that purpose and I wrote in my journal what I was doing and how I was supporting people, and I gave it up, I just said, I know it’s going to come to me. I’m just going to give as much as I can, and I know it’s coming back to me and I’m not even expecting it. I’m not expecting it. I’m doing what I’m going to do because it is my mission and purpose in life. I’m living my dream. I literally am living my dream and I don’t even know how it happened. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you how this happened. I mean, not in a million years. It just happens. It’s magic.

JIM: You’re clearly doing something right there. I mean, based on how you define success at the beginning of this interview, you are clearly successful in what you’re doing, and it’s going to keep up, I’m sure. So where can people learn more and what’s the best way to connect with you? I’m guessing it has something to do with Alignable.

SUE: Well, obviously Alignable you can find me there. I do have a little like a link tree thing. I just went to fix it up all about Sohu.com. Just go there. You can find the link to the cards. You can find a link to alignable. You can find a link to the group, see where I’m at, and I would love to meet up with some other nomads and meet more people. And if I can help anybody that’s going through a stuck part of their life and try to help figure out a way to find your purpose and and have that make money. That’s I would love to help. It’s just it’s my purpose in life.

JIM: Fantastic. That’s what we’re all about here as well. So hopefully listeners can check out your route and connect with you down the road. And I hope to do the same. So Sue, so nice to meet you. Thank you for joining us.

SUE: Thank you so much for having me. It was nice to meet you as well.

JIM: So are you on Alignable yet? All of us co-hosts here at the RV entrepreneur are so look us up. We’d love to connect. Speaking of connections, did you miss our RV Spring Mixer? During this fun virtual networking event, we presented some tips for developing your pitch and refining your networking skills. We’ll be doing that again for sure. Meanwhile, check out the show notes for Alignable links and reach out to others in the RB Facebook group to keep those connections going. Maybe we’ll be seeing you down the road at a local Alignable event.

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The RV Entrepreneur is presented by RV Life – Tools that Make Camping Simple
https://rvlife.com

You May Also Like: The RV Life Podcast
podcast.rvlife.com/
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