Things to consider when running virtual estimates as a painting company

Chris Kiefer (00:01.329)
Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and today I am with Kyle Cooper. Kyle, thank you so much for coming on. Kyle is a super, I met him through a coaching group that we're a part of, but turns out that my wife has known Kyle and Kyle's wife Michelle for over two years now because she attends yoga at your guys' yoga studio. But.

Kyle Cooper (00:11.339)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Chris Kiefer (00:30.373)
My context of who Kyle is and why I'm excited for this conversation is he's former military, former law enforcement, turned entrepreneur. He and his wife Michelle have so many exciting ideas. I'm not going to steal your mission, but we both went to a workshop to refine our missions in life for both personal and for the business. I am super pumped about what Kyle and his wife are up to.

I'll let you give like the brief, you know, I always say 60 second, but in reality, it's like two to three minutes, like resume me through like Kyle as a kid to now Kyle's an entrepreneur with a couple of businesses in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and aspirations of, you know, well, not aspirations, you are doing YouTube video, a YouTube channel, monetizing that, you've got dreams for that, you've got dreams for the growth of these businesses locally.

So I'm just gonna hand it over to you and tell us how did you get to the stage that you are right now?

Kyle Cooper (01:32.746)
Yeah. So nothing about my story is like kind of generic, but I grew up in Texas, um, long for like, you know, from the time I was up until born and raised until I was like 21, uh, played college or play high school sports, then got into college sports for about a year or so. And in

You know, 2001, nine 11 happened and I was just really moved to join the military and be kind of part of something bigger. Uh, I think a lot of people during that time did the same thing and kind of threw away what I had going on in school to, to again, kind of fight for our country and, and be patriotic. So did that immediately got deployed to Iraq, uh, which honestly, that's what I wanted to do. That's one of the reasons why I joined. I kind of went to recruiter and it's like, Hey, what, what job can I do

to get me deployed the fastest because I want to go help.

And long story short, they told me, well, you can either be a grunt and go kick indoors or you can be a truck driver. And I love vehicles. I've always loved off-road writing or off-road driving. I had Jeeps and I was, you know, from my age, I was like 16 up. And so I was like, Hey, yeah, that sounds cool. Let's go drive a giant military vehicle off-road in a different country. So, uh, they weren't joking. As soon as I got out of basic training, boom, I was deployed and, uh,

Went to Iraq, was there for 14 months, actually met my wife there. So my wife, similar thing. She, she joined the military, uh, out of college. She was in college, want to do something different. Um, I'm not going to steal her thunder on her story. Her story is pretty funny. So maybe one of these days we'll get to hear that, but she basically joined out of spite and, uh, ended up, you know, us being together, we, we met overseas, her, I was going, when you're deployed, you get a two week leave. And.

Kyle Cooper (03:20.97)
I just kind of scheduled that out to be over my birthday. It was like my 22nd birthday. So I was heading home and Michelle, my wife actually had a red cross notice where her grandpa wasn't doing very well, so they put her on a flight with me and we got stuck in Kuwait for like six days together. So I'm a guy, she's a girl, you know, haven't been around each other really for the most part. And.

Kind of like one thing led to another. Our first date was, uh, in Kuwait at like a trailer subway and, uh, ended up flying home, uh, kind of did our thing. Came, got, got back, uh, went back to Iraq. Didn't really see each other. And then towards the end of our deployment, um, she was like, Hey, what do you think about me moving to Texas and seeing how this thing works out? And I'm like, whatever, crazy girl, whatever you want to do, you know, come on. You'll do it.

And we'll see how this works. So she moved to Texas with me for about a year. Being from Oregon, wasn't a huge fan of it. It's totally different, right? So we ended up moving. No, I'm from Texas originally. So yeah, like I said, born and raised in Texas. And so we moved to Oregon and basically just

Chris Kiefer (04:21.629)
Way different.

Chris Kiefer (04:25.501)
Are you guys both from Oregon?

Okay.

Kyle Cooper (04:36.578)
was like, Hey, we need to kind of start fresh. We had, you know, we had the school paid for and all that kind of stuff. So went to Oregon state for several years, um, living there in Oregon, got married and kind of was in the reserves at this time. So I'm still, you know, doing my one week a month, two weeks a year, making rank, all that kind of stuff. So I was doing a lots of trainings and stuff. Uh, wasn't deployed again, like a lot of people, because I was in an institutional training unit where. I was able to.

teach people how to do my job and train them for being deployed. So, um, not a drill sergeant or anything like that, but just an instructor. So they, that asset is kind of important back in the States and they didn't want to send their people who have a lot of knowledge, you know, back deployed when they could be a lot of help teaching people and the masses to go over and be deployed. So anyway, that's, that's one of the reasons why I didn't get deployed again. Um,

Chris Kiefer (05:13.139)
Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (05:29.754)
Mix feelings about that. I really enjoyed the deployments. I feel like I was making a difference but at the same time I really enjoyed being back in the States and making the difference there as well. So going to school fast forward about like three credits away from getting my double degree in education and PE or PE. Yeah PE and education and A job came up for law enforcement. I'm like, yeah, I've always wanted to do that I want to do that since I was a kid. I'm gonna apply for it

Applied for it, um, got hired as a reserve first for about nine months. And then, um, a job position full-time came up, came open, applied for that and, and got it and was like, okay, I guess we're doing this now. So this isn't. Yeah. Yep. So this is a forbidden County, which is a, the County seat that's airing core

Chris Kiefer (06:11.313)
And this is like, you're like a patrol person or just driving around in the car.

