Handling Career Turbulence with JB Adkins- CR48

Living with less can sometimes allow you to do more. In Career Relaunch episode 48, JB Adkins, a former pilot turned founder of Skyryde, a flying taxi service startup, shares his humble story of walking away from aviation school to pursue his entrepreneurial interests instead. He'll explain the tradeoffs he made to make things work, including living in an RV with his wife and two young boys to reduce costs so he could fund his venture. I'll also reveal what happened to me on the exact day I made a similar decision to leave one path behind when I quit medical school.

Living with less can sometimes allow you to do more. In this episode of Career Relaunch, JB Adkins, a pilot turned founder of Skyryde, a flying taxi service startup, shares his honest, humble story of walking away from aviation school after receiving a full-ride scholarship so he could pursue his entrepreneurial interests instead. He’ll explain the tradeoffs he made to make things work, including living in an RV with his wife and two young boys to reduce costs so he could fund his Skyryde venture. I’ll also reveal exactly what happened to me on the exact day I decided to quit medical school.

Key Career Insights

Walking away is always difficult and might involve some tradeoffs, but if you can ride out the rough waves, you may just emerge on the other side doing work you find much more rewarding.
If you have to, you can learn to live with less, which can allows you to reinvest into more important things that truly drive your happiness.
Whatever has made you successful in the past will play a role in empowering you during a complicated, confusing transition.

Tweetables to Share

You can learn to live with less.


JB Adkins


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Resources Mentioned

Read more about JB’s Skyryde business featured in the Washington Post.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I challenged you to think about your own work environment and consider whether there’s a way for you to do more of the work you enjoy doing. What could you do to pursue all your different interests or to showcase all your different skills you’re most proud of? It may even be worth considering ways to look elsewhere to scratch whatever itch you’re feeling

About JB Adkins, Pilot & Founder of Skyryde

JB Adkins grew up in a large family with 16 siblings. He started flying at age 11 and eventually began his career at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University on a military scholarship. He decided to leave that behind to work in entertainment, music video production, & advertising before bouncing back into aviation to eventually start a string of companies in the field. Along the way, he encountered tremendous obstacles and pitfalls, from being homeless for 5 months with his wife after they had a baby to making the decision to live in an RV full-time to save and invest in his new business, Skyryde, a flying taxi service startup that could change the way people move around cities.

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Episode Interview Transcript

Teaser (first ~15s): It was personally exhausting just looking at my wife, looking at my young son, and saying I’ve failed as a dad and as a husband. I can’t even take care of my kid. I haven’t mastered whatever I needed to master. I’ve kind of failed at life.

Joseph: Good morning, JB. Welcome to Career Relaunch.

JB: Thank you so much. I’m honored to be here, Joseph.

Joseph: Thanks so much for waking up, first of all, so early over there. I know it’s like 5 a.m. where you are, so I appreciate you making time for this.

JB: Absolutely.

Joseph: I’d love to just start off by talking a little bit more about what’s happening with you right now. Can you just kick us off by telling me what you’re up to and what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life?

JB: Absolutely, man. First off, I am in the middle of the mountains here in my six-wheel RV camper.

Joseph: Where exactly are you at this moment?

JB: It’s a little town right outside LA called Acton. It’s a horse community, an equestrian community out here in the mountains, kind of in the desert a little bit.

Joseph: Okay.

JB: I am focused on building a company called Skyryde. It’s a company I have always been passion about in terms of the concept, which is sort of a flying taxi, air taxi deal. That’s something that I’ve been passionate about since I was little in middle school. At this point, I would literally sacrifice everything to get this thing off the ground, pun intended. That’s where we’re at.

Joseph: Thanks for making the call from the RV. I want to come back to talking about life living out of an RV, because I know that’s a big part of your story. I also want to come back and talk with you about Skyryde. I want to hear all about what that’s been like and—you mentioned sacrifice—just to understand what you’ve sacrificed and why you chose to sacrifice certain things so that you could get this off the ground.

