You Betcha She Did! Life Advice, Business Tips for Rad Women Entrepreneurs, Leaders, Coaches and

76 | Gears and Asanas: A Tale of Yoga and Motorcycles with Jess Childs

• Ladies First Digital Media Company • Season 5 • Episode 76

Share episode

Strap on your helmet and unfurl your yoga mat; this episode takes you on an interesting ride with Jess Childs, a yoga instructor with a penchant for motorcycles and the heart of an entrepreneur. Tune in as Jess recounts a tale that began with the roar of an engine at a safety course and evolved into a life dedicated to the zen of yoga and the thrill of the open road. 

Jess not only talks the talk but walks the walk, sharing how the blend of these worlds promotes personal growth and a balanced approach to life’s challenges. In the vintage vibe of her store, Sully's Ride Shop, Jess extends her passion by creating an inclusive space that welcomes all—from scooter newcomers to vintage motorcycle lovers to old-timers with oil-stained jackets. 

Tune as we discuss:

  • Her partnership with Heather Cleveland (of the Green Bicycle Company) on Mr. Wendal's Collaboration, a community initiative that champions compassion for Sheboygan's unhoused. 
  • The BIG things she has learned as a new entrepreneur- including the need to give yourself grace as you learn and grow. 
  • Her best advice for women looking to get into the biking world. 

Links mentioned in the show:


If you liked this episode, check out our past episode on Heather Cleveland and the Green Bicycle Company.

Enter our Podcast Review Contest for a chance to win a month of free advertising for your own business or a favorite business of yours OR a chance to record a tribute to an inspiring woman in your life!!!

How the contest works:
1. Write a positive written review for You Betcha She Did by March 8th. 
2. Take a Screenshot and send it to Rayna at youbetchashedid@gmail.com or DM us on Instagram.
Winners will be chosen on March 8th and announced on Instagram @youbetchashedid

Your time to shine has come!  Join us for our amazing women-only retreat at the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan.  Spend time away focusing on you and master the art of self-appreciation. This relaxing and energizing retreat includes appreciation training and coaching, yoga, and other engaging activities.  Learn more here

If you're a current podcaster or aspiring podcaster who wants to grow their business with a podcast, check out Podcast Growth Club where Rayna shares her best strategies to help you grow and monetize your podcast with a small audience. 


Support the Show and Rayna's Work to Elevate MidWest Women!
Buy Me a Coffee

If you love the show, please subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a positive review 🙂Follow You Betcha She Did on Social Media

Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, rainer Rikiki here. Hey, don't forget. This month we are running our special contest to earn a free month of ads for your business or your favorite business. You can't beat that right. All you have to do to enter is leave a positive written review for YouBetchesSheetD on iTunes or Spotify. Take a picture of it. You can DM it to the YouBetchesSheetD Instagram account or email it to me at YouBetchesSheetD at gmailcom. These are due by March 8th of this year. That is International Women's Day Great day to promote it. On that day, I'll choose two winners of the YouBetchesSheetD contest. Thanks for playing. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 1:

We have a great episode today with Jess Childs. She is the owner of Sully's Ride Shop, a boutique motorcycle store located in downtown Cheboygan. Besides being a motorcycle mama, she is also a yoga teacher, involved in helping the homeless population in Cheboygan, and serves to help the arts through the Cheboygan Theater Company. Tune in to learn more. This is going to be a great episode. Did she really do that? Youbetchessheetd? Hello, and welcome back to another episode of YouBetchesSheetD, the podcast where women entrepreneurs, changemakers and leaders, especially from the Midwest, share their wit and wisdom. I'm your host, reina Rikiki. Today I have Jess Childs in the studio. You do a lot of unique things. As our listeners know, you own a motorcycle shop called Sully's Ride Shop. You're also a yoga teacher. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How did you come to go in those two directions A love for motorcycles and a love for yoga? How did this unique combination come?

Speaker 2:

about. They seem at first glance kind of diametrically opposed. One is more edgy, more risk-taking, and one is more serene and more calming. But I like to think we can all wear many hats and have many facets to our personalities, so I do enjoy them both. They both came about for me kind of in late 30s, early 40s.

Speaker 2:

I had happy life, happy home, great kids. Everything was going smoothly, but maybe a little too smoothly, like I was feeling really comfy, and sometimes comfort is great and it's just what we need. But sometimes we can get too comfortable, and so I was sort of craving some new learning, and if it felt a little outside of the box and made me a little nervous, that was even better. So I took a motorcycle safety foundation course. There are many in this area to choose from. It's Harley-Davidson's headquarters is an hour down the road, so this is a motorcycle-loving part of the country. So I took the class, my husband took it with me. We decided to buy some bikes after that, caught the bug and have been improving our skills ever since, and we live in a part of the country where you can only ride about half the year unless you're super diehard and willing to really bundle up. So pretty much May through October for me, I get out the bike and dust off the skills and continue to learn. We're safety people, so we gear up, we wear a helmet just to ride around the block and we usually head straight out of town and get right to the country roads and really get out there and just enjoy the scenery and enjoy the open road, as they say.

