SEE ALSO:
Top Digital Nomad Conferences to Attend 
Digital Nomad Retreats to Check Out 
Best Coliving and Coworking Programs to Level up Your Digital Nomad Experience
3 Tools to Enable / Upgrade Your Digital Nomad Lifestyle

Meet Palle Bo, The Radio Vagabond 

In 2016, Palle Bo made a decision to change his life. As his daughters were grown up and moved out of the house, so did he. He sold his house, his car and all his furniture and became a digital nomad, travelling full-time with a goal to visit every UN Nation in the world. 

He runs his sound production company as a digital nomad and produces podcasts for clients like The LEGO Group, Ramboll and TBEX.

He’s also the host and producer of his own travel podcast called The