Risk, Resilience, And The Road: Tent Tales From Daytona Bike Week

The engines are loud, the tent is louder. From a canvas floor pooling with rainwater to a sales board we feared wouldn’t budge, our Daytona Bike Week run at the Cabbage Patch starts rough and gets real. We gambled big on a new location—higher rent, bigger crowd, more risk—and immediately collided with delayed shipments, an all-night print sprint, and an opening weekend of rain that drove us to shut early and regroup over pizza and live music with our guy, Daniel Johnson.

What happens next is the reminder we needed. Community shows up. Sunday opens bright and the shop lights up, delivering our second biggest Daytona day ever. Monday doubles last year’s Monday, and by nightfall our four-day total passes last year’s five-day haul. We talk candidly about risk and resilience, why venue choice matters, and how to treat a long event like a portfolio: some days flop, others surge, and the win lives in the average you build by staying ready. We break down the gritty details—tent failures, “taco mattress” fixes, and the real math of chasing a dream on the road.

You’ll hear why we sponsor artists who lift the crowd, how repeat customers become family, and why “grow through it” isn’t a slogan for us—it’s the operating system. If you’ve ever bet on yourself and watched the weather laugh at your plans, this story is for you. Ride with us through the mess to the moment the sun hits and the line forms. Then tell a friend, share the episode, and drop a review to help more riders find the show. Your support fuels the next mile—subscribe, share, and let us know your best comeback story.

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Transcript

Tent-Side Opening At Daytona

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This week on Share the Struggle Podcast, I think we might need to change the name of the show to Tent Tales or Tales from the Tent, because I am recording this here episode of the podcast in a big old tent at the Cabbage Patch Campground in New Shaman Beach, Florida, aka Daytona Bike Week. Tales from the Road, Tent Tales, Stories to Be Told, all on this week's episode of Share the Struggle Podcast. Let me tell you something. Everybody struggles. The difference is some people choose to go through it and some choose to grow through it. The choice is completely yours. Which one you choose will have a very profound effect on the way you live your life. What it do? What it do? What it hid it do? Good Lord Almighty. Am I so excited to be back with you? Oh, it is true. It is damn true. Why? Because I love you, Boo. Episode 295, and we're coming to you live. Well, I'm recording live, but you're gonna hear it recorded, so I shouldn't have said live, but it rhymes with 295. This week's episode of the podcast

Why We Moved To The Cabbage Patch

SPEAKER_00 2:06

might be a little delirious. It might not be all that serious because this week I'm recording in an LL Bean dome tent on a patch of leaves and foliage across the street from the infamous Cabbage Patch Bar, the 100th anniversary of the Cabbage Patch Bar. You believe that? A bar that is a hundred years old, and I'm telling you right now, it does not look like anything's changed from when it opened 100 years ago. Pretty friggin' wild. I am across the street in a canvas tent that will um contribute a lot to this week's episode. Spoiler alert. Uh yeah, here I am, out here in a tent across the street from the cabbage patch. It is Daytona Bike Week, the 85th anniversary of Daytona Bike Week. Y boys from Loud Proud American are here set up, selling at the Cabbage Patch. It's myself, the brother Brian, and his boy Zach, the extended family, the extended Liberty family. We are here, me and the pomelos, getting things done. Our first time vending at the Cabbage Patch. If you've been listening to the podcast, if you uh kind of know some of the stories from the road, you know that about a year ago, I should I say, exactly a year ago at this time, we were vending at Daytona Bike Week for the very first time. And when we came here, we were across the street at a location uh named the Cackleberry Campground. And it was a great first step for us. But when we were there, we quickly realized that a better fit for us was across the street at the cabbage patch. It's a little more challenging, a little more difficult to get into, but we thought it was a good fit for us. Uh obviously, you know, with a bigger increase in traffic and um just an overall atmosphere change. It also comes with an increase in rent, but we felt like we could roll the dice, take the risks, take the chance, and that it would come back to us, right? That it would all work out, it would all pay forward. So that's what we're up to. We are here, year two, Daytona Bike Week, this time set up at the cabbage patch.

