When I first enrolled in post-secondary education, my goal was to become a chemical engineer. Chemistry was my favourite subject in high school and it seemed like a natural progression. What I didn’t anticipate was the rigorousness required for that field of study, and as a naive seventeen year old that just left home for the first time, I quickly discovered that I was in over my head. (Read: I was more interested in partying than studying advanced calculus.) After one semester in which I almost failed every course (except chemistry!), I switched to general studies.Looking into the following year, I knew I had to buckle down and pick a major. And I honestly can’t remember why I chose to go into commerce, except that a friend of mine had switched to that too. And then after one year of that, I decided to narrow in on accounting. Why? Because another friend of mine was in it too.

Umm…follower, much?

All I knew for sure is that with a business degree in hand, it was highly likely I would emerge from University with a solid job, and I was right. Laid out in front of me for the next decade was a series of advancing opportunities. Until all of this happened, my life was laid out perfectly before me without much cause to question it.

(But you know what happened next.)It’s been over 10 years since Pete and I left jobs that netted each of us over six figures in order to begin our life of travel. We were both extremely privileged to graduate with few student loans and at a time when jobs were easier to find, but beyond that, we vigorously hustled to reach that income by the time we were 30. (Well, Pete admits that his efforts were sometimes wanting, but as a young female in a very male-dominated industry, I had no choice but to put in extra.)

But we left that all behind and went from hundreds of thousands to zero income. And for the next decade, we worked far below any prescribed minimum wage. We were okay with that, however, because we were building something. What, we were not entirely sure of at first, and along the way, we’ve tried many different things. Ideas in various stages of execution litter the path behind us, and it hasn’t been until the past couple of years that we have finally settled on a stable business structure and plan. And now that we have focused our attention properly, everything is beginning to flourish.

You may have noticed that things have slowed down on these pages. At one point, we were posting three times a week, and then once a week, and now we consider once a month a win.There are three reasons for this:

• We simply aren’t traveling as much, and it’s hard to sustain a travel blog without the travel. We’ve made a commitment this year to go somewhere at least once per month, but not all of it will be blog-worthy, either. Travel writing inspiration comes much quicker/faster when we’re in new places all the time.
• My writing style has evolved. Whereas one trip would often result in several small blog posts, I usually only produce a single in-depth piece now. This feels like a more fulfilling process to me, and even if it means a hit to the amount of traffic we see on our site, I think it is more beneficial (to us, and to any partners we may have) in the long run.
• Time is precious my friends, and lately, entire weeks are eaten up by our work on “the other side”. That means this blog is sadly neglected (especially seeing as the other side is what predominately pays the bills).

We have, several times, considered shuttering the site completely. Guilt about neglect is rampant, and at times this website feels like a giant burden. Website traffic is decent but not what it once was; follower numbers on some of our social channels are in a slow decline. Other bloggers, many who started long after we did, are soaring and succeeding beyond what we thought was possible for any of us. We didn’t get into blogging for any of those reasons – I’ve always admitted that writing is largely an indulgent venture for me – but I am human, and recognizing downward trends in something I’ve put a lot into doesn’t feel particularly pleasant.

But lately we have shuttered the idea of shuttering, and for now, we’re still here. Neither of us is ready to give it up. This blog encompasses so much of us, of our journey, and has built a community that we’re proud and happy to be a part of.I’d like to say that we’ll give it more attention, but the truth is, it will likely just rumble along as is. We have some exciting upcoming travels that will be documented here with the same care and effort that they always have, but the sheer number of projects we will take on will be less. We are not aggressively pursuing new audiences with growth tactics like guest posting and other things. Instead, our focus will be on nurturing the readership we do have.

Because something else about this blog has been realized in the last year – Hecktic Travels also happens to be a great business card for “the other side”. Many of our Hecktic Media Inc. clients come to us because they found us via this blog first. One of our biggest clients is a housesitting website (which, as you know, is a hot topic for us!), and our other anchor client approached us years ago on our Hecktic Travels Instagram account. And more come to us because they are specifically looking for storytelling bloggers, like us. What we are putting out on this blog is coming back to us in many positive ways.

A couple of years ago, I sat down to my laptop and created a series of documents with such titles as “Mission Statement” and “HMI values”. And then I felt a wave of nausea oncoming.Hey. Didn’t I leave this corporate bullshit behind years ago? Part of our decision to strike out and travel the world was that we were tired of that sort of environment and wanted to figure things out for ourselves. But then we realized that as we brought people on to work with us (besides Pete and me, we now have two full-time and two part-time contractors), we needed to spell these things out. We needed to ensure that our vision for HMI was well communicated. Ergo, I guess those things ARE valuable, and I am immensely proud of where we are today.

Other things bring us back to what we used to be: we have a steady stream of work that keeps us fairly desk-bound, and we must adhere to a regular schedule so that contact with clients is consistent. Gone are the days where we could spontaneously bounce around the planet and get by with only a few hours behind the laptop daily. Travel must be carefully considered so as not to overlap with intensive projects. We can never be too far away from WiFi.

We have, in many ways, resumed a life we once had. But with one important difference…

And there are both good and bad sides to that.Paying for our mortgage, vehicle, travel, food, clothing, etc. etc. depends directly on our efforts and on making the right choices to advance our business. Thousands of dollars can be made or wasted on one decision. There is no safety net. For some people, that is a situation that induces too much anxiety to be considered.

On the flip side, triumphs are also entirely ours (while shared with our contractors of course, who put in substantial efforts to help us thrive). But beyond registering success, what Pete and I value most is the freedom that entrepreneurship affords us. Yes, we may be put in many weekend hours, but we still aren’t fully tethered to the 9 to 5. We can hit the gym during the slower mid-morning hours or sneak off for a matinee movie as we please. We can still plan to go to Greece for a few weeks this spring (that is indeed in the works). We can balance work with exploring new destinations.

Had I continued my pursuit of becoming a chemical engineer, maybe I would have found my way to this spot too but probably not – that is a vocation that is likely much more institutional – and so I am glad I took other paths. I am glad I followed until I could break out and become a leader. And I recognize that championing this business is not something I could have done without first experiencing every other rise and pitfall that has been in my path.