Kyle Cooper (06:26.41)
So yeah, I did that for, um, almost 10 years between, if you count my reserve time and everything, and during that time, going through a lot of stuff, you know, law enforcement is, is hard. And then you compound that on top of like a military career that I've had with all the things that we had seen deployed and, and dealt with, I needed kind of an outlet for stress, uh, you know, things were kind of starting to get to me a little bit and

Growing up. I'd always been into like I said off-road Vehicles and everything but not a whole lot of time with motorcycles I had always had four wheelers and stuff like that but I remember when I was like 11 years old my neighbor was selling a Honda trail 90 for like 200 bucks I'm like begging my parents to get this thing right because I was like I wanted a motorcycle so bad I'm had friends that had them and everything but couldn't afford it that time, you know, so it never happened So anyway, finally here I am

have a little bit of money and going to school or when I was going to school, I wanted a better way to commute without having to fight traffic and park on campus and all that kind of stuff. And a motorcycle you could go and you could park like right at the building your class was in. Right. So I picked up a Honda CM 185, which is

just larger than a moped, right? Just, it's a, it was in like a 1983, I think. So just this little Honda motorcycle and I'm just putting all over the place. Actually, side note, when my wife had her first child, I was like zooming home on that thing and it maxed out at like 53 miles an hour, you know? So I'm just trying to get home to the hospital so we can go to the hospital as fast as possible. No, I...

Chris Kiefer (08:05.329)
I thought you were going to say that you took your wife to the hospital on that. And I was going to say that.

Kyle Cooper (08:12.03)
That would be something that you would see in one of those Middle Eastern countries for sure But that's not what happened that would have actually it would have been a cool story. But So yeah, I'm here. I am Yeah hold on tight, so we I have this kind of like bug about motorcycles and There's a movie called long way around. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of that. It's got Charlie Borman and Ewan McGregor and

Chris Kiefer (08:16.276)
Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (08:20.693)
Honey hop on, let's go.

Kyle Cooper (08:39.894)
basically they take BMW motorcycles around the world and they do it in like three months or something and I just I get sucked in because it's a series it's not just a movie so it's you know I can't remember 10 episodes or whatever it is and I'm just glued to this the series I'm like man this is what I want to do one day so

My, my wife goes with our, with our baby to Eastern Oregon to see some family and I'm on I'm working so I can't go with them. So I'm, I have a half a day off or so. And I just, I take off on a, on my motorcycle and a different one at this time, not that little Honda, but I take off and I come to, I'm on, I'm riding down the coast and I see this guy, um, older guy, he pulls up with this just

Awesome motorcycle that's made for off-road, but you can also do dual sport is what it's really technically is. It's a on-and-off-road motorcycle and After here I am watching, you know, I've been when watching this series of long way around. I'm like gosh this guy I mean, he's got he's got the bike I want so just kind of start walking up to him to kind of pick his brain about it and I'm like, hey man That's just that's a cool bike. I get tell me about it and everything. He's like, well, I really like yours I'm like now I know dude yours is way better. You know, he's like you want to trade I'm like

What? And this guy's probably like 70. I'm like, seriously, just trade titles? Like just no money involved or nothing? He's like, yeah, let's do it. He had like, I don't know, I think it was like 20,000 miles on his. I had like 16,000 miles on mine, so they're really close. Mine was a street bike, his was an off-roader and.

Yeah, he's like, yeah, meet me tomorrow. This is my address. Here's my phone number. Bring your title. We'll swap. It was signing over each other. I'm like, what? Okay. So went home, got my title, got the next morning, went back to that same, went to his house and, um, so yeah, we ended up swapping motorcycles and sorry, there we go, focus, uh, we ended up.

Chris Kiefer (10:20.233)
That's crazy.

Kyle Cooper (10:37.606)
Ended up with this sweet dual sport motorcycle and I can okay. This is step one I can start I can start riding off-road and that's the first thing I did man I all any bit of camping gear that I had from like backpacking or Car camping I crammed it in this bags of this motorcycle. I'm like, here we go this This was 2010 yeah

Chris Kiefer (10:52.903)
What year was this?

Chris Kiefer (10:59.261)
Okay, because I want to try and jump into like the thing that people don't, I mean, I didn't know this about you until you told me and then I went and looked on your YouTube channel and you've got how many followers or subscribers on YouTube right now?

Kyle Cooper (11:13.422)
I think it's almost close to 35,000, so maybe just short of that.

Chris Kiefer (11:15.993)
Yeah, so not a small YouTube channel. It's that's like, I was like, when you said 35,000 in my head, I thought 3500. And then I went and looked, I was like, he's got 35,000. So when did you, so you did this 2010, when was the first, well, I have two questions. When did you post your first video? And when was your first, the idea of like, I should document this? How far apart was the idea for it? And then taking action.

Kyle Cooper (11:25.89)
Yeah.

Kyle Cooper (11:38.314)
You know, so in 2000, yeah, so in 2010, YouTube wasn't really a thing, right? I mean, there was some, people were doing it since like, I think 2008 or so, but it wasn't big yet. And I never thought, like, oh, I'm gonna post videos on YouTube, and that's what I'm gonna do, and that's gonna be fun. But in 2016,

Kyle Cooper (12:00.406)
just prior to that, I had another bike and I started taking photos and video, but I hadn't posted anything online. So in 2016, I picked up a Honda Africa Twin, which is, at that time, was like this really popular motorcycle. It's a revamp of a bike that was popular years ago, won the Dakar race back in the, I wanna say 80s, early 90s. And...