I’d love to start by going back in time a little bit, JB, because you’ve got a really interesting story. You’re actually the first pilot that we’ve had on this show. I want to start off by going back in time to when you were 11. I understand that’s when you started flying. I was wondering if you just could just tell us how you got into flying, and then we can move forward from there.

JB: When I was seven years old, I believe, my dad took me to see a movie, and I still have the little DVD to this day. It was an IMAX. I think this is when IMAX first kind of popped up. It’s like early 90’s. It was called the Magic of Flight.

It was basically a documentary about like the Blue Angels, the Wright Brothers, and just all these iconic aviation figures and groups. That movie really set me on this trajectory to want to learn how to fly in the first place.

When I was 11, I didn’t know that you could be that young to start. I think I bumped into a flight instructor somewhere, and they saw that I had some aviation tour or something like that. I can’t remember exactly how it happened. As fate would have it, I ended up going to the local airport and literally dumping all the money I’d saved up from cutting grass and took my very first flying lesson that day, which literally changed my life.

From that point forward… I was still relatively young, so I couldn’t fly by myself yet, but I was taking flying lessons like once every couple of months when I could afford it until I was about 14 when I started getting really consistent with the flying lessons.

When I was 14, that’s when I started flying two or three times a week and really working hard towards getting the first level of your pilot’s license, which is your private. I ended up getting that in high school, and yeah, it was awesome. I was doing a lot of fun stuff in high school.

Joseph: Yeah. It’s not the story of every high schooler out there. I was firmly planted on the ground during high school. Yeah, very cool.

I know after that, JB, you went onto the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on a full-ride military scholarship. Can you tell me a little bit about that chapter of your career and what happened during your time in aviation school?

JB: Military, what they call ROTC scholarships are very competitive, especially if you’re trying to become a pilot. I grew up in a large family too. I was one out of… Gosh, now it’s 16, because I’ve had a couple of brothers and sisters since I left home over the last 10, 11 years.

In my family, we didn’t necessarily have the money to send people to school at all, and so we had to figure it out. I knew that the only way for me to really continue on my aviation career was the military. With airlines and all that, they love to see military experience anyway. I figured, ‘Hey, if I can get my school paid for, I can continue to double down on my flight training and get them to pay for it and still have the prestige of being a military pilot.’

I earned the scholarship through the Marine Corps to Embry-Riddle. They paid for everything literally. I still have a picture, Joseph, of a $180,000 check. It was one of those big checks like you get on those game shows.

Joseph: Like you see on TV.

JB: Right! They presented that at school.

Joseph: Oh, wow!

JB: It’s so funny when I looked back. They literally gave me a check and said, ‘Hey, you’re guaranteed a pilot slot. We’ll pay for everything.’

What was interesting during that time was that I was actually torn. I actually wanted to go and pursue, at least try my hand at film. The family really didn’t think that there was any real future in that necessarily, so off I go to the military, to Embry-Riddle at least. I’m doing ROTC and all that. The entire time was honestly just grueling, knowing that I could be making films every day at USC or something like that, which is kind of my back up.

Joseph: Can you just explain what was running through your head then during those early days in aviation school after you’ve gotten this huge scholarship and yet you’re thinking that, ‘Maybe this isn’t the place for me?’ Can you just walk us through how you thought through that and what you ultimately decided to do?

JB: The ethos was very not me. What I mean by that, it was very macho. It was very warrior-esque. I was able to keep up physically and all that. I look pretty small in stature guy, but I played sports in high school and stuff like that as well. I wrestled and ran tracks. The physical wasn’t as exhausting. It was the culture.

The culture is what turned me off, because I’ve always been sort of a creative, big thinker, pie in the sky. Talking about killing and all that stuff, it really didn’t resonate with me. Every day, getting yelled at, I don’t know. It didn’t really line up with my values.

Even to this day, I look back and I’m like, ‘Yeah, you know, I’m actually glad I’m not over in Iraq dropping bombs on people.’ I’m not disparaging the people who do that, because I have a lot of buddies who are still friends to this day who are out there fighting for our freedom, and I salute those guys.

