Conversations with Big Rich
Hear conversations with the legacy stars of rockcrawling and off-road. Big Rich interviews the leaders in rock sports.
Conversations with Big Rich
My partner in crime, Shelley Krehbiel, on Episode 22
Hi, if you don’t know me – I’m today’s guest – I’m Shelley Krehbiel, the one who writes the Show Notes and does the Transcription, and generally is Big Rich’s partner in crime and life and love and everything else. Rich interviewed me a while ago so I could tell some of our story. How we got here, all the things we’ve done to arrive at this place. Can I tell you, it’s weird to talk about yourself this way. But here it is, a bit of history of the Rich and Shelley show, these are stories we tell all the time with company and friends. Hope you enjoy.
2:02 –I am not an off-road girl
3:18 –Thank you Dr. Warren
5:18 – Do you still want to get married? Or how to plan a Surprise wedding
8:49 – How to Unscript your life
11:51 – My identity crisis
15:13 – The rebirth of WE Rock
22:57 – How 4Low came to be with a little help from our friends
29:42 – Industry, Competition or Enthusiast – which are you?
34:22 – Working toward Strategic partnerships
35:51 – Wyatt Permberton gives a push
38:35 – What I love most is the family
43:48 – Wednesday’s are my favorite
You can catch Shelley on a number of websites: www.unscrpt.com for help in your online business; reservations at www.masonsquarehotel.com; magazine subscriptions at www.4lowmagazine.com and coming soon, her own author website at www.shelleykrehbiel.com Don’t forget, for all things WE Rock, go to www.werocklive.com and if you are needing some all natural skincare products – check out www.thehealinghippy.com or www.trailnaturals.com
We want to thank our sponsors Maxxis Tires and 4Low Magazine.
Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.
[00:00:01.080] - Big Rich Klein
Welcome to the Big Rich show, this podcast will focus on conversations with friends and acquaintances within the four wheel drive industry. Many of the people that I will be interviewing, you may know the name, you may know some of the history, but let's get in depth with these people and find out what truly makes them a four wheel drive enthusiasts. So now's the time to sit back, grab a cold one and enjoy our conversation.
[00:00:29.660] - Maxxis Advertisement
Whether you're crawling the Red Rocks of Moab or hauling your toys to the trail Maxxis has the tires you can trust for performance and durability. Four wheels or two, Maxxis tires is the choice of champions, because they know that whether for work or play, for fun or competition, Maxxis tires deliver. Maxxis tread victoriously.
[00:00:56.220] - 4Low Magazine Advertisement
Why should you read 4Low magazine, because 4Low magazine is about your lifestyle, the Four-Wheel Drive adventure lifestyle that we all enjoy, rock crawling, trail riding, event coverage, vehicle builds and do it yourself tech all in a beautifully presented package. You won't find 4Low on a newsstand rack. So subscribe today and have it delivered to you. All right.
[00:01:20.460] - Big Rich Klein
Here we are today with conversations with Big Rich. We are going to do something a little differently today than normal. We are going to do an interview. With Shelley Krehbiel, who happens to be my partner in crime and life and in WE Rock and 4Low magazine and everything else that we do. Without her, in 2009, WE Rock probably would have disappeared at the end of that season. And she convinced me to keep going. So here we are in 2020.
So for those of you that do not know, Shelley, here's a good time for you to get acquainted. So, Shelley, tell us a little bit about yourself.
[00:02:02.770] - Shelley Krehbiel
Well, you never told me that we were actually interviewing me. I thought I was just helping you out here. But my journey to offroad came exclusively because of Big Rich. I was not an off road girl. And quite honestly, I'm still not an off road girl. I am happy to spend time in the passenger seat when we're on the trail. But it's not my passion. What my passion is, is business. And I love serving our community and helping people to grow and giving them opportunities that they may not have.
If we weren't around. So Rich and I met. I don't know if everybody knows this, but we met on eHarmony and I had been divorced for a few years and had dated and was finding out quickly that there were a lot of things on my no go list. And that's one of the things that I loved about eHarmony, is that if you had had things that were deal breakers, you could put them down. So he came to eHarmony after his wife had passed away.