It was just a super popular bike that had been redone. So I like, I want this bike bad. I put a deposit in on it. Um, and I'm literally one of the first people in the Northwest to own one. So in, in 2016, when it came out, my serial number was in the 100s and I wanted to make.

Some content on this knowing that, okay, if I'm going to start a YouTube channel, I had been watching a lot of YouTube at this point, researching this bike and all these other things and kind of got into this niche, like, Hey, I think I could do that as a hobby again. This is like therapy for me. Um, going out, riding motorcycles. I'm enjoying that because like I had mentioned, you know, I needed something as an outlet to go out and just like blow off steam and kind of get away from people, um, not that people are horrible, right? I just sometimes seclusion is nice. So.

Chris Kiefer (13:05.694)
Yeah.

Kyle Cooper (13:06.866)
So and I had done it with some friends who were also in law enforcement. So it was kind of a dirt therapy thing for us is what we kind of crowned it to be as dirt therapy or throttle therapy. So in 2016, get this spike super popular. There's a huge following behind it. And I make my first video and it's just how to install some crash bars for this thing to protect it and being my first video, it's not great. It was like a how to video. I figured like, Hey, you know, just show what I'm doing.

And then I wake up like the next morning and it's got like 2000 views. And I'm like, holy crap. Like you hear people say that YouTube is hard to start getting views. You know, you might get a hundred here, a hundred there, and it takes like six months to do that, but. Okay. Maybe I found something. So I started making another video and another video. And then right about that time, my wife and I were deciding that I wanted to get out of law enforcement.

It's hard on the family. I never saw my kids and again the stress and the mental where it was having on me We kind of came up with a plan that In the next five years and they get out of law enforcement. We're gonna do something else Literally like three days later I get hurt and law enforcement and through trials of trying to get back into it and basically told me hey Here's a severance package. You can take it Okay, well, you know whatever God or whatever you believe in but I think God was basically telling me that hey that's

Chris Kiefer (14:18.057)
Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (14:26.294)
That's the ticket for, yeah. Close the chapter and move on. So we actually on a whim sold our house, our vehicles, everything that we owned. And we bought a, a fifth wheel and a dually pickup. And we're like, Hey, we don't know what to do at this point. My career that I was going to do is gone, but let's, let's hit the reset button and let's go travel for until we decide we don't want to do it anymore. So we traveled the country and went to all 50 states, um, within 14.

Chris Kiefer (14:26.677)
Close that chapter, yeah, move on.

Chris Kiefer (14:54.517)
How long did that take you? Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (14:55.818)
14 months. Um, we, we had planned, honestly, we were just like rolling with it. We, we coming through, coming through Idaho, we loved it. We had some friends who lived here and they were like, man, you gotta, you gotta move here. You gotta move here. And we're like, I don't know. But after, after going to all 50 States and seeing what we had to offer quarter lane for us just kind of fit, fit really well. Um, found a house.

I put an offer in on it. The offer was turned down. We traveled some more. And by the time we got to it, we were headed to like New York state. By the time we got to New York, a few days later, they hit us up and said, hey, that offer that was originally on the table fell through. Are you still interested? And we said, yeah. So bought a house pretty much sight unseen. We looked at it for about 30 minutes. And came back, unloaded all of our stuff, and this is where we ended up. So we're in Coeur d'Alene now. But.

During that time traveling, I made a ton of videos because we had a toy hauler, so I was able to take my motorcycle with me to all these places and ride places I would never, you know, living in the Northwest at that time, it was hard to get to the East Coast, right, with a motorcycle, you'd have to either ride or truck it. Well, we were traveling anyway, so, you know, I'd go and I'd ride Florida and I'd ride, you know, all these different places and make videos about it and sort of, yeah, so I started to...

Chris Kiefer (16:10.685)
And this is all on the same YouTube channel this whole time. And was your focus the whole time on like, motorcycle videos, not like all my families traveling around the country. It was just like, from my perspective, if I'm a viewer, it's like, what the heck, this guy's in Florida now? And now he's over, like, from that, you were focused on the rides and the motorcycle and not really the other part, or did you bring that into it?

Kyle Cooper (16:31.008)
Yeah.

Kyle Cooper (16:36.142)
Correct, yeah, my audience knew that I was a full-time RVer, but that's what we were doing, was I didn't wanna involve the family, and coming from a law enforcement background, at that time I still had a lot of, I was really closed off. I didn't want to let people know about my family or any of that kind of stuff, because in that career you just don't want people to know who you are, because people get angry, right? So that being said, I've actually recently

Chris Kiefer (16:46.345)
Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (16:58.977)
Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Cooper (17:06.196)
family and stuff like that into my into my videos and You know looking back on it It would have been probably a pretty good thing just for viewers to know who I actually am instead of just some dude on the internet, but Yeah, I did get that question a lot though. Like hey, how are you going from here to here to here? What do you do for work? So so when we ended up in Idaho, you know, I had made

Chris Kiefer (17:24.481)
What do you do for work? Yeah, exactly.