Disclaimers From A Noisy Camp

SPEAKER_00 4:13

I'm gonna also start things off with a couple of quick disclaimers. Number one, I can't guarantee sound quality. I'm inside of a tent with the walls blowing open, but you're probably gonna hear motorcycles ripping down the road from time to time. I can't tell if you can hear the bar across the road, if you can hear the band that's playing that's ripping over there. You might hear that in the distance. You might hear some drunk, crazy people around our tent that are also in this tent city that might quite possibly be making a lot of noise. Thankfully, I'm recording this in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. Actually, 444 on a Tuesday. Some of you out there will greatly appreciate that little shout out. 444 on a Tuesday. I gotta get this podcast recorded so that it drops for y'all. So we keep the winning streak alive because when this episode drops, that means for 296 consecutive weeks, the Share the Struggle podcast has been loaded to all major platforms. We have not missed a week in over five freaking years. You believe that? You better. Pretty damn crazy. The next disclaimer I will make is I do not know how long I can record for it today. The boys are covering the tent. I've got uh visitors around, I've got family around, I've got people reaching out trying to check in, but I know I need to get this episode in because this is my commitment to each and every one of you. So my disclaimers are I can't guarantee sound quality and I can't promise you the longest episode, but truth be told, I needed to come on here and share the stories of the road. Y'all ready for this? You excited for this? I hope you are, because I know I am. If you've been listening, leading up to us heading to Daytona, kind of balancing everything out, realizing that maybe the bus wouldn't be ready in time to hit the road.

Shipping Chaos And All-Night Printing

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Brother Brian said, Hey man, if you can get a trailer, I'll use my brand new truck and we'll hit the road together. Brother Chris stepped up and told us, here man, take this trailer, use my trailer, load it up, hit the road. So that's exactly what we did. Brian, Zach, and myself. We um we loaded up, I want to say Tuesday morning, which actually, as I'm kind of telling y'all this story, if you listen to last week's episode, there was a little cliffhanger left on that episode because I had come up with a brand new design, the Loud Proud American America 250 Tribute, stars, stripes, and straight pipes. I ordered my graphics for that design, and they had not yet arrived. So if you remember that episode last week, I mentioned to you that I paid for two-day air shipping, should have arrived on a Friday. It did not. They would not let me get the package on a Saturday. I said, Hey man, I paid for two-day shipping, and you won't give it to me on the weekend. And they said, No, man, you paid for two days shipping, but you didn't pay for weekend delivery. And I said, Hey man, you're the ones that screwed up my package and brought it to the wrong state. And they said, Well, sorry, Bubba, you still got to wait. So on Monday, they tell me, hey, your package is on its way. And I'm gonna tell you, I got a bunch of friggin' stuff to print when this package arrives. And I'm leaving at six in the morning the next day. Well, on Monday, I track my package, I get the notification saying it's in the truck and it's headed to you. But on Monday, it just happens to also be a snowstorm, okay? So y'all remember me telling you this story and saying to you, hey man, whenever this shows, we print and then we've goes. Well, as luck would have it, during my day tracking the package, it said that it would be there before the end of the day. Originally it said between like 12 and 2. Then it moved from 2 to 8. And it said, you know, it'll be there. Now as the day started to slip away, and I'm looking at the clock and realizing something don't seem right. I start trying to reach out to FedEx, which mind you, I started multiple um online chats, different um, you know, text to talk featured nonsense, trying to contact somebody, calling, not getting in touch with anybody. After doing all of these things, multiple attempts, I finally get an agent on the phone that opens up a ticket for that local location. They call me back at five o'clock and say, Hey man, sorry we didn't get out to you today. Based off of the storm, we only delivered essentials like medications and perishables. And I said, Hey man, I gotta leave in the morning, brother. What are the chances if I drive to you and said snowstorm, you would hand me my package? And he said, Well, if you can get here by six o'clock, I'll do that for you because I'm closing early. Well, I drove on up there, got my package in the snowstorm, came home, saddled up, and then printed all night long. Mm-hmm. So much so that I didn't get to finish all the packing that I needed to do. So I printed actually it wasn't super late. It was a little after midnight. I was able to try to go to bed around one in the morning. I get up at five

