If you’re going to blame the student-debt crisis on the daunting cost of a college education, at least hold the culture of higher education – which facilitates kicking the tires on a few majors before deciding on a direction – responsible for stretching the average undergraduate enrollment to well past four years.

Most of us have no idea what we want to do for a living at 18.

Gregg Potter wasn’t burdened by such indecision.

“Growing up in Colorado is where I got my fascination with weather, and specifically severe weather,” said the founder of F5! Tornado Safaris, which will conduct its 25th annual chasing tours next month. “It was the blizzard of 1982 that really piqued my interest in weather, even though I was only 10. That storm started the Friday we got off for Christmas break, and there were snowdrifts 4- to 10-feet high. I remember the Denver airport was closed for 36 hours.”

The hook was set.

“Before I even got my drivers license, I had my mom driving me around town looking for storms. So I knew I was going into meteorology when I was in junior high. That made picking a college and classes really easy.”

 At that time, the National Severe Storms Forecast Center was located in Kansas City, Mo., so Gregg chose the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Kansas, 45 miles from KC. “I got accepted to Kansas and Oklahoma,” he said, referring to schools with atmospheric science programs in states adjoining Colorado. “But I like KU so much I never even visited Oklahoma.”

He likely would have made that visit had he graduated high school a few years later; in 1997 the severe-weather arm of the National Weather Service (NWS) was relocated from Kansas City to Norman, Okla., just south of the Oklahoma campus, and was re-branded as the Storm Prediction Center.

By then, however, Gregg had lost interest in working for the government (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration oversees the NWS). After finagling his way into an internship program with the National Severe Storms Forecast Center that hadn’t existed before he arrived at KU, Gregg became disenchanted.

“While I was doing the internship, I realized it was boring,” he said. “When severe weather is happening, it’s exciting. But the rest of the time, not so much.”

Gregg, now 51, considers his internship one of the most important decisions of his life, even though it threw him off the scent of what he envisioned as his ideal career.

“I would have spent 15 or 20 years of my career trying to work my way up to working with severe weather for the NWS only to find I didn’t like the job,” he said. “I tell every student that I work with to identify where you want to go with your career, then try to get an internship with that company, or a similar company. It can save decades of time and misdirected energy if you can get a glimpse while you’re still in college of what it’s really like to work for your dream company.”

Enlightened by the internship, Gregg still considered himself ahead of the curve, career-wise.

“I realized that my only real option was to start my own company. So I spent the last two years of college with that in mind. I had a couple of buddies from school that had the same mindset. When we graduated, we decided to set up shop in Austin (Tex.), because there was severe weather in Austin, there was good music in Austin, and I was kind of sick of the cold.”

 The new company originally set its sights on agricultural forecasting in order to pay the bills, but an unusual offer pivoted the course of what would become Gregg’s long-term business, AnythingWeather. 

“We got a call from a guy who operated a big roofing company, and he offered us free office space if we’d provide him with hail reports from across the country. Hail damage was a new focus for roofers back then, and it turned out to be very lucrative. So we started the hail service, which is still one of our core operations almost three decades later.”

Like their son, Gregg’s parents, Tim and Jeanne, had grown weary of harsh weather; they sold their Castle Rock, Col. home as soon as Gregg graduated from high school, and took off for the heat of Palm Desert, Cal. With an open invitation to work out of their property, Gregg left Austin in 1997 and headed for the Southern California desert; a few years later he summoned a college roommate with whom he had been planning a part-time business since their days in Lawrence: Jason Webb.

With AnythingWeather reestablished in SoCal, Gregg and Jason got to work on their dream side hustle: running storm-chasing tours. The first was in 1999, six weeks of chasing under the flag of F5! Tornade Safaris. Having missed only the Covid-plagued 2020 chase season, next month’s tours will mark the 25th annual safaris for the company – all of them launched from Oklahoma City, Okla.

Save for a few years when Jason was running around England with Shruti Uppal, a British client from a 2012 tornado chase whom he married two years later, Jason has served as F5!’s lead-car driver from the beginning. Sitting right beside him is Gregg, the lead meteorologist since 1999.

The pair has spent much of their time for the past quarter-century attempting to recapture the grandeur of their very first tour, when they were thrust into the path of the 1999 Bridge Creek-Moore tornado (known locally as the May 3 Tornado), an F5 with the highest speeds ever measured on the planet by Doppler radar: 301 mph (+-20 mph).

The twister killed 46 people, injured 800 and cut a 38-mile swatch of destruction that damaged 8,000 buildings in the suburbs south of Oklahoma City, the starting point for that first tour (and every one since) 25 years ago.

“I mean, that was our first tornado as a business,” Gregg noted. “We could go 100 years without seeing the likes of that again.”