Kyle Cooper (17:33.39)
I was only at about at that time, maybe 3000 subscribers in 2018, 2019. Um, we had started opening some businesses here as we got rooted. So I kind of backed off on the YouTube thing a little bit. We opened up our yoga studio over, um, and here in Coeur d'Alene and that was in 2018 and then in 2021, we opened our, our retail store, best life. And I had done again, had done some videos, but haven't had, wasn't really, it was still a hobby for me.

Chris Kiefer (18:02.377)
Mm.

Kyle Cooper (18:02.582)
Well, 2020 hit and everything went online and I am not the kind of person that can just sit still. And when you're not able to go and do the things that you normally do, I had to keep busy. So I took, I took YouTube on full time. I was making two videos a week in 2020 and I did that for about a year. And I bumped up from about 3000 subscribers all the way up to, I think it was like 22,000 literally within just a few months.

Then it really and then I started seeing monetization come in because I was I'd already been monetized before but we're talking You know YouTube not being involved with anything else, but just the affiliate, you know links Or just the affiliate clicks through the through the ads I was making at the time like maybe a hundred bucks a month or something just enough to pay for fuel, right? You know if I wanted to ride my motorcycle

Chris Kiefer (18:49.851)
Yeah.

Kyle Cooper (18:52.438)
But in 2020, once everything kind of got more, you know, and more, there was more views, more clicks, all that kind of stuff. I was like, okay, you can actually make some decent money with this now. So I kind of took it on and started in just putting more effort into it and making my videos, um, more than just about the, you know, making documentaries for myself and try to actually see and do what my viewers wanted. And I think from then that's, that's.

when it clicked like hey make videos for people that they want to see not what you want to see and since then you know it's I think that's just kind of 10x my channel and I kind of go through these ebbs and flows where I don't make a video for a month a month or so and then I'll make you know two or three in a month and

just the consistency is hard with the other businesses, but it's something that I really enjoy doing it. And who knows? I don't really have a plan to ever stop doing it. It's just, again, I can look back now all the way back to 2016 and just relive those adventures that I've had because they're just, you know, documents in time, videos and documentaries in time that I get to watch, you know, whenever I want and show my kids.

Chris Kiefer (20:01.013)
Hmm. So the one thing that you briefly, I feel like in the conversations that we've had around this at the mission work that we've been doing, I'm curious, what would you what is your personal mission? Have you have you finally zeroed in on that?

Kyle Cooper (20:19.574)
A little bit, let me pull it up here. So our personal mission, or my personal mission really goes along with my business missions as well. I have it here in my notes, gotta see if I can find where I put it.

Kyle Cooper (20:34.298)
And again, we're still tweaking this a little bit, but.

So right now our mission is to build a community of people who break through limiting beliefs to live their best life. And our, our vision really is just.

Chris Kiefer (20:47.874)
Mm. Just love that. I think that's so, I think it's such a good, it's like, it makes me excited to like, stay close to you guys. Like I wanna be, I wanna be a part of this community. Are you kidding me? Like, what's next?

Kyle Cooper (20:59.23)
Yeah. Well, we got to thinking about it because we were trying to break it down in, okay, we'll have a mission for this business. We'll have a mission for this business. And in reality, like we have the same goals for all of our businesses. Um, and even with, you know, the YouTube thing that I, that I do, I, to me, the community is the most important part because I have, I have, you know, you talk about social media and how it's.

not faceless, you know, but you still were the odds of a actually meeting these people. But in the motorcycle community, the niche is so small that I have met so many people that hey, man, like I recognized you from a video when we're just like literally out in the middle of nowhere, like just happen to pass a motorcycle, they'll turn around and come back and be like, Hey, you're that guy on YouTube. And then, you know, we exchange numbers and next thing you know, we're doing rides together and you build these friendships. So social media has done a lot for me as far as just

I'm actually making human connections instead of just those digital connections. And, uh, that's to me, that's just one, one thing that people don't necessarily always get out of, you know, either social media in some ways.

Chris Kiefer (21:56.705)
Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (22:05.525)
So my, I have a followup on this. So breakthrough limiting beliefs. That seems like a, well, first of all, Natalie and I hired a coach a couple of years ago, and I am such a big advocate of people being in coaching groups, getting personal coaching, life coaching, business coaching. I just like, it's unbelievable to me, the value of being around people that are like, reflecting back what they're hearing from you.

and also just like the community of people that are doing this together. So my question for you is what are the key, like if you were to pick some key mindset shifts or limiting beliefs that you personally had in the last 10 years that you have like, oh my gosh, I used to think this about myself or whatever, and I broke through that. What were and I don't know if you've got a couple of them or if there's one that jumps out at you.

and you can be as vulnerable as you want to be, but I feel like that's super interesting because I could go on for myself about things like that.

Kyle Cooper (23:07.566)
Well, there's a couple for sure. So the first one is kind of the excuse that you hear from everybody is like, oh, that's cool that you get to do that, but there's no way I could ever do that. I'm telling you, if I can do it, you can do it because I've got three kids, I've got businesses that I run and granted being an entrepreneur, we are a little bit more free as far as time off and things like that. And...

It doesn't make a lot of sense. Sometimes if you only get two weeks vacation a year to go to say, okay, screw you family, I'm going to go ride a motorcycle for two weeks, wherever. But I think there's, this has to be compromised with whenever between you and your spouse or your family to, to say like, Hey, these things are super important to me, it's good for my mental health. That's good for physical health, whatever it may be to get out and go do these things. And again, that may not work for everybody, but I've been in a position enough to where luckily it's worked for me. And.

dealt with some, and I'll get into the second point here and that's, and that's the mental state I have dealt with a lot of demons over the time, over my, you know, 20 years, uh, from military and law enforcement career. And I mean so much of the fact that where, if I, if I didn't make a change, my family wouldn't have been an option anymore, they would have been gone because, uh, I needed, I needed to do something for my mental state. And some people.