Hitting The Road And Setting Up

SPEAKER_00 9:05

in the morning, bring my mom to work, come home, and then do the last minute touches, loading things up, finishing things off, getting things loaded into the truck. And then uh Brian and Zach shows up, we hitch up, and uh we're heading out. And I'm just gonna tell you, I'm not gonna get into too many details, but I will just tell you, we made it out of the driveway before the first catastrophe took place. And at that moment, I'm walking down the driveway, the wife's wondering what's going on. She comes down to help out. She rolls up to the three of us and says, What the F are you idiots doing? Zach looks at her and says, What? Did you expect this to go flawless? And we started the road trip with the greatest line of the road trip. So for the rest of the week, anytime something goes wrong, our response is What? Did you think this was gonna go flawless? Because let me tell you, Cinderella, it certainly didn't, and it certainly hasn't. But those t-shirts got made, they're on the shelf, and they're selling all over the place, and you're gonna be seeing star, stripes, and straight pipes all across Daytona Beach. You hear me? So we load up, we hit the road, we drove straight through day and night. I think it was about 27 hours later. We rolled into the cabbage patch to start our setup process. We get to our location, new location, first time over here, feeling pretty excited about the location, getting everything set up. Then we work on getting our campsite set up. And going into that, my wife found me a pretty awesome tent. Okay, she found me this tent that goes inside of a 10 by 10 canopy to really help with uh all the heavy rain and uh just a nice, quick, easy setup, super secure as far as a tent goes, right? Um, you know, really waterproof, really excited about this tent. Well, I'm working in the vendor space. They come back down here, the boys are setting up the campsite, and they're telling me, hey man, this tent does not fit your canopy. I wasn't thinking that all my canopies are like vendor um industrial canopies. So the tent isn't designed to fit in one of those canopies. When you clip it into it, your tent's actually two, three feet off the ground. I'm not light enough to levitate, okay? It's just not gonna work. Thankfully, Brian's got um ton of camping supplies. He breaks out a tent from LL Bean, sets it up, and says, Hey man, here you go. Uh the wife and I had picked up a bed frame air mattress scenario off a marketplace. When you plug this sucker in, it unfolds itself and airs itself up, and then you're off the ground, you know, by like a couple feet. So perfect. Keeps keeps uh keeps me out of the rain, keeps me dealing from you know, intruders of the uh reptilian time kind and such, you know what I mean? So we're feeling good about it. Opening day, we uh our first night, everything's good, get set up. Next day, finish our our setup and our production scenario, get things ready to rock and roll. We're setting into our routine, we're feeling good about life, we're

Rain, Slow Sales, And Daniel Johnson

SPEAKER_00 12:09

excited. Opening day of bike week happens, we get out there, things start good, and things are going nice, and then all of a sudden it starts to rain. Okay, it rains pretty damn good. By three o'clock, we have to close down. At three o'clock, we close up shop to let the rain pass because everybody else around us, you know, was doing the same thing. And we said, hey man, there's nothing else to do but wait this out and see what happens. So we're stuck here. What are we gonna do? We're gonna start drinking. So at three o'clock, we start drinking, hanging out. I mean, that's just what dudes do at bike week, right? So it clears off a little bit. We head back over, reopen the doors, try to make some money. I'm cooking sausages next to the tent. Things are going good, okay? Sales, no, not so much. Those are not going so good. Next thing you know, it opens up and starts pouring. All right. Well, guess that's all there is to it. All right, we're gonna close it up. Nothing else we can do for it. That's it. Close up the shop. Our boy Daniel Johnson of Daniel Johnson Music is taking the stage. Now, if you listened to last year's episode, which if you haven't, you should go back and check. You'll know that uh Daniel Johnson was the best thing about this here road trip. We made um you know another brother. We welcome another brother to the family, a fellow Loud Proud American across this great land. We made some great relationships last year, and that's why we're here, okay? Like um, some of the people at the bar, like our friend Abby, the bartender, which was our favorite bartender of the of the whole trip. She helped to get us into this into this side of the road, these side of the track. She helped to get us over here to um this location. Daniel, just somebody that we've stayed in contact with that we want to uh sponsor. We want to make Daniel the first ever Loud Proud American sponsored musician. We want to work together to help each other achieve our goals and dreams and hopes and aspirations. So it was so exciting to see him. And we said, you know what? Everything's closed. Daniel's playing. Let's just go saddle up and hang out with him. So that's what we did. We're uh, you know, listening and catching up and having a great time. We didn't get a chance to leave for dinner. I go across the road, negotiate a whole pizza purchase from a pizza vendor, come back, we're eating pizza, we're live streaming the show. I'm leaving slabs of pizza as a tip by Daniel's feet. We're just having a great time. We're meeting people, we're already starting relationships, everything's going fantastic until I decide it's time to go to bed. Okay? I walk back to camp, I open the tent, and I step in to about four inches of water. All right? My tent is flooded. The next thing that I notice is the air mattress that I purchased off of Marketplace. Apparently has a big ass hole in it because it is deflated. And because it deflated, all my blankets are now in the flood scene here. Okay? Not good. So I'm trying to patch up the freaking air mattress. It's not working. I'm laying in this thing like a taco shell. It is just