I think, for me, I really couldn’t see myself at that time, being an 18 or 19-year-old kid. When you have a guaranteed pilot slot, when you graduate, you owe 12 years. I would have had to wait until I was 34 to even consider getting out. That’s a big chunk of my life to give up at 18 or 19. That decision-making process overwhelmed me at the time.

Joseph: Can you remember the day when you decided to leave aviation school behind?

JB: I remember. I think I was at PT. It was like this. It was like 5:30 or something like that. ‘Oh dark 30’ they call it. I’m at PT, because we PT’ed every day, which was physical training. We had to show up. You got to dress a certain way at school. It’s crazy.

I remember being at PT, and I remember not feeling well. I think we had just come off of doing like dips or something like that. I remember like it was yesterday. We had the pull-up bars and the dip little thing. I’m sitting there, and I get off the dip thing, and I just remember feeling super light-headed. My ears started ringing really bad, and my vision starts closing in. I think I’m having an epileptic episode or something like that. I go over to my captain not standing up all the way. I’m like, ‘Hey, I think I’m having an epileptic…’ I don’t know, and I’ve never had epilepsy. I don’t know what caused me to say that.

Saying that actually ruined my chances of continuing on this track to become a pilot. Just saying that, they made a file for me. It were like, ‘Hey, you’re going to see a neurologist, no questions asked, and this is probably going to ruin your opportunity to become a pilot or ever be considered to fly.’ I was like, ‘Whoa! I’m certainly not going to be infantry for the next however long.’ They gave me a choice. At the end of the day, my test came back okay, with them like, ‘Hey, you know what? We’re going to give you an opportunity to either keep your scholarship and continue, or you can just go and you won’t owe us anything.’

In that critical moment, I was like, ‘You know what? I think I’m going to transition into something else. I’m going to give this up.’

Joseph: Wow! How did you then move forward from there? What did you do the next day, the next week to move on and start something new?

JB: At this point, I didn’t really know what to do. I’m thinking, my parents, they’re going to be disappointed. My family, I’ve let everybody down, because they’d known I’ve always been passionate about aviation. It has always been my dream, so to speak, but in my heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to do other things. I just felt like this is the only way to achieve what I wanted to achieve in aviation, which honestly has always been more on the business side.

I tried to join the army’s program, and I stayed with that for about a semester, but I actually ended up getting a D in a math class. That disqualified me from getting the scholarship for the army. Something did not want me to go the military track, man. What I did, I wasn’t able to continue along that path.

Joseph: That wasn’t working out. The stars were not aligning for you there. What did you decide to do next?

JB: I actually ended up getting a job at the local shoe store just so I could figure things out, because I was like, ‘Okay, at this point, I’m going to end up owing. I’ve got to take out a small loan to cover the last little bit of my semester.’

At that point, Joseph, I already had my sights set on California. I wanted to try my hand at the production thing. I wanted to make movies. I wanted to do something creative, and so I started planning my transition that following summer to come out to LA and just dive right in, try to make it in the movie business, try to make it big.

Joseph: Before we talk about the music video chapter of your career, can you just explain what it was like for you to go from having a full-ride scholarship at an aviation school to then working in a shoe store? Not that there’s anything wrong with working in a shoe store. I’ve worked in retail myself. Can you just explain what it was like to go from learning how to fly to selling shoes? Was that something that was difficult to stomach for you?

JB: To be honest with you, it might have been the opposite, Joseph. I think that’s because with sort of the rigidity of the Marine Corps, I felt like I wasn’t really able to be myself. Working at retail job and being around people who were not subjected to that rigidity actually freed me in a sense.

Joseph: Interesting.

JB: I’ve always been a people person. Interacting with people, even selling them shoes and fitting them, I excelled at that – the sales part of it. At the end of the day, I think what motivated me is I knew that I was on my way out to California anyway. I looked at it as a stepping stone, in a sense.

I was still relatively young. I was like 19 at this time. I was just embarking out on my journey and just completely free world at my fingertips, working this retail job, meeting all sorts of interesting people, working with an amazing team there. I still keep in touch with some of those guys to this day, believe it or not.