Speaker 2:

And then yoga teaching also came to me. Actually, about three years after that I was an active yogi student but a teacher training opportunity came up and the person who was pitching it described it as an opportunity to deepen your own practice, and I love the sound of that because I always wanted to learn about those other aspects of yoga besides the physical asanas and to have an opportunity to dive into those other limbs of yoga, because I have since learned that the poses are just one eighth of the practice of yoga, but they get all the attention. So I I took the 200 hour training and just at the tail end of training was when COVID Hit and everyone locked up, studios locked up, everything went virtual. So it was dormant for a little while for me and then had the opportunity to start teaching at elevate. And Boy, is that stepping out of the box and getting a little nervous the first time you Speak for 60 minutes and nobody talks back.

Speaker 1:

I guess, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2:

You're like, oh, there's no response, they're just doing what I, what I yeah, my fears during teacher training Were things that really turned out to not matter at all. Like can I demo this challenging pose in front of people? The biggest challenge for me was the public speaking aspect of it and having a good cadence and having a good volume and even vocal health, because I really wasn't used to talking non-stop for 60 minutes and Choosing words wisely, because when you're cueing people to move their bodies a certain way, the cues should be really actionable and relatable. So Both the activities the motorcycle riding and the yoga teaching Did make me a little nervous, did make me feel like I was taking a risk, did increase my Love of learning and my wanting to continue to be a student. So there were a lot of parallels.

Speaker 1:

I Love that, to be honest, I mean the whole thing when you were talking about how you were getting too comfortable. For a lot of people they end up staying there in that almost too comfy role and they don't push themselves to, like you said, to grow, to learn, to kind of put them in that scary moment where they're gonna try something new. But I love that you were like ready to embrace it and, like you said, you went kind of to Perhaps very different directions. But yeah, I can see the parallels when you're talking about it. I'm curious what kind of bike do you ride?

Speaker 2:

Mine's a Kawasaki Ninja 300, but my family has a Love of restoring vintage bikes, so we also have many bikes from the 1970s in our garage, in various states of this array repair yeah. Yeah are. The window bike at the front of Sully's is from the 1960s. I believe it's a 64 Ducati and then my husband's 78 Honda 750 is also in the shop right now, which is kind of nice because when it's cold outside and we're not riding they make for beautiful Statuesque artwork in the shop.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no doubt, and you also have like a really nice hobby of things to do. You know what is too cold to. You're like we're gonna tinker on our bikes and figure out how these things work. So you started Sully's ride shop with your son. Okay, and it's like a boutique motorcycle shop. What are some of the like you know, unique challenges of starting a motorcycle shop, not only on itself but with your son. What were some things that have gone? Well, what were some things that were?

Speaker 2:

tricky I Would love to start with gone. Well, we started the shop because we were having trouble finding gear that we liked locally. There really wasn't anywhere to shop for jackets, riding pants, helmets, goggles, that kind of stuff that we were drawn to, and so we thought well, let's give it a shot, maybe we can do this. So that little portion of the business plan was already done that market research, because we had been consumers looking for the stuff and Couldn't find it locally. So really our only option was to drive maybe to Milwaukee or to order online. So that's kind of how the idea was born for the brick-and-mortar portion of Sully's and the successes have been watching people come in who are new riders. They're our favorite because we pride ourselves on being really welcoming and low pressure and ease of entry.

Speaker 2:

Your other choices are to go to a motorcycle or a power sports dealership which, as you know, any dealership car dealership, bike dealership they have a certain high pressure feel to them. Usually I don't want to generalize, but usually it's the kind of place that makes you feel a little nervous. In power sports places the gear is usually an afterthought, it's back in a corner and they're more interested in selling the machines than the gear. We focus solely on gear and seeing those new riders come in and feel their shoulders go down, where they can get comfortable and ask all the questions without feeling intimidated. We don't throw a bunch of jargon at them right away. They're just interested in taking that motorcycle safety class and they want to try on three different helmets and see which one feels most comfortable.

Speaker 2:

Love that, love growing the motorcycle community and the fact that we're welcoming no matter what you ride like. We have a lot of scooter customers who ride moped Cool yeah, so that's been a huge win. Matt and I both really enjoy the feeling of sending someone out the door with safety gear because it just makes sense that when you're feeling safe and protected, you're going to be a better rider. Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I know and I like that you guys offer a different look and feel outside of the Harley-Davidson genre, because that has its own thing, its own culture and that's awesome and I love that it's rooted in Wisconsin. But, yeah, you guys have more of a I don't know, just a different kind of style, maybe I almost want to say like European kind of motorcycle look, and it's just good. We went to Lean Vintage, yeah, vintage Exactly, and it's I don't know, it's just kind of a fun, different way to approach the art of the motorcycle and being out on the open road, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then the second part of your question.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we're talking about challenge Challenge yeah.