The Flooded Tent And The Taco Mattress

SPEAKER_00 15:03

folding up around me. I'm on the frame, just trying to stay out of the water, and I'm committed to just sleeping. At this moment, brother Lance and Sister Jen, that's right, Paisley's godparents, they're arriving from New York and they said, Hey man, where you at? We're pulling in to the cabbage patch. And I said, Well, I was in bed, but I'll come on down. I put myself back together like a disheveled wet rat. I roll out there, freaking I don't, I don't even know, man. I didn't have underwear on. I had sleepy eyes going. I had my took my contacts out. I made me nighttime glasses. It's a it's a show, okay? I don't look like I'm ready for public consumption. Like you I really shouldn't even be viewed at this stake in my life. But here I am, okay? I go out there and I say, what the hell else am I gonna do? Nothing else that I can do. So I hang out with the family, have a few drinks, and say, well, if I get enough of a bus, maybe I can just black myself out through it, we can sleep through it and make a new day tomorrow. That's the plan, okay? So day one at bike week, we don't make shit for money. We're already in the hole, and on day one, on a nice Friday, you're supposed to be making money, and we ain't. The only thing that I'm doing is floating down the freaking river. That's what I'm doing. But as Zach so correctly said, did you expect this to go flawless? Because that's just not our style, Cinderella. Things just don't go flawless. But we made the best of it. Saturday rolls around. I tried patching the mattress up with duct tape. Let me finish this story. I tried patching the hole with duct tape. I would fill it up with air, and uh, I would get about 20 minutes out of it. So throughout the night, it was a process of getting up, putting air in the mattress, trying to sleep sideways, horizontal, across the bed frame to keep it from taco shelling. And then eventually I would wake up with some kind of support rail in my rib cage, and I would get up and then I'd blow the air mattress back up again. All in the meantime, you're trying to dodge water, like you're staying in a flood when you get up to fix any of your stuff. So then it was a process of drying blankets and figuring out life. BP O'Brien Pomolo went down and got me an air mattress patch. We patched the mattress up, he helped, you know, dry the tent out. And I think we're at a good place. I think we're figured out. But I will tell you, if it does start to rain again, I'm sleeping in the Lower Proud American tent because whether it's sunrise or it's moonlight, I can see through the side of this tent, and that tells me she might have lost all her waterproofing privileges. Okay, she's lived a good life. This is where we're at. It's unfortunate that I have a brand new tent in the back of the truck that I just can't use. But here we are. Nothing in this here life of mine goes flawless. I'll tell you that right now. Day two at the old cabbage patch, day two for Daytona Bike Week. Started off pretty decent. We were having a nice day. And uh just super overcast, super dark, a rain in the forecast. It never really rained all that much. But uh, what I will tell you is bike week at Daytona is spread out quite a bit. If