Joseph: That’s really cool. We have something in common. We didn’t talk about this before, but I actually worked at a Banana Republic for a few months. I was working in the women’s shoe department, helping women try on different shoes there. I loved it. It was one of the most fun jobs I’ve had.

It was exactly what you mentioned, JB. You get to interact with a lot of different people. You’re catching people when they’re pretty happy because they’re shopping for something new. I was like you. I also found it to be kind of freeing in some ways, when I stepped back and thought about it. That’s really interesting.

Let’s talk about what happened to you when you went to Southern California then. You got involved in the music video business, I understand, right?

JB: Yeah, man. It took me a couple of months to really get planted, as far as that’s concerned, but I knew that’s what I wanted to focus on. I wanted to come out. I kind of had it all tracked out. I was like, ‘A lot of really good movie directors start off as music video directors.’

I’ve been a musician growing up. I played in church and stuff like that. It’s a whole another thing. I was like, ‘I love music, and I can definitely see myself doing that,’ so I would just practice writing concepts. I would just listen to music. I’d just sit.

In the music video business, they have what are called treatments. Those are almost like at startups and in business, where you have like slide decks, like pitch decks. A treatment is essentially that for music videos. I’d learned how to write them, reached out to directors I admired. Most of them didn’t ever get back to me, but that’s a whole another thing.

Just really diving in head first and started doing extra work in LA to supplement my income, because at that time, I didn’t really have anything lined up in terms of jobs.

Joseph: Like showing up as an extra in ads or other music videos?

JB: Yeah, totally. I started doing that. With extra work, there’s a lot of downtime, because they’re only using you maybe an hour out of an 8 or 12-hour day. I’d go to the library and get every book I could on film and composition. This is still like pre-internet explosion, before everything was on Google. This like the Blackberry 1.0 era. Not everything was as readily available as it is now.

The library was like my solace. That was where I really was able to kind of hone, just through reading and via proxy, like kind of honed my skills man. A couple of months after experimenting and figuring that out, I shot my first video.

It was like a group of Christian rappers. I knew they wouldn’t take themselves too seriously, no disrespect. I was like, ‘Hey, I’ll shoot your video for free.’ I borrowed a camera from a guy that I met on a photo shoot. I think I paid him like $60 or something like that. I had no clue what I was doing, no clue how to use it, but I think I was looking at some YouTube videos to try to get acclimated. It ended up just diving head first rather and shot my first video.

Joseph: How did you then go from shooting music videos to launching an aerial tour company? Can you just walk us through that transition, because I know that that also involved some, what I’m going to call, kind of tough times just trying to make it?

JB: I just had this longing to get back into aviation, mainly because the music video business is so brutal. On top of that, I was doing a lot of content that I wasn’t really proud of. You’re doing a lot of exploiting. There’s a lot of… the models. I was recently married at that time.

Honestly, it wasn’t the most positive environment. That, coupled with always having passion for aviation, I was like, ‘You know, maybe I should look into something else before this gets out of hand.’ That’s when my wife and I—it was around the time we were expecting our first child, my first son—we started an aerial tour company, or we tried. It was an interesting time.

Joseph: We talked before. You were explaining that you went through a bit of a transitional period in terms of your living situation. Can you just explain what happened and where you were spending your nights?

JB: The music video business, I’m kind of letting it go. It’s kind of going downhill. At that time, I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s start an aerial tour company. This will be an easy…’ I don’t want to say easy but, ‘Let’s put like a text spin on it. We’ll do like an app. When you’re in the air, the app will show you where you are, and it’ll talk to you, so we don’t have to have somebody. The pilot doesn’t have to be distracted.’ All this and other stuff.

We bought an airplane, Joseph. First mistake, should have never done that. We bought an airplane, literally just dropped cash to buy this old airplane that we thought would be an amazing marketing tool. We actually went down to Venice Beach here in LA and asked the police department if we could bring the airplane to Venice Beach.