Speaker 2:

We were just talking about how we've had to become okay with making a lot of mistakes, and that's not. It's against human nature. Right, you make a mistake and you want to beat yourself up about it, but when you were a small business owner, neither of us has ever been an entrepreneur before, so it's totally new to both of us. It's natural we're going to make mistakes and we've had to get. We've had to practice giving ourselves grace there, taking a deep breath, taking a step back, realizing that mistakes are how you learn and realizing that sometimes there's a big silver lining in every mistake, because, yeah, it's a stepping stone and it can actually propel you forward rather than back, but yeah, that's a tough learn.

Speaker 1:

That's a good life lesson, but I agree with you. You know our culture is veering away from perfectionism, but it's definitely still rooted in it and I think whenever you make a mistake, there's a certain sense of shame that automatically comes when it doesn't need to be there, just needs to be like oh yeah, this is part of the process, and what you do with what you learn afterwards is key to that growth right and making your next step even better. Well, good for you guys, because I know that's tricky and you do have to give yourself grace, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And keeping in mind that paths aren't always straight lines. You know there's lots of zigs and zags and curves in the road and no pun intended, Twisty roads are more fun than straight road.

Speaker 1:

That's right. That's right, keep that in mind. And that's the normal path, I think, of any project. It's like up and down and twisty and turny, like it's very weird and rare if it's just a linear path that moves upward and onward. It's like that's not normally how it goes. Well, I want to pivot just slightly Now. I know you and Heather Cleveland and longtime listeners of the show. You'll be familiar with Heather Cleveland. She owns the Green Bicycle Company. She was on one of our earlier episodes and I'll have that linked in the show notes. But Justin Heather Cleveland started working on a project called Mr Wendell's Collaboration and it's all about educating business owners and residents on best practices for interacting with the unhoused population. So even though Sheboygan is not a huge city, we do still have a homeless population. So tell me a little bit more about that, jess, like what motivated you to initiate it? What have you noticed? What are your goals in that area?

Speaker 2:

It happened very organically as soon as we opened the shop in May of last year. We were interacting with people who were unhoused and some of them were unremarkable, just easy, and didn't throw up any red flags. But others felt a little escalated and I wanted immediately to know how to handle this, and I knew there must be experts out there who had tips on these type of interactions and how to maybe de-escalate or what I could have done beforehand so that it wouldn't have escalated. And so I asked Heather for a cup of coffee and we sat and talked it out and she said I've had the exact same questions. So we wondered if all of the business owners in the downtown area maybe could use some expert advice and some tips and, like we like to say, best practices, because these are our fellow human beings and although we sometimes just kind of walk right past and don't make eye contact and pretend they're not there, they're there and they deserve compassion just like any of us do. So Heather was the right person to ask.

Speaker 1:

Yes, she was.

Speaker 2:

She immediately swung into action and found other cities that had already put together guides that we could use as templates for our Sheboygan guide.

Speaker 2:

We've had one big workshop so far at the Mead Library where we opened it up to not just small business owners but also any concerned citizens who wanted to learn, and we got to do some really cool role playing where we learned these great de-escalation techniques and how to just cause those situations either not to happen in the first place or, if they do happen, how to bring the energy level way down so that we don't have to make that phone call to the authorities that nobody really wants to meet.

Speaker 2:

So I think it was very helpful and we're looking forward to our next one. We're gonna try to do one a quarter Different experts, different guest speakers, that kind of thing. And the other great takeaway was we put together a map that we can give to anyone who's in need that shows where public restrooms are in the downtown area places you can sit and relax, places you could charge your phone, places you could take a shower, that kind of thing. There are a lot of great resources, but I didn't know about half of them, so putting them all in one place really helped.

Speaker 1:

You wanna help someone too. Right? It's like you sit with that compassion piece. You're like I know there's resources out there, I just don't know where they are, and having a map I feel like would be super helpful. It'd be like okay, let's talk about what you need right now, let's talk about how to get you to that next step, so that they're feeling better and you feel like you help someone too, which is important.

Speaker 2:

There are places to get a meal. There are places to get cleaned up, there are places to just sit and relax and have a soft chair. There are places to warm up if you're cold and places to cool down if you're warm.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the whole gamut. If people wanna find out more about these workshops, where should they turn to? Is that something they should go to the Mead Library, or I don't know if you guys have a newsletter or something.

Speaker 2:

We don't yet. We're still in our infancy. Thank you for asking. I don't have a great answer yet, except that Heather is posting the meetings on Green Bicycle companies socials and blasting those out that way for now. But yes, we're hoping to have our own methods of communication very soon.