You know, they go out and they paint or they, they do whatever the hobby may do that, that they may do to be able to relieve that stress. And it just turns out that going out on a motorcycle, camping off of it, getting away fresh, some fresh air, the challenges of it, I mean, being able to be self sufficient, I mean, we don't go out and we don't stay in hotels and we, we go literally in the middle of nowhere where the closest paved road might be 60 miles in any direction and you know, we, we survive out there and that's just the way that.

Chris Kiefer (24:57.117)
And when you say we, there's another thing like this is like you and one other person, maybe. And sometimes it's just you, right?

Kyle Cooper (24:57.252)
It's just a way.

Kyle Cooper (25:03.79)
There's been times where, yeah, I actually like doing the solo stuff. Um, but at the same time, it's really fun to share those experiences with other people. So I have a couple of buddies who have gone, gone through a lot of the same stuff that I have and we, we do these together. So, um, I,

Chris Kiefer (25:18.289)
And does Michelle ever go with you or is she like, that's your thing? Have fun.

Kyle Cooper (25:21.682)
So she used to, so she used to have a motorcycle. She wanted to be part of it. She tried it out. Um, once we had kids, it was hard for her to get out and go on a motorcycle and leave them. And just the fear of like, what if something happened, you know, either to one of us or both of us, they're, they're away and home by themselves. And not by themselves, but with a caregiver and, you know, she didn't want to have to have something awful happen and

Chris Kiefer (25:36.085)
Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (25:41.768)
Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Cooper (25:49.158)
not be there for her kids. So I totally understand it. She's like, you go do whatever you need to do to get to help you out. But this is not for me. So and that's fine. It was fun when we did it together. But again, it's not for everybody. And I'm not saying that, hey, if you have you know, anything that you're dealing with, you should go do this because everybody has different things. But for me personally,

Chris Kiefer (25:51.041)
Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (26:12.149)
So, and I wanna come back to this thing you said, if I can do it, anybody can do it. This is something, I would say honestly, this is probably the thing that I am most passionate about. And that is, for some reason, like you had a dream, you had an idea. I don't even know if I would call it a dream. It was just kinda like, wouldn't it be cool if blank, right? If I did my, if I rode around on a motorcycle, if I got a motorcycle, if I quit my job, if I did whatever, and I feel like,

Kyle Cooper (26:33.044)
Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (26:41.313)
So many people that I know are in this place of like, I kinda wanna start a business, I kinda wanna be a painter, I kinda wanna do whatever, but there's something that's different about what you and Michelle did, and I'm curious how, like, if you were to try and coach somebody on like, how to think about it, how to do it, like, there's a part of me that feels like you have to incrementally, like, it's like taking reps in small ways, of like, I'm gonna walk to work today.

And like that's or what like do the uncomfortable thing, take a cold shower, I don't know. But how do you go from like, I'm not a person that takes risks or pursues my passions to like doing it.

Kyle Cooper (27:10.91)
Right, yeah.

Kyle Cooper (27:23.49)
I think, so I think that's kind of where I have the advantage is because being gone, going through a lot of the things that I've went through early on.

I don't, I don't take anything for granted. I mean, at any time when we were deployed, I mean, we drove trucks, we were what they called like IED magnets, right? We did convoys and we were a target all the time. So coming, getting through all that and realizing like, okay, life can be pretty short. Don't take those things for granted as far as like what you, what your dreams are and what you want to do in life.

So again, that's one of the reasons why I pursued law enforcement. I had this plan to do like to coach and be, you know, a physical education teacher or a football coach, because that's what I had have done prior to being in the military, but.

When I, when I had the opportunity to maybe go into law enforcement, I jumped on it because, Hey, who never, you never know, like this may not be, I might get too old or I might whatever, to not ever have this opportunity to do it. So that's why I jumped into that. And the same thing goes with us traveling. We so bad was all we're always like, Hey, one of these days, when we retire, we're going to travel. And when the opportunity arose for us to be able to, to do that when, um, you know, we had the money to do at the time after selling our house and everything else.

that at that point that was holding us anywhere we were just like hey it might it might fail in like a month but here's what we're gonna do to try it out so we went and bought a truck we went bought a trailer and like had zero plan and a lot of times that freaks people out right because there's people out there that are planners on everything they have to have spreadsheets and all this other stuff and for us it dude zero like

Chris Kiefer (28:58.741)
How much planning would you say you guys did do? Like when you, like, well the idea of like, we should travel around the country, did you like, we're gonna go to California first, or to, you like, you just were like, all right, buy a truck, buy a trailer, and then we'll see where we go from there.

Kyle Cooper (29:07.826)
No.

Kyle Cooper (29:13.498)
It's so funny because we laugh about it. We made the most inefficient ways around the U S like we, we left in 2000, October, 2016 and yeah, and this was, so we travel, we

We traveled around Oregon for about a month. And then we were like, hey, Disney in Florida has a really cool holiday. Let's go to the Florida Keys for a little bit. And then we'll spend Christmas in Disney. And we're like, look at our finances. And we're like, I think we can make that work, at least for next month, you know? So we drove.