We were like, ‘Hey, we think this would be an amazing marketing tool. Can you let us put this on the boardwalk so that people would be enamored by seeing a freaking airplane, and then they’ll sign up for a tour?’ They were like, ‘Sure, we’ve never seen that before. Come down.’

We took the wings off the airplane, trailered it down, and set this airplane up on Venice Beach. We got quite a bit of press act for doing that actually. It was hilarious. People were just like, ‘This guy has brought an airplane to Venice Beach? That’s a first.’ We booked zero tours, bro. Zero.

Over the next month, we had this hangar rent we had to pay for. We had the airplane obviously. It needs maintenance. We had stuff that needed to be done to that. We ended up folding in like two months.

That was devastating, because here I am at this point. My wife was literally about to go into labor. We had three weeks left until my son is born, and I have this airplane that has all these issues, and I can’t sell it. The hangar rent is super expensive here. All of this overhead, and I have no idea how I’m going to take care of it, and so I literally ended up getting evicted from our apartment and go on to live with a friend for five months.

My son at this point, he literally spent his infancy from house to house. We lived with some friends for five months, and we went to live with some lady we met at a church for a month or so. Every time I talk about it, I just kind of get emotional because it was a tough time. I don’t know how to say it.

Joseph: What was the toughest thing about it?

JB: It was personally exhausting just looking at my wife, looking at my young son and saying I’ve failed as a dad and as a husband. I can’t even take care of my kid. I can’t take care of my family. I haven’t mastered whatever I need to master. I’ve kind of failed at life.

I remember literally when we were moving the stuff out of our house, when the sheriffs were on their way to make sure that we had cleaned everything out, when we were evicted, I remember looking through hotels. You know those motels that you stay by the week? It’s like 200 bucks a week. I literally remember like, ‘Man, I’ve got like a few hundred dollars left to my name.’ I just need to find one of these hotels that’s not in the jankiest area, so we’ll be somewhat safe.

I just remember feeling like… My God, dude, I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I was homeless, literally, with a baby, with an infant. That was devastating on a personal level.

Joseph: How did your wife handle that situation, because she’s a new mother? You guys don’t have a home. How was she reacting to this whole situation that you’re in at the time?

JB: I’m so fortunate man. I always tell people my wife believes in me more than I believe in me. I don’t think this has anything to do with it per se, but my wife’s actually older than me. We’re eight years apart. My wife had had her own career, and she really took a step back to help support what I was doing.

I think my wife saw the potential. I was young. I think when that happened, I was like maybe 24, 25. She surprisingly was very calm throughout the entire ordeal and just had faith to say, ‘You know what? I know this looks jacked up. Yes, I’m going through it emotionally too, but I am going to support you. I’m going to play the strong person in this thing, and we’re going to get through this.’ That’s exactly what she did.

Not one night, from sleeping on a friend’s couch literally on her back with a baby on her chest every single day, did she complain – not one night.

Joseph: You can’t really ask for more than that, especially when you’re trying to figure things out and you’re already feeling pretty bad about things. That just sounds incredible that she was such a great support during that time and so understanding about the situation.

How did you get yourself out of that situation? Can you just explain what transition you went through? Then I want to start talking a little bit more about Skyryde.

JB: I ended up just taking a step back and going to find a job. I essentially just leveraged my portfolio to get a gig at The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army had like an in-house agency that they had just launched, and they wanted young creatives to come and kind of help spearhead this thing.

Salvation Army is a Christian organization, but I sent them my music video really, with all these hard core rap videos and girls and twerking and all that. I was just transparent with them. They liked the work just because of the quality of what we had done. I was like, ‘Look, that was kind of a past sort of base.’ I’m totally focused on doing something new and positive now, and I got the gig.

Mind you, when you get an eviction, it’s not easy to find a place to live, so we had to wait a little bit longer to get into a place to get somebody to trust us. I got the job with Salvation Army, and I was able to kind of double down on the skills that I had learned in music videos and in production to help own what we were doing there. It was an amazing experience.