[00:03:18.190]
And we were matched in December of 2008. Um, in March of 2009, we finally met and we began an exclusive dating arrangement from there, but from long distance because I lived in Idaho and he lived in California. And it was one of those things that had you suggested to me at the time that I was looking for a partner, I would have told you no, what I wanted was a date on the weekends. And even after we spent time together, I said, you know, this is a really bad idea because I'm not the girl you think I am and let's just have a fling.
And he agreed. And so it's now, what? Eleven years later and we're still having a fling, although we did get married in December of 2012, that's 2012. So that's a whole nother story. We we had gotten engaged and. When I was a little nervous about that, because we both already had twenty five years experience, so between us, we'd been married for 50 years. There was no point in rushing into it. And I was a little nervous.
I said yes, because there was no doubt that this is who I was going to spend the rest of my life with. But I wasn't sure that I was actually ready for the piece of paper. And so when people asked when we were getting married, I would tell them the day after the end of the world, my theory was. If he's lucky, he doesn't have to marry me because the world ends, if I'm lucky, he will marry me and will we'll have so much time together.
[00:05:18.880]
But that was right when the Aztec calendar was being talked about and the end of the world was coming. And so. We we agree that was when it was so the week before the end of the world happens. All right. We're in Montana and Rich says to me, so this Friday is the end of the world. Did you still want to get married? And I said, can I sleep on it?
[00:05:47.140] – Big Rich Klein
Yeah, that was that was not what I expected to hear at that point.
[00:05:53.050] – Shelley Krehbiel
So I wasn't questioning whether or not I wanted to marry him. What I was questioning was how we were in Montana. We were away from our friends and family. And I was like, you know, how do you put on a wedding in a week and where are we going to do that and all that kind of stuff. So the next morning I woke up, he'd had kind of a fitful night. I didn't realize I'd done that to him.
But I woke up and I said, OK, here's the plan. We're going to call Tyler and see if we can have the wedding at his restaurant in Blackfoot. We're going to have a surprise wedding. We're going to invite all of our friends, but we're going to tell them we're having an end of the world party. So we sent invitations to all of our local friends that said, you know, we're having an end of the world as we know it.party. Rich arranged for Andrew Paulson to be our preacher, and he did awesome. And we took over the bar. The party started at 11:00 p.m. on a Friday night because that's when the restaurant bar closed. I had my favorite bartender there. We never really told Tyler what we were doing. So he's there. His dad, Kevin's there. My bartender, Brent, there, a bunch of my friends we're having a great time. There's motor sports on the TVs in the sports bar.
There's an open bar. And at midnight, Rich walks out the door and then he comes back in and he goes, Hey, everybody, it's there are no zombies knocking on the door. So Shelley and I are going to go ahead and get married. And the look on my girlfriend's faces were priceless.
They were like, why? What did he say? And like eight minutes later, we were married. That was all well and good. Charlene did an awesome job putting out a press release the next day with our picture, said we got married. It was all well and good, but his sister saw it before we had thought to call his mom to tell her that we had gotten married.
[00:08:04.030] – Big Rich Klein
Yeah, so. My sister Claudia sees the press release, calls my mom and says, so did you know that Rich and Shelley got married last night? And. Of course, my mom didn't know. And so then we got the phone call going. What did you do? Which they were not unhappy with it by by any means. In fact, they were quite happy with it. They've always said that if anything happened between Shelley and I and we didn't last, they were keeping Shelley and getting rid of me.
[00:08:40.970] – Shelley Krehbiel
I'd like to believe that they certainly do treat me well. So that's how kind of we got started.
But my history with the with the business was that I was working a full time job. And I had told my bosses eight years before I left that I was retiring in 2011. I'd read a book and it had inspired me to realize that life can be done differently. I was living a perfectly fine life.
It had three point two kids, a dog in the yard, white picket fence, the whole routine corporate job. I was in a great position. They paid me plenty of money and I realized that that perfect life was awesome. It just it wasn't mine. It was good for someone else. So I told my bosses that I was leaving. 2011 was my date because that's when my youngest graduated from high school. She would no longer need that nice, steady, stable home.
And then I continued on. And every year I told my bosses, hey, guess what? I'm retiring in 2011. And they would laugh. And my mentor said, You can't tell people that they'll stop giving you things to do. And it turned out to be just the opposite. They were fantastic with me. They gave me projects to complete because they knew I couldn't hold on to them for life and I'd have to just get them done. And then some things happened and I got divorced and my bosses said, Awesome, now you're not going.