Speaker 1:

Okay, excellent. So yeah, in the meantime, everyone check out Green Bicycle on Instagram. Now, jess, I know you're also into the arts and supporting the arts. You serve on the advisory committee and program planning committee for the Sheboygan Theater Company. What role do you believe the arts play in developing a community, and how do we make those more accessible? It's a big question.

Speaker 2:

Such a big, big, big question. I have so much love for the arts and I value them. I always go back to this point that I remember during the pandemic, when we were all locked into our homes, what saved us all was art. It was Netflix or watching concerts, or making sourdough bread or knitting, or learning to paint or write poetry, and they were also the first thing called. It wasn't like a priority.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, the arts were deemed unnecessary and I remember feeling personally offended by that, because I've seen the good that the performing arts and the visual arts can do, especially for a kid. It really helps bring a super shy, timid kid out of their shell. It helps with empathy and compassion because if you're, maybe you get a part in a play and you're playing a different character who sees the world a different way, then you might see it in your day to day and that can't help but broaden your horizons and change your perspective or change your paradigm on how you look at the world. But we're so blessed in Shibuygan. The Shibuygan theater company is celebrating its 90th season and not a lot of towns of our size can say that they have a gem like that that's been around for 90 years. I wanna encourage all of your listeners buy a ticket, go see a show, bring your kids, bring your grandkids. Get some exposure to super high quality performances at a very reasonable price.

Speaker 1:

Speaking of children, I know you have children and they are grown up. I still have kids in elementary school, but I always like to pick people's brains for future advice of like what's the next step? And what's the next step, Just any tips or tricks you have in terms of what's it like to have adult kids and how do you, like you know, help them be independent but still offer support? Tell us a little bit about that phase of life.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my kids are 20 and 23.

Speaker 2:

I remember so vividly when they were in elementary school and as a parent you kind of feel like you're on that treadmill the whole time.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot going on at that age and you are active really active in their life and kind of in command of a lot of aspects of their life. And as they age, each year you give a little bit of that up. Let them be a little more independent, let them go a little more, let them spread their wings and now they don't need my help with many things anymore and that's kind of a magical thing to watch and just to see them become the humans they're gonna be is a reward. At least in my experience it's been a reward that is better than I had ever expected. And I'll keep my answer short because I know everyone has different parenting journeys and different parenting experiences. But I guess if I could give any tip, it's just that each year enjoy letting them have a little more autonomy over their choices and their life and kind of enjoy watching them become who they're gonna become, rather than trying to hold on so tight and steer the ship.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I like that. That's a good thing to remember for sure. It's like let them grow into who they're gonna be. Well, before we end the show, I wanted to see if you had any advice or tips for women, especially who Maybe I've always been curious about the world of motorcycles and are thinking about dipping their toes into that world. But you know, we know for sure they should take a motorcycle safety course. But I don't have any other advice. Or maybe they should just come visit you in the shop and pick your brain.

Speaker 2:

What do you think? Come visit me in the shop. It's nice to talk to other women riders. It's nice to find a group of women to ride with. It's nice to find a group of riders who are your same skill level. So, yeah, come in and talk to me. Let me know what you're looking for, what makes you nervous, what makes you excited.

Speaker 2:

We can put some gear on you, which is sometimes a really kind of ego-boasting experience, because you look cool wearing it, you feel protected wearing it, you feel right when you climb onto the bike, when you're wearing the right gear and I love the idea of baby steps. Maybe you take your MSF course and then you make a date with me and a couple of other gals and we get on the bikes and we go three miles to get an ice cream and we never go over 25 miles an hour and then we park the bikes and we enjoy our ice cream and then we ride three miles back and that's the day. And I think taking it that slow is a great idea, because it is a skill that you build slowly, a lot like yoga. It's a practice and you learn a little something different each time you're on the bike. So, yeah, that'd be my advice. Take it slow, take the course and definitely gear up and find some gals to ride with.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great advice. I love that. I was like I want a gale group of motorcycle riders. The whole idea of baby steps is very enticing. It's like we'll just go do this and then we'll check that off our backs and then keep building our skills and I think it's nice to have a destination rather than just riding in a circle.

Speaker 2:

So maybe you find somewhere. On a beautiful summer day you can head out for lunch with some other riders. Take it slow, enjoy the scenery. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a great suggestion.

Speaker 1:

Well, jess, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing about Sully's ride shop, your experience as a new entrepreneur and also your varied experience helping the community in different aspects, if everyone. If you want to check the show notes, I'll have links to everything we've talked about today so you can get in touch with Jess, especially if you have a hankering to enter the motorcycle world. As always, thank you for listening to you, betcha, she did. If you like what you're hearing, don't forget to share this show with a friend, a neighbor, a sister, a cousin. You never know who might need this information. Until next time, take care.