I’m not an office guy, but I’ve certainly learned what I needed to learn to transition into the next phase, into sort of doing what I’m doing now. I’m very grateful for that time.

Joseph: Before we talk about Skyryde, just one more question about your transition. What was it like to be able to move back into your own place?

JB: I don’t think I can describe the feeling, Joseph. Just the pride, having a bed. The first three months, we just had an air mattress, and we were happy to have that, just because we had slept on couches for so long. It was a relief. I think that’s the only word I can use to describe being in our own place at that point: relief.

Joseph: Let’s talk about the current chapter you’re in right now, which is working on Skyryde. I want to start by talking about this lifestyle choice that you made and why you decided to live in an RV. Can you just explain what living in an RV has opened up for your life and for your career and what you’ve been able to do because of this?

JB: I left The Salvation Army about maybe two and a half year ago. I basically was like, ‘Hey, I want to focus on this aviation project that I’d had in mind when we got evicted.’ The aerial tour company was sort of a precursor to what is now Skyryde.

I had this idea back then to sort of do something like this, but that whole eviction and having to go work and all that kind of derailed things a little bit. I’ve left Salvation Army to focus on this. I started like a consultancy. Salvation Army was my first client. They actually hired me back as consultant, which was awesome. It gave me flexibility, and I still had an income. But a market like LA is just so expensive. The overhead to live is just sky-high, literally.

My wife and I had been talking about an alternative lifestyle so we could save every penny and put it into just getting started with Skyryde. We actually tried a boat first. It was three things. We were either going to move to a cheap part of Europe for a while. We were going to move to like Spain or something like that and try to arbitrage our money that way. I was like, ‘No, let’s just stay here and get a boat.’

We tried it. We a rented a boat on Air BnB, and we stayed. We tried that, but the rocking was bothering my wife. Then we literally found out we were pregnant with our second kid during staying on the boat. I was like, ‘Well, that’s not going to work out.’ Having two kids on a boat, it’s just going to be counterproductive.

Then, we looked into RV’s. I’d always been under the impression that RV’s were super expensive to sort of own and operate. I’m thinking RV parts are very expensive and all that. We’ve ended up finding an RV, and it was a dream. It’s an older RV, but it had been owned by one couple. We bought the RV from them and the next week literally moved into it. My friend let us basically rent his driveway out at a property that he wasn’t living at. We did that for like two months until we got kicked out by the HOA.

We are forced to figure out where to park the RV and ended up finding a membership RV park which has been… We literally are paying a couple of hundred bucks in rent a month for everything – water, electricity, and the sight. It’s amazing.

I like to say we were able to save almost all of our income and put that into bootstrap in the business. It’s been an amazing, amazing experience so far. I wish I would have done this years ago, honestly.

Joseph: Is there something that you’ve learned about yourself, having lived in an RV for a while now?

JB: I’ve learned that home is where the heart is, and I would say heart equals family. Now, it’s my wife and myself and my two young boys. We’ve never been happier, honestly. We’ve learned to live with less. We don’t have any storage. We own everything we have, no debt. It just frees us up to the point where if we lost everything today in terms of finances, we’d be just fine.

I think we’ve just learned to sort of cultivate an air of peace and serenity in our home. This is kind of our refuge, man. We love being at the RV. For my sons, I think this is going to be an amazing experience for them and have a major impression on their upbringing and how they approach life. It’s awesome.

Joseph: It must be a lot of fun for them, definitely.

JB: Oh, they love it. They love it. They run around and…

Joseph: I can imagine, yeah.

Can you tell me a little bit more about Skyryde? What’s it about, and where do things stand right now with the business?

JB: It’s a service that lets people book short hops on small planes between airports and major cities. It’s an alternative to traffic. We’re actually getting a lot of favorable press and stuff right now, but the journey has been an arduous one to say the least. It has been a long journey.

The aviation business is not easy by any stretch, and we’re dealing with a lot of different regulatory bodies who are very, very, very difficult to sort of deal with, I guess.