And I went, Oh, no, no, no, I'm still going. And then I met Rich and I was able to say, Hey, now I know what it is I'm going to do when I go. And they went, Oh. So I continued working for them. I was the CFO for a forty million dollar company, and it was it really was a great career. But in 2011 they pretty much said, well, in 2010 I said, OK, it's time to hire my replacement if you want me to train them.
They did that. I trained him. So 2011 came along and they said, come and go as you wish and, you know, make sure that everything's still working like it's supposed to. But they wanted to give Dan the opportunity to perform on his own with me just doing some oversight.
So we did a full complement of of events that year and we started Dirt Riot. Because our theory was, if we were going to go and live on the road, we needed to have more things to do than just half a dozen events or eight or nine events because we wanted to be able to live on the road and not Deadhead back home. So we bought the the Taj Mahauler and started traveling and doing some things that way. And it was it was a fantastic year.
[00:11:51.290]
The end of the year came and I retired from my job and said, all right, I'm out. And we haven't looked back. I had a little bit of an identity crisis because quite honestly, I didn't know who I was. I had always been Shelley at First American or I was Haley's mom or Josh's mom or Kayla's mom. I was Shelley with Relay for Life. I was I, I. Was on the board for the local theater, I did training for the American Cancer Society, I you know, whatever was going on in my town, I was a part of that.
And so I I had a bit of a crisis because I no longer knew who I was. I was not only know an empty nester, I was going to leave my community that I had built and was such a big part of it. And now I was leaving my job, my career that I'd had for 23 years as well. So Rich stepped up and said, all right, all those things that you've been planning for all of these years, because I'm one of those weirdos that writes business plans for a living or actually for a hobby.
And he said all those things that you've looked at start spending 20 minutes a day on one of those things and let's see what rises to the top. And after doing that all summer long, I realized that what I wanted to be was a writer.
Now, often oftentimes I'm a writer who doesn't write, but we all have those problems. Right.
So but I so I started some blogs and I started doing some writing and we just that's kind of how we landed on the road. I wanted WE Rock to succeed. I wanted it to be something that I mean, the competition part had always been awesome. The financial part was a struggle. And Rich was into making a lot of deals with a lot of people to get through whatever month he was in. And I said I didn't really understand why people paid him.
I know that sounds funny, but because I wasn't really involved, I didn't see I didn't understand the concept of marketing partners. So once I got started and got involved, not only did I understand the concept, but I could see our value. And I made it so that he wasn't allowed to make any deals anymore. We because I know what our value was and I wasn't willing to discount that
[00:14:42.140] - Big Rich Klein
Well, I could make the deal. I just had to have it approved.
[00:14:45.170] - Shelley Krehbiel
Yeah, you couldn't discount it any longer. We we had an experience at SEMA once where he was setting up a meeting with one of our partners. And they said, can you not bring Shelley? And he said, well, why, why wouldn't I bring her?
It's like, man, she just doesn't give me any room to negotiate. And Rich laughed and said, Oh, no, she's coming along.
[00:15:13.620]
One of the things that we realize is that the things that we do bring value to people. They bring value to our marketing partners. They bring value to our to our competitors, to the spectators. And that is not something that we're willing to discount. We love the people that come that participate in whatever fashion. But we also know that while our needs are small, we we are never going to be wealthy. That's not on our list of things that we need, but we do have to put food on the table and fuel in the truck.
And so we keep ourselves at a level so that we can continue to do that. We're of no good to anybody if we can't get to the next event. So that's kind of how how we approached WE Rock. At the time that he let me get involved. We took it down to the bare minimums because what I didn't know, having not been involved, not being part of motorsports, is I didn't know what worked and what didn't. So we trimmed our expenses down to nothing and started building incrementally and seeing what worked and what didn't.
We did a year without merchandise because it wasn't something that we could afford to do. We tested different advertising. We did, you know, test different ways to do all the things that we do. And finally came upon a model that worked for us. We added Dirt Riot. We did the same thing. We're firm believers in Main Street over Wall Street and an incremental growth, wildly successful is an awesome dream. But it is not how we build our businesses.
And we did that for. Five, six years without without really any changes to that model, just moving forward, one event at a time, one more, one event, next event, moving on like that. And then I started looking for opportunities because it's not that I wasn't satisfied with what we were doing, but more that I was ready to do some more things. We had kind of our our plan in place. We worked our plan.