Chris Kiefer (29:52.433)
And what were you guys doing for work? Like, you guys both quit? Oh, you had the severance package.

Kyle Cooper (29:56.102)
Yeah, so I with yes, severance package and with selling our house, we had we had a monthly income coming in. Also, I have a little bit of disability from the from being deployed and I got hurt when I was deployed as well. So the VA pays me a little bit every, every month there as well. So didn't have a ton of money, but we had enough to pay for fuel and wherever we wanted to stay for about the month. You know, we, we stretched it a lot of times and there was times where, uh, you know, we would look at our account and be like, well, I guess we're stuck

Chris Kiefer (30:01.985)
some cash. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (30:13.129)
Okay.

Kyle Cooper (30:26.116)
afford fuel and we can't afford this and until the next deposit yeah and you know again that sounds probably pretty irresponsible to a lot of people but the amount of memories that we built and like we took our kids with us my oldest was eight six and four no younger than that my youngest was two so

Chris Kiefer (30:28.203)
Until you get the next replenishment. Yeah, yeah.

Kyle Cooper (30:45.878)
Yeah. So two, five and eight. And, um, you know, and we had our mother-in-law with us as, cause she had just retired and she wanted to travel and she would fly back now, now and then. And we had, so we had childcare with us. So we had things in place that helped, but at the same time there was, it was, it was an adventure every single day because again,

Chris Kiefer (30:48.254)
Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (31:04.537)
So then, but then going back to that, what would you tell someone? Like I have, on top of my head, there's five people in my life that I'm like, oh man, they, I want them to go just like jump, try it, do it, just go for it, but they're not. And so Kyle comes in to tell him something. How do you, this mission of like, break through your limiting beliefs, how do you do that? And what would you tell someone that's hesitating?

Kyle Cooper (31:21.282)
That's, yeah, I...

Kyle Cooper (31:31.262)
I think everybody wants to figure out the how before they actually do it. And sometimes the how comes as you're in, in the, in the mix or in the fire. Like you, when you're forced to figure it out, you'll figure it out.

And when, when you're, when you're, when you sit back and you're, you try to analyze all the things that could go wrong or right or whatever, yeah, you don't make a decision and that's even from like my military and law enforcement career, it's like you make a decision, you go with it, maybe it's the wrong one, but at least you made a decision because the last thing I want to do is not make a decision and end up, you know, quote dying in that position from, from just freezing up. So we.

Chris Kiefer (31:45.185)
Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (31:52.193)
You just get frozen. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (32:02.282)
Mmm.

Chris Kiefer (32:09.289)
That reminds me of the quote you and I both heard this at the same time, but Dan Martell, it's about, it's not about making the right decision. It's about making the decision and then making it right. And I heard like that, I was like, oh, that is fantastic. And I think that's exactly what you're saying, which is, if you have this dream and desire, basically the punchline is like, sell the house, do the thing, quit the job, whatever it is, and then just like throw yourself into it.

Kyle Cooper (32:20.916)
Exactly.

Chris Kiefer (32:38.853)
and watch yourself learn how to swim. Because if you, at a certain point, yeah, maybe you could do some planning, but I also love that you guys did this with three kids, right? Because I feel like that's another common thing. And I have empathy. This is like the people that have families, you know, it's not like, like I'm okay with sleeping in a tent if it comes down to that. But I can't, you know, I can't take a one month old and sleep in a tent. You know what I mean? Like that's not okay.

Kyle Cooper (32:41.537)
Right.

Kyle Cooper (33:07.208)
Right.

Chris Kiefer (33:09.633)
So there is the grace there of like people in different situations, but yeah, I just think if you if you guys can figure out Not figure you guys are doing it That's what I love about the mission that you guys have if you guys can Continue to scale that and build that community of people that are breaking through their limiting beliefs and building a wonderful Well living building their best life, but I would say a wonderful existence to me that's like that is

Kyle Cooper (33:31.819)
Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (33:36.985)
something very noble, it's memorable, it's something that you feel good about when you die, that you encourage or inspire people to do the thing that they probably wouldn't have done if they weren't around other people that were doing scary shit and jumping in.

Kyle Cooper (33:52.803)
All right. And, and, and that kind of just to play on that. So we, we got the traveling under our belt and that kind of built confidence and like, okay, we can, we can pretty much do whatever, whatever we put our, we put, we put our mind to. So then when we moved to quarter lane.

Chris Kiefer (34:02.409)
more resourceful. Yeah.

Kyle Cooper (34:06.778)
My wife had just kind of gotten into yoga and yoga for her was my motorcycle stuff. She had some things that she was dealing with. She went into yoga. Um, she never thought she would take a yoga class, right? She had this like mindset about, you know, yoga's weird and all this other stuff, but then fell in love with it. And when we moved here, we realized that there's not any studios. There was a few, but there weren't very many yoga studios here in Coeur d'Alene. And we wanted to start or make a studio where people from the military law enforcement, their spouses can all feel welcome and come in here and help

worked through some of that stuff that like she did. So that was one that was our main goal with our studio is to build a place for people. They can feel accepted, uh, comfortable. And we don't, our, our motto for awhile was that we take the weird out of yoga because people have a stigma about yoga being weird and we just wanted it to be.

