About Jim Harmer

Hey Parents! I’m Jim. My job at Trekker is to bring fun, out-of-the-box experiences, technology skills, and entrepreneurship abilities to your kids.

I’ve spent the last 12 years as an entrepreneur building online businesses. After selling my main company in 2021, my wife and I did a lot of soul searching about what was next for us. We decided to bring a first-class private school to St George, and grow a close community of families whose children can learn there.

I’ve sold most of my past brands, but I still run a popular Youtube channel called Backfire. It’s about guns and the outdoors. Emily says it’s my excuse to take my kids hunting and shooting all the time 🙂

Brands Built and Successfully Exited

• Income School (Built to 80 employees before my business partner bought me out in 2021)
• ImprovePhotography.com (Attracted over 73 million pageviews and was my full-time focus for 6 years before I sold the company)
• KnifeUp.com (Was the largest knife review website on the internet before I sold the company)
• CamperReport.com (Built to over $10,000/month in passive income before I sold it)
• Dirt Bike Planet, EmboraPets.com, Pontoon Guide, and probably a half dozen others I can’t think of right now. I’m a little obsessed with building brands.

Jim’s Story

Hey parents! As important as a learning model and environment is at a school, I know that having the right adult mentors is critical to making a school successful. I wrote this page so you can learn a bit about me since I hope to spend a lot of time with the kids.

After spending two years in Brazil as a missionary, I attended BYU-Idaho. While there, Emily and I met and we clicked immediately. We got engaged after just two weeks and were married two months after our first date. We’ve been married for 15 years now.

After graduating from BYU-Idaho, I went to law school and became an attorney. I interned as a prosecutor and as a judicial clerk, but by the time I graduated, I was already on a different path.

While attending law school, I started a blog about photography. The blog started getting millions of people viewing it, so I offered online classes in photography. By the time I became a licensed attorney, my blog was earning far more than I could have in law, so I became an entrepreneur.

As I built ImprovePhotography.com, I also started more online brands. I built a large knife review website, then a boating brand, an RV brand, and others. I attracted large audiences to each of the brands, and then eventually sold them to investors. Having created so much online content in a variety of brands, it makes it amusing when I go out to stores. People regularly recognize me and stop to meet me, but I’m never sure if they know me as the gun guy, the internet marketing guy, the photography guy, etc 🙂

Then, I founded Income School. At Income School, my business partner and I taught thousands of people how to create their own online businesses. Eventually, our team grew to 80 employees. In early 2021, my business partner bought me out of the business. It was really hard closing the door on Income School after we were able to grow that company into something I was really proud of, but Emily and I could just feel there was something else we needed to be doing. I just didn’t know what it was yet.

In the months following the business exit, my wife and I had some experiences that showed us the path forward. We are using the resources we’ve acquired to make Trekker Entrepreneur School an absolutely incredible community for K-12 students in St George. Quite frankly, I can earn a lot more from continuing to build companies, but Trekker is what we really care about.

My wife and I have spent the entire last year dreaming about Trekker. We want to create an incredible community for these kids. It’s all we talk about, and it ends up being the subject of nearly every prayer we’ve offered in the last year. Thank you for giving us the chance to see what we can do for your family.

Trekker isn’t right for every kid, but if you feel that this community has been created to serve your family, then I hope you’ll join us. Let’s help a generation of St. George kids to be confident, happy, smart, and skilled. We just can’t bear to keep seeing 18-year-old kids who crumble as soon as they leave home.