Weekend Flops And Mindset

SPEAKER_00 18:10

you're downtown by the beach or you're somewhere maybe by the racetrack, you're not gonna go out for a ride. And most people aren't when they know there's a really good chance of them being stuck in the rain. So they all just kind of stayed put. So day two at bike week was another complete flop. And we went into this expecting to dominate what we did last year, when in fact we were quite a bit behind our numbers from last year. So, new location, higher rent, higher opportunity, shitty weather, we are going further and further in the hole. With this said, we're trying to remain positive because that's just really all that you can do, right? Nothing left to it but to do it. And and the thing about events like this, when you're somewhere for you know 10 days, the days that are supposed to be really great, sometimes those days flop. But when those days flop, there could be a normal day that wouldn't be a great day that ends up being a tremendous day. So, what I'm saying to you is when you're doing these type of things, even though they might not go according to plan, in the end, you just take all of those days, all those numbers, all those sales, you throw them in a pot, you divide it up, and you see if it was worth it, and you see how it went. So, with that said, the mission for us, the task at hand for us is to replace what should have been our two best days with some random days. So on Sunday, the sun came out, things got beautiful, and we had the second largest day that we have ever had at bike week in our two years of bike week. So a great, great way to rebound. And then uh today, what day was that? That was Sunday, so then Monday, another great day. Uh, we had a Monday that doubled last year's Monday. And what I can tell you is by the end of Monday, we have already caught up to what we did last year. We made up for the Friday, Saturday flop. And at the end of the day on Monday, we'd already passed our number for Tuesday of last year. Does that make sense to you guys? Bike week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday to start.

Big Sunday, Strong Monday Comeback

SPEAKER_00 20:12

At the end of the day on Monday, that total from this year was greater than last year's five-day total. So our four-day total greater than our five-day total. Again, today, we're having ourselves a pretty solid day, um, a nice, nice little Tuesday. And I am confident enough to say that before the week is out, I feel so strongly about the ground that we're making up that by the end of the week, even before this week is over, we will match the number from last year, giving us the weekend to divide, conquer, and overcome and make this trip so much more worth it. To validate our feelings and our thought process from last year. We spent countless time discussing whether it'd be worth taking the chance again. Do we take the chance on something that we found to not be very profitable and also increase our debt in doing so because we doubled our rate of rent to move, we doubled our expenditures. So, in doing those things, we're doubling our risk, but we have the confidence that it's going to pay off. And at this moment, even after the two first negative days, I am still confident that we too shall find a way. And I am willing to say before the end of the week, we will match and beat and defeat what we did last year, and we're gonna finish on a real strong note. Because besides, did y'all think this was gonna go flawless? No, it isn't, but it's gonna go just the way it is supposed to go, and each and every day is another opportunity to meet more and more great people, to make great connections, and to welcome many, many more loud, proud Americans to our family. I am oh so Truly blessed by all the people that stopped by to say, Hey, I love what you're doing. All the people that are

Betting On Ourselves And The Community

SPEAKER_00 22:05

now coming back and saying, Hey man, I bought from you last year. I wanted to come in and get something else. To all the people that are coming from all the different states that we already know, from the family from Maine and New York showing up, the people from New Hampshire that we know, everybody coming through, saying, Hey man, we're here to support you. We believe in you. On the way here, we were selling gift cards and taking donations to a Venmo to help fund the fuel tank, to help fund the freedom to get us back to Bike Week. Many of you listening right now donated to our fuel tank to help us get here. You bought a gift card to support us. You're part of pre-sales to help fund us. This is all because of you. This opportunity is because of you. We are here because of you, and because of you, we will pull through. And this will be a great event for all of us here at Loud Proud American. It truly takes a village to build a brand, and thankfully, we have the greatest village across this here land. With that said, my phone has been buzzing off the hook. It's time for me to get on back down to the cabbage patch and finish S-T-R-O-N-G strong. I don't even know why I decided to spell that out, but I guess I needed the two. I love each and every one of you, and I want to say thank you for supporting my American dream. Now go wash your friggin' hands, you took these savage. And next week, I'll share with you all the successes, even more stories, because I'm sure there's many, many more to come. Thank y'all. I appreciate you. I love ya.

Gratitude, Support, And Sign-Off

SPEAKER_00 23:40

I'll talk to you next week. That's it, and that's all, Biggie Smalls. If you're a Loud Proud American and you find yourself just wanting more, find me on YouTube and Facebook at Loud Proud American or the Face page, as my mama calls it. If you're a fan of the Graham Cracker, you want to find me on Instagram or all the kids by tickety talkin' on the TikTok. You can find me on both of those at loud underscore proud underscore American. Big old thank you to the boys from the gut truckers for the background beats and the theme song to Mr. Podcast. If you are enjoying what you're hearing, track down the gut truckers on Facebook Just Sir Gut Truckers. Give them motherfuckers a like too. I truly thank you for supporting my American dream. Now go wash your fucking hands, you filthy savage.