You literally, in LA, can book a flight through Skyryde, and we’ll stick you in a tiny airplane and take you from Van Nuys here in LA to Santa Monica, which typically is an hour and a half commute. For us—we just did it the other day—it was 6 minutes and 49 seconds.

We’re really trying to sell people their time back. The goal with that, honestly, is to build the best flying taxi company there is with the latest and greatest technology. It’s a lot of fun, man. I’m having a ball.

Joseph: Having been through all of these different changes, from starting off in aviation school, then moving into entertainment and advertising, and now that you’re working on Skyryde, how does this experience compare to some of those other experiences that you moved away from?

JB: This one, I’m in it for the right reasons. I think even with the music videos and advertising, I was always kind of focused on the money and trying to be something I wasn’t. That’s kind of the culture. The industry is kind of keeping up with the Joneses and having the fanciest car and wearing the latest outfits and swag. You kind of have to play the part. I wasn’t really being myself, which is so funny, because with the Marines I thought, ‘Hey, if can go and do this, I can just be myself.’

In essence, I was actually sort of being affected by the people around me who weren’t always the best influence. The decadence and the excess and all that, that’s what music videos and entertainment is all about.

I think with Skyryde, it’s really just me. This is the 11-year-old me in a 28-year-old body, having the imagination to dump on my change on that. I remember it like it was yesterday, on the flight school counter and taking my first flying lesson and really dream and believe that could do it, that I could be a pilot by the time I was 16. That same energy and imagination has really penetrated everything I’ve done with Skyryde right now, and I’m totally happy.

I’m not doing it for the money. My wife and I talk about it all the time. If we need to live in our RV for the rest of our lives, then we’re good with that. We have everything we need – everything, and then some. You know what I mean? I think it’s just a different experience altogether. It just is authentic. For me personally, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.

Joseph: That’s fantastic to hear, JB. I got one more question for you, and then I’m going to let you go. What’s something you wished that you had known about career change that you now know having been through all of these different transitions?

JB: Here’s what I know. The same thing that held you down in terms of your skillset and your personality and the nucleus that makes you you, that makes you successful in whatever it is that you’re doing is the same thing that will carry you through your transition, honestly. I think it’s just a matter of finding what your strengths are and doubling down on the next thing.

The work might be a little bit different, but at the end of the day, I think your skillsets and the things that have empowered you through the other stuff you’ve done, whether that was a previous career or what have you, or a series of other things, it’s really the same set of skills that are going to empower you and carry you through this next phase.

Joseph: That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s really important to remind yourself that the things that are kind of nagging you right now or the things that you feel you should be doing instead of what you are doing are actually the things that you should latch onto as you try to figure out what you want to do next in your career, that you shouldn’t apologize for it, and that you should actually embrace it and be proud of it and kind of roll with it.

JB: That’s a hundred percent, man. Wow, I love that.

Joseph: Speaking of doing work that you really enjoy and finally getting around to doing something that’s more in line with, as you put it, your nucleus, if people want to learn more about how things are going for you or if they want to learn more about Skyryde, where can they go?

JB: They can go to GoSkyeryde.com, and we spell it S-K-Y-R-Y-D-E. It’s just a web ad right now. We literally just recently launched in May here. We’re still working on the software and stuff like that, but if anybody’s in LA and needs a flight, go to Skyryde and book one, or you can reach out. There’s support email there, and I’ll probably be one of the ones to answer that, and we’ll try to get you on a flight.

Joseph: Okay.

JB: Just let you try it.

Joseph: It sounds great, JB. I hope that people will check that out. We’ll definitely include the website in the show notes. I just wanted to thank you again for telling us more about your very interesting career journey and how you navigated the transitions, especially during those times when things got pretty tough, and also some unique perspectives about the importance of doing work that allows you to be yourself and that makes the most of who you are. I think it’s a good note to leave on.

I just wanted to wish you the best of luck with Skyryde and also best of luck with fatherhood.

JB: Oh, thank you so much, Joseph. I’m so honored to be on. Like I said, I’m so grateful for you, seriously. It’s been amazing