Chris Kiefer (34:52.776)
Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (34:53.75)
like North Idaho yoga, it's like just normal people yoga, right? Like, and I mean, I'm not trying to offend anybody because yoga is a great, a great tool, but like, again, it just has a stigma and it's for people who don't know, you know, they see it on TV or whatever, you know, and they think that yogis are just weird and that's not necessarily the case ever, you know? So again, not having any business background zero. We're like, Hey, we're going to start this business and we're going to go with it. And

same rules applied. We don't know what the hell we're doing, but we're just going to do it. And you know, we had some mentors and some people who kind of led us away, led us in the right direction, but we did everything for the most part ourselves. And you learn by, you know, you learn by some failures, but, um, luckily none of those failures were ever so big that it really affected everything. It was just learning experiences and we just, we.

Chris Kiefer (35:38.505)
So I'm gonna interrupt again, because I feel like I'm guessing, I wanna clarify this, did you guys have a business plan when you opened, or what was the business plan when you opened the studio? And I want more of like a yes or no, because I have a follow-up. Yeah, so that's, and again, people say like, step number one, come up with a business plan. And my experience was not that. If you are someone that has the,

Kyle Cooper (35:50.698)
Our business plan. Yeah. No, no.

Chris Kiefer (36:04.969)
like disposition to make a business plan because you're a planner and you're good at that, that's fine. And it's not, I mean, it certainly might give you a little runway, but I am definitely the type of person, like I started my company 10 years ago after quitting my engineering job. And I was like, I got a drone, I like technology, and I can sell photos, I think, maybe. I don't know, but to who? I didn't know, I didn't know what I was doing. I've never run a business, never took a business class. And it was tough, like lots of struggles.

Kyle Cooper (36:26.078)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (36:33.597)
but you start reading and the necessity, what's the, the necessity is the mother of invention. It's just like, if you are in it, you just are like, all of a sudden, you're stumbling across blogs and articles and podcasts and books and communities of people that are doing the same thing, but you're never gonna find those things if you don't have to find it. And I think that's, obviously, your business plan has probably been revised and you've massaged it and now you're like, okay, I see a model coming here.

Kyle Cooper (36:54.538)
Right. And humans, humans are super resourceful.

Chris Kiefer (37:02.929)
And you could probably help someone else start a YouTube, a yoga studio very efficiently. But I love that isn't a necessity or a requirement to play the game.

Kyle Cooper (37:08.087)
for sure.

Kyle Cooper (37:13.038)
Correct, yeah, and again, no business experience.

When it came down to it, people would ask you, Hey, how did you, how did you start it? Well, in reality, we had a fifth wheel that we had purchased brand new and we used it for 14 months and we had equity in that because we paid cash for it from the sale of our house. So we sold that took that chunk of change and put it into the studio. And then we just basically move that money from one place to another. And again, we probably could have made a little bit better decisions on some of the things that we spent the money on to get it going. But I'm also very handy, I guess.

All of our build out ourselves with the studio and stuff like that. So it didn't cost us yoga studios are actually fairly inexpensive to start. It's a, it's an empty room with some flooring, you know, right.

Chris Kiefer (37:57.265)
Yeah, no, you don't have to get thousands and thousands of dollars of equipment and weightlifting stuff.

Kyle Cooper (38:00.646)
No plumbing or any of that kind of stuff. Right. So, and even still, we, we took a couple of years and we do hot yoga or heated yoga. So it took us a couple of years to even get proper heat panels and therefore to be like a legit heated studio. We were just using the HVAC system to heat the room to 90, which in reality we owe overuse the crap out of that thing, man. But, uh, anyway, yeah. So now, now it's, you know, you walk in and you can say, okay, this is a legit heated yoga studio and it's, we just actually turned five.

Chris Kiefer (38:18.497)
stressing it.

Kyle Cooper (38:30.48)
We hit our five year, um, last month and we're doing a, at the time of this video, at least we're doing a five year celebration tomorrow. So I'm pretty excited about that. But, and the same thing goes eight, eight AM and 10 AM. Yeah. You probably have an email about it somewhere. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (38:41.373)
What time is that? We'll have to make sure that we come over to that if we're... Nice.

Chris Kiefer (38:49.813)
I don't, because I don't have, I never, Natalie does certainly. Yeah, so I think that's fantastic. What the, well did you have any other wrap up thoughts on that train?

Kyle Cooper (39:02.142)
Well, no, not really. And basically I was saying from the yoga studio to our retail store best life and into the YouTube channel all three apply as far as like not necessarily having a plan But just figuring it out along the way and making it work and you'll never be able to do that Unless you take that leap of faith in yourself. You have to know that like I don't and this is not me

Chris Kiefer (39:22.625)
Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (39:26.778)
Sitting on a high horse. I don't fail at stuff because I don't allow myself to do it I mean don't get me wrong. I've had failures in the past, but like I just I'm so motivated that I will run myself Ragged until we find a way to make things work

Chris Kiefer (39:39.997)
Well, I would tell me if you this is how I like to position failure in my head. And I'm curious if you guys had like, did you guys think when you were doing these different ventures or ideas of like even traveling, I heard you say something small, but I think this is important. You said we're going to do this until we decide not to do it anymore. And to me, that's like that's like the unlike there isn't it. Truthfully, there are no failures in life until you're dead.

Kyle Cooper (40:08.795)
Right.