I have I am a spreadsheet fiend. I love them. And I got lists to go on for days. I don't understand spreadsheets. And Rich is not really a list maker. I am. And so I.
We started just just keeping our eyes open, we weren't looking for anything in particular, we just were keeping our eyes open. And we had we were at an event in Texas at K2 and we were having a conversation with Shane and Randy after the event, and they were looking for some marketing tips. So we're talking with them sitting in the trailer and just visiting with it, and Shane says some offhand remark about and if I could just get rid of the bed and breakfast and I looked at them and I said, what, you have a bed and breakfast?
And he goes, Well, yeah, it's my last asset with my ex-wife. And I'm just really kind of tired of dealing with her. And I went, huh? And we continued on with our marketing conversation and kept talking. The next day I said, Hey, Rich, will you call Randy, cuz Randy's a real estate agent? I said, will you call him and see if we can look at the bed and breakfast? And he looked at me with what?
So Randy hooked us up, took us into into the bed and breakfast. We called Shane on the phone. We stood there about an hour on the phone in the big hallway and just talked through how they did business and everything. And as we got in the truck the next morning and headed off to Tennessee and we're hours into the trip and I said, I think I'd like to make an offer. On the on the bed and breakfast in Mason, and he went, OK, OK, I said, great.
So we made an offer and a little negotiation and then we they accepted we made a plan to go to Mason to close on the deal and hopped on an airplane and got there. You know, this is a couple of months later knowing that there had been some some legal things that needed to happen first. And so we get there and they aren't ready to close. Turns out we're the only condominium in all of Mason County because we own the second story of a two story building.
And so but we were staying at in the in the bed and breakfast while we while we waited and we sat we went from room to room and just sat in each for 20 minutes to an hour. And just I was just trying to feel the space and we finally get done with it and stayed for a couple of days. And then we were back off to where we needed to go. And I said, so this winter after we get closed and everything, we're going to remodel, refurbish that space and we're going to take out the breakfast part and we're going to make it a hotel and we're going to do this and this and this and this.
And he went, OK, so we made some plans. And at Thanksgiving, we went back. We were running at status quo, using the same people that Shane and Michelle had been using. And and it was working great. We went back at Thanksgiving. We had three weeks before our guest came. We already had some guests booked for Christmas. So we have three weeks to do some refurbishment, we did that and then we ran off to Costa Rica to housesit for some friends and we came back on the 7th of January and we had another three weeks to get everything done before KOH and the start of our season.
So we finished that. What we found after the first set of refurbishment is that the bathrooms were tired and we didn't realize that until we put fresh paint on everything else. And so we came back in the second, second three weeks. We did all of the bathrooms. We converted one of the rooms and we took out the kitchen area. And I mean, there was there was work done in every space. And then we did something that nobody else in Mason County does, and that is we set up a website where people could make a reservation online without talking to anyone.
And Mason County is awesome. It's but it's tiny and the world doesn't get to it quite as fast as it gets everywhere else. So we're still the only place in town where you can book a hotel room without talking to anyone just right online. There are some Airbnb reservations. You can do that, of course, but nobody with their own website. So we're happy to be bringing a little innovation there. And I tell you, it has been it was it was one of the coolest things that we did.
[00:22:57.520]
Best investment for sure. Even with with covid this last spring where we lost all of our wildflower customers. It still is a is a great investment, but it was part it's part of our retirement plan. It's not it's not something we actively work on. We just it's just there. We want to be able to do stuff. But that was our first foray into opportunities. And the next the next year was we were at Donner Ski Ranch with I should back up before we even bought the hotel, we had been talking to a guy who owned a magazine about purchasing his magazine, and his pricing was not something we were comfortable with.
And so we said, no, thank you and kind of set that aside. But we knew what we wanted. You guys might have already heard Rich's story about the start of XOM and how that began and. So that that was part of our history together was that conversation, so we were looking for an opportunity to produce a magazine. So we're up at Donner in 2017 summertime. It's a beautiful day. And I read on Facebook that 4Low magazine is for sale.
