Slade - Travel While You Work - The Ultimate Guide to Running a Business from Anywhere

Travel While You Work:

The Ultimate Guide To Running A Business From Anywhere

Mish Slade

Copyright Mish Slade 2015

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

BEFORE YOU GET STARTED

SECTION 1: SETTLING IN, LOGISTICS AND SAFETY

SECTION 2: GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

APPENDIX: INTERVIEWS

RESOURCES

When my husband Rob and I first became "digital nomads" back in 2012, the term barely existed. And whenever it was used, it sounded pretentious and tacky. (Admittedly it still sounds that way, but no one has yet come up with a suitable replacement shorthand for "someone whose work doesn't require them to be in a particular place and can be done largely online".) It also sounded like a passing phase something for a few wannabe free spirits to try out before realising that the lifestyle is unsustainable in the long term.

A mere three years later and while the term itself isn't ubiquitous as such it's becoming more and more widely understood that travelling while you work is not only totally possible but also extremely fulfilling.

I'm not just talking about freelance web designers, programmers, writers and travel bloggers; I'm talking about accountants, lawyers, therapists and teachers. Fitness trainers, economists, photographers and business consultants. Not to mention entire businesses that have chosen to do away with a centralised office, and instead hire and manage a distributed team who live around the world.

So why do they (and we) do it?

Essentially, it's about freedom. As you'll discover when you read this book, being a digital nomad affords you the type of flexibility and autonomy that you couldn't enjoy as an employee or business owner working out of an office. And that freedom extends much further than just "the ability to travel a lot". Yes: you'll have set up a life and business in such a way that enables you to experience the world at your own pace, rather than squeezed into an annual two-week vacation. But you'll also grant yourself the ability to do away with (or at least question) everything that's taken for granted in regular working environments.

You don't have to work 9-to-5 if those aren't your most productive hours, for example. You don't have to commute. If you're a business owner, you can hire staff from anywhere around the world rather than from the far smaller selection of people who live near "the office" or would be willing to travel there. If you're a freelancer, you can at a moment's notice decide not to take on so many clients for a few months (just because) and move to Thailand to save money.

Being a digital nomad is possible and doable for the majority of professions just head to the Appendix for some interviews and inspiration. But it demands a certain set of skills and know-how in order to be enjoyable and productive. This is especially true if you're planning to set up a business and manage a team on the move, but it's still the case if you simply want to freelance or become a remote worker for someone else's company.

And that's where I come in. To help, that is. I started out as a freelancing digital nomad (doing copywriting and web project management under the company name "Mortified Cow"), and later while continuing with the freelancing worked with Rob to set up our own business.

The business is called Yellow Lettings; it helps landlords to find tenants for their rental properties, and then manages the entire lettings process (rent collection, inspections, maintenance, legalities and a whole lot more) for them.

We came up with the name in Barcelona, set up the basic structure of the business in Thailand, conducted interviews for our first hire in Edinburgh, and launched the website from Prague. Meanwhile, our co-founder is in London, our first seven employees are all in different cities around the UK, and we routinely hire contractors who live anywhere from Sri Lanka to Bulgaria.

And between this remote business and our freelancing experience, we've learnt a lot about what it takes to travel while working. We know how to get settled into a new city in super-quick time. We've discovered the best methods for hiring contractors and permanent members of staff without needing to interview them in person. We've figured out (after an incredible amount of trial and error) how to manage and communicate with our team of staff and contractors around the world. We know the best methods for dealing with clients as a freelancer. We've found out about some nifty tools for receiving cross-currency payments without losing a ton of cash to conversion fees. And we've developed some mindset hacks for maintaining our productivity while moving around the world.

This book is essentially a distillation of everything that works for us, and everything I've learnt from the other digital nomads I talked to while writing this book. It won't all be relevant to you if you're a freelancer, you can skip the chapters on hiring and managing, for example and you may not agree with all of it. But I think and hope you'll find enough in here to make it a worthwhile and helpful read.

Thanks for reading!

Mish

p.s. If you want to read about planning for your trip (booking flights and accommodation, figuring out visas and insurance, etc.), that's all covered in my other book: Travel Like A Pro: road-tested tips for digital nomads and frequent travelers: www.worktravel.co/protravel.

Here's what it looks like to us:

We move to a new country every six weeks or so sometimes slightly more, sometimes less. And once we're there, we live our "regular" lives: we work, have meetings, go out for dinner, do exercise, shop for groceries, and so on. We don't go to an office: we flit between our apartment, wifi cafes, and thanks to data tethering anywhere we like outdoors too.

For us, the thrill comes from both the freedom of this lifestyle and the fact that we're always somewhere new. We get to experience local life in multiple cities with exciting, different cultures. We learn about and better understand people from other countries because we live in their buildings, use their supermarkets, travel on their buses and deal with whatever political issues they're having at that moment (garbage strikes in Madrid, anti-government protests in Bangkok, marches against the stop-and-frisk policy in NYC...). We look at and learn from the various ways that they go about living their lives.

By moving around, we never get a chance to habituate to our surroundings: we're constantly experiencing and noticing everything around us. This has actually been incredibly beneficial for our businesses: it's helped us to be more creative with our ideas and solutions to our problems.

Other digital nomads don't move around quite so much: they might stay put in a city or country for months at a time. Some people even have a "base" where they spend a large chunk of the year, but will frequently take trips to other parts of the world. What makes them digital nomads is the fact that they make use of their freedom and flexibility to relocate whenever they want to and that they're able to take their work with them.

What your digital nomad lifestyle looks like is up to you, but if you plan on moving country or city