Chris Kiefer (40:08.945)
And even then it's like you're just you're out of attempts, right? But every single failure, quote unquote, of like, for example, the Sky business that I started that I mentioned 10 years ago, it still is in existence. It's an it's an S Corp that I started and registered with the federal government. And it's evolved and changed. And you could say that it had like five different life cycles as a business because I was trying to figure stuff out. And I even had to like put it on pause and go get a quote unquote real job because I didn't know.

Kyle Cooper (40:18.798)
Mm-hmm.

Kyle Cooper (40:33.314)
Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (40:39.293)
like it wasn't sustainable, it wasn't bringing in enough income. But it's like, if someone was like, oh, you know, at one point we had six employees and we had to let everybody go, turn them into 1099s because our life was changing and we were having kids and we moved and stuff. And someone could look at that from the outside and say, oh, that's too bad that Sky didn't work out and you know, you had to shut it down. But I'm like, I just got this six year education.

Kyle Cooper (41:05.566)
Right.

Chris Kiefer (41:05.721)
in running a business. It's just like I went to college, but no one looks at college and is like, oh, you didn't succeed in four years in college. It's like, no, you learned a bunch of stuff. And that's the same thing in any business venture that you do is that it's like every single quote unquote failure is just like, that was cool, I learned another thing there. Not gonna do that again. Just do the next thing, you know?

Kyle Cooper (41:14.647)
Right.

Kyle Cooper (41:28.094)
Yeah. And for us, our, we're traveling, our goal was to hit all 50 States. And when we did that, we were, we were okay that we checked that box and we did that in right about 14 months. And we kind of realized at that point, like, okay, our, our kids, we were homeschooling or road schooling at the time, you know, which to be honest was like the best thing ever, because you want to learn a little bit about like American history, let's go to the East coast where it all started, you know? And, and so that was great. And, but we just got to the point where they needed a little bit of stability.

Chris Kiefer (41:51.827)
Hmm

Kyle Cooper (41:57.988)
four days and, and at that point we decided that, Hey, let's, let's settle down and we never made a point to say that, Hey, we'll never do this again because that we absolutely want to do it again and we will, it just a matter of like, okay, let's find the timing again, where all the business that we currently have right now are kind of self-sustaining. Well, you know, our goal is that to travel at least four months out of the year. So

Chris Kiefer (41:59.254)
Hmm.

Kyle Cooper (42:20.814)
So we yeah, we settled down and yeah, and here we are now and we just we found the new adventure of starting new businesses and yeah, we love it.

Chris Kiefer (42:20.833)
That's awesome.

Chris Kiefer (42:30.621)
So let's move into our wrap up questions here. This has been super fun. Questions I ask everybody, three book recommendations.

Kyle Cooper (42:41.714)
Atomic habits would be my number one The Dan Martell book that I just read buy back your time and Then there is a Jocko book. It's a leadership Extreme ownership extreme ownership

Chris Kiefer (42:48.405)
Buy back your time.

Chris Kiefer (42:57.477)
Extreme ownership or? Yep.

Kyle Cooper (43:01.058)
That's those are my three top books that come to mind that I I'm not a reader Like I listen to books on audio all the time But these are the three books that I like I've read I read cover to cover like I they led They held me like crazy and they I loved them So yeah get out and get those three

Chris Kiefer (43:16.129)
Quick question or follow up on the atomic habits. Is there a series of habits or like a routine that you have that, what habit did you start or stop after reading that book? Maybe a succinct way to ask that.

Kyle Cooper (43:33.126)
Um, man, that's a hard question. I think for me, it was.

The consistency would be more than just the habit, right? So whatever I, I told myself, whatever I do, stay consistent with it, no matter if it's just that 1%, every, or that.1% every day of getting better at compounds over time, and that 1% will then turn into two and three and all the way into, you know, you're 100% better than you were X amount of days or years ago. So I look for fitness, for instance, right? I was never.

I wouldn't say never in the last 10 years, I have not been consistent with fitness and since reading atomic habits and type and stuff like that. And as I get older, I just want to make sure that I'm fit. So I go to the gym at least every day, or I do some type of physical activity at least every day, for sure. For the last year I've done that. And, um, you know, we can go on and on about that, but I think, I think just the consistency is the most important thing and telling yourself that.

You may not see a change now, but just having that little bit of, of gain every single day will compound over time.

Chris Kiefer (44:38.929)
Yeah, 100 percent. And your favorite movie.

Kyle Cooper (44:43.418)
The first one that comes to mind is Step Brother because that is one of those movies that I can just cry laughing watching. All the... number two would be like the Adam Sandler series of movies like back in the 90s. Those are all great too. I could probably quote those word for word.

Chris Kiefer (44:51.029)
Did we just become best friends?

Chris Kiefer (45:00.037)
Yeah. John Stamos. Yeah. So awesome. If someone wants to connect with you, what's your preferred method of getting in touch with you?

Kyle Cooper (45:03.419)
Hehehe

Kyle Cooper (45:12.046)
Instagram is probably the easiest. That's where you can't really message anybody on YouTube. If you want to watch YouTube videos, definitely check out my channel, backcountry, ADV, moto, but Instagram, the same handle. It's a backcountry, ADV, moto or backcountry venture motor sports.

Chris Kiefer (45:25.641)
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Kyle. Really appreciate your time and this is fun conversation. And the best part is that we get to keep hanging out for the foreseeable future. So I appreciate it and we'll talk to you soon.

Kyle Cooper (45:33.078)
That's right.

Kyle Cooper (45:37.45)
Yeah, thanks, Chris.