And I turn to Rich and said, you need to call him right now. Here's his phone number because we want to buy this and it turned out the price was right for us. And so we bought it. We didn't know anything about the magazine industry because one of the things that I love is that you don't have to know anything about a particular industry business. Everything, everything is figureoutable everything. And so we called on our once the agreement was made, we called on all our friends and said, help.
We just bought a magazine. And this is how we want to do things, but we're going to need some help.
And so we got referred to a designer, we got referred to a printer. We got I mean, just everybody was so fantastic about getting us started. And the magazine that you see today is the one that we designed. I mean, we set out to say, OK, this is the kind of content we want. These are the features that we want. This is this is how we want to do things. And there were a number of sleepless nights as I tried to figure out how to do everything.
But we got the first issue out on our own on time.
Exactly. That was that was a biggie for us. Deadlines are a big deal and we haven't missed one since, nor do we plan to. But what I love is that it's the same people with when it's our community. So we're serving, we're serving them. We're serving you. When we the first issue that showed up when it showed up at Trail Hero, we had a FedEx truck that was going to Lil Rich's house and we met them, met their driver there.
The pallet of magazines was there. And I said, don't even take it off the truck, open one of those boxes and I need to see it. I need to touch it, feel it. Because if I hate this, we're going to burn that pallet. And the driver kind of looked at me like I was crazy and Rich got a knife out and open one of the boxes and we all held one in our hands and we sniffed it and we felt it.
And we, you know, flip the pages. And I took a deep breath and said, OK, we can unload. So we unloaded the pallet. We went right down to the Trail Hero registration, it was being held at Sand Hollow Off Road. And we started handing out magazines just as fast as we possibly could. And that was that was our first our first step. We've all of a sudden we had a magazine, we had a subscription base, we had an opportunity.
And it has not been without its challenges like anything that we do, you know, but we are now on issue 34. So it started the first issue we paid to print was No. 17, and we're just starting on number 34. So that's twice as many as since the life of it began. And I'm really proud of that. We get some we get some great testimonials from people who say this is exactly what I was looking for. It's not for everybody, but it is for those who are four wheel drive enthusiasts.
And we try to cover tech. Can we cover old school? Because we think history is important and we do a little bit of of everything. My job with it is to make sure that the communication goes well, that it reads well, that it has you know, the punctuation is good, the grammar is good. This is part of that writer part. I do a lot of editing, but one of the things that's important to us with the magazine is that everybody's story stays in their voice because we have a number of competitor or no contributors.
We want to be sure that their voice stays in the story because it's too easy to just take the personality out of it and just give you the facts. And, well, I like that we are not just a straight journalism reporting. We are there to tell the story. And so that's important to me that we keep everyone's voice in that. So if ever you're interested in writing and contributing to a magazine we would love, we would love to have you.
As long as it's about four wheel drive, we're game.
[00:29:27.980] - Big Rich Klein
And you don't even have to be a good Writer, because Shelley is a very good editor, and that is evident when you look at any story that I've written that it's coherent after she gets a hold of it.
[00:29:42.400] - Shelley Krehbiel
He never gives himself enough credit They're not that hard to review, but it is a lot of fun. And that is something that we're pretty proud of 4Low magazine is is something that we want we want to continue. It's it's. It's our way to stay in the industry and to expand into the rest of it. We know the the we've always looked at four wheel drive. It has a number of different different sections. There's the industry side, all the manufacturers, the people doing stuff on on that side.
We see most of those people at Easter Jeep and they're at Jeep beach and they're at the Expos and they're at SEMA. That's that to us is the industry side, the people who are making their living in that industry. And then there's the competitor side, those that are competing in four wheel drive, whether they're rock racing, rock crawling, rock bouncing, there's a competitor side and they have a different perspective on four wheel drive than even the industry people do.
And then there's a third component in the enthusiast. And these are the people who have their Jeep, their Toyota, their Land Rover, whatever. They they want to be a part of four wheel drive because they take great enjoyment in their hobby. But they're not on the competitive side. They're not on the industry side. They're the people who are attending trail rides and Jeep jamborees and they're spectators at rock crawling events. And they're the buyers at the Expos and and the jams and stuff like that.
So with all of those people, there's that everyone has a little bit different need. The magazine appeals to the enthusiast and we're happy to be a part of that. But with WE Rock, we really only work on the industry and the competitor side and reaching those spectators, reaching those enthusiasts was a little harder. The magazine gives us more time with the enthusiast, less with the competitors. So we were trying to be a little bit more full circle, trying to bring all of those pieces together so that we can service that community because that's important to us.
So then let's see. 2018. So we did the hotel in '16, the magazine in '17, 2018 came along and we. Because I'm an opportunity junkie and I really don't know what I want to do when I grow up, I had been introduced to a company. The year before and started using their products and as Rich and I were out on the 4Lowo ambassador tour and I saw that this lady was selling her company and it's an all natural skincare company.
So she was going to close it. Yeah, she was right. She wasn't selling. She was closing. She posted on Instagram, you know, stores closing this day, blah, blah, blah. And I went, oh, no, I don't want that.
So I reached out to her and I said, Hey, Kassy, you and I haven't met yet, but tell me what you're doing and why you're doing what you're doing. So we talked for a little bit and I made her a proposal and said, OK, instead of you closing your doors, would you consider selling it? And so I bought The Healing Hippy. And The Healing Hippy is an all natural skincare company. We do all natural deodorants, healing salves, lip balm, sunscreens.
We don't have a huge. List of products that we carry, it's small, it's intimate, but the products are all outstanding and it didn't take me long to figure out that while I can keep the communication up, I can do the advertising, I can do those kind of things with our travel schedule. It was impossible for me to fulfill orders. So I partnered with my youngest daughter. And Haley now takes care of most of The Healing Hippy. But it's still something that she and I do together because I love strategic partnerships.
[00:34:22.560]
I love working with other people, separating the duties, making sure everybody's happy with it and being able to do that. So we've got a couple of more things in the works that we're working on with with friends, with people we know, with people who have different skills that we want to bring to the community that aren't quite ready for release yet. The podcast was one of those things that I've been trying to talk Rich into for two years. And last November, he did his first couple of interviews and then it stopped because there's a lot of pieces that go with a podcast that you just don't realize the editing is difficult.
The equipment is not hard, but it's not easy either. The time that it takes to put a podcast together is more than you can imagine. And so I knew that there were stories that needed to be told. So I'd asked him to to do that. And he kind of went, yeah, I don't know. I did a couple of interviews. It sat. I try not to be a nagging wife, OK?
[00:35:43.630] - Big Rich Klein
Those interviews were actually done late August, early September while we were waiting for to do Nationals'.
[00:35:51.370] - Shelley Krehbiel
Oh, is that when it was OK. So we get to KOH this year and we're sitting in the media tent because that's where a ton of our friends are and Rich is sitting with Wyatt Pemberton. And he says, you know, I've been thinking I've been trying to do this, I can't really get it off the ground and Wyatt goes, what are you waiting for? Of course, if you don't know Wyatt produces The Talent Tank,which is an Ultra4 based podcast and he does a fantastic job with it.
So I listened to Wyatt and Rich talk and they went through all kinds of details and how you do this and how you do that. And he offered up some great suggestions. And we left KOH with Rich telling me, you know what, I think I I think I'm ready. I think I am going to do this. And then we went off and we did our first event and there was no time. And then we went off to go to our second event and the world stopped.
And all of a sudden he and I are sitting, looking at each other day in, day out.
And he said, you know, I think I'm ready to do that podcast.And I think
[00:37:08.660] - Big Rich Klein
I was going stir crazy. I needed something to do
[00:37:12.310] - Shelley Krehbiel
and I totally understood. So we set up a studio and he started started doing interviews. And we just by the time you hear this, who knows how many have been released, but we release once a week. We just episode 12 is ready to go out.
And this is going to continue. The best part the best part about this is the reaction to the stories I get the opportunity to listen to the interviews as I prepare the transcript, because I think a transcript is important for those who may not hear as well or who might like to read instead of listen. And so as I listen to that, the number of times that I laugh out loud, the names that keep coming up, the stories that are related, I mean, Bob Roggy's name comes up in every single conversation, Tiny, you know, the first, true unlimited buggy comes up in every conversation because we're talking about the start of rock crawling twenty years ago, 21, 22 years ago, and how it all began and how it changed and how it's innovated and how it impacted people's lives.
[00:38:35.050]
And what I love the most is the family that everyone talks about, how how they refer to each other, the camaraderie, the the graciousness of everybody who, when you break, who helps fix that. And I love that because I can see that at WE Rock every single time when something's not going right. And you can see people working together. While we were doing Dirt Riot, that was that was our focus. That was our key. We use the hashtag #dirtriotfamily because the number one thing we wanted was to teach grassroots racers how to race, how to get to know people, how to work in the pits, what you needed to do to be able to get to the track on time prepared and when something went wrong, who you called on for help so that when they went to another race organization, they were prepared, whether they were headed to Ultra4 or to Baja or anywhere else.
We wanted them to know who their friends were. We wanted them to know who their family was and how they could rely on them to help them with whatever it was that they needed. And we saw that play out so many times. With WE Rock, there hasn't been another competitive organization, so it's been more difficult to train, to build that family. And for a long time it was because it wasn't very big. The competitive ranks had fallen so, so much because of the economy.
And as it started to come back, we really didn't feel that same camaraderie. And I kind of would go, man if my choice was a WE Rock event or a Dirt Riot event. I was going to choose Dirt Riot every time. And then over the last few years, we've seen that change. We've seen that family come back. We've seen that people come back with a great attitude and that and the willingness to help everyone.
So when we. Felt the need to make the change last year, you know, Dirt Riot was so much fun, but there were some things that were getting complicated, finding a place to race, and that was one of the hardest part, finding a property partner, because, you know, we did damage to their lands.
[00:41:15.940] - Big Rich Klein
We not I mean, we built roads where there were no roads.
[00:41:19.710] - Shelley Krehbiel
Yeah, we built roads. So. Well, it probably isn't true damage. It was it. We still changed it. And so not everybody was willing to do that. So the price on the land was going up, the locations were getting more difficult. The ability to make a dollar with the, you know, insurance prices went up, property went up, all of those things. It was like in the end, quite honestly, our our driver counts were not as strong.
So we had to make a financial decision to say, all right, if we're going to keep one and not the other, which do we keep? And WE Rock made more sense. The other thing that we needed to do as a couple, because we are not we're not in our 20s anymore. I mean, gosh, if you think about it, we've been married like 64 years combined. And so we're we're not the spring chickens.
And it's so hard to have somebody travel with you to do the events for a long time.
When I first started and Josh, England was part of our crew and he was like a son to us and we loved having them with us, but it didn't make it easy.
It was still you know, there were all was always a third party, no matter what conversation you were having. And it just it was difficult. So when he made the decision to to go to Texas and to be. Help me, Alex is sorry, Alex Wacker's pit crew, and to be a part of that, we were more than happy to have him do that. Then we had a year in which Joel and Jodi Moranton traveled with us and we had a great year, a good plan.
We knew exactly what we were going to do. And then little Andrew came along a little sooner than he was supposed to, and that changed everything. But there's that part that goes, man, if I'm going to be married to someone, being married to one person is enough. And when you travel like that in such close quarters, it's it's difficult. So I love that Rich and I can do this, that we can travel the country, that we can live in our RV, that we can pretty much do anything we want.
[00:43:48.280]
And Wednesday's are my favorites because I love that on a Wednesday afternoon three weeks ago, three weeks ago, I think I was in the Llano river on a Wednesday afternoon at three o'clock last Wednesday, I was up at Bodie State Park walking through the the old time historic gold district.
This Wednesday, I'm likely to be in a pool. We don't we don't play on the weekends. That's when we work. But in the middle of the week, when everybody else is going to work, we're that's not what we're doing now. We're not getting up. We're not going someplace. We do our own thing. And I love that part. I love that freedom to be able to do that. So anyway, my point was, we love WE Rock, we love the family.
We love how people take care of each other and we look forward to having a great year. It's been weird not having the flexibility to come and go and do the things that we that we like to do. You know, a lot of people spent some time during covid reevaluating their lives and making decisions as to whether or not they wanted to continue to do what they were doing. We looked at it and wait a minute, we designed our life this way on purpose.
We want to get back to it. And while the freedom is opening up, it's still not 100 percent. And there's still some things that are kind of up in the air and we're just trying to do the best we can with that.
[00:45:32.500] - Big Rich Klein
If you enjoy these podcasts, please give us a rating, share some feedback with us via Facebook or Instagram and share our link among your friends who might be like minded. Well, that brings this episode to an end.
Hope you enjoyed it. We'll catch you next week with Conversations with Big Rich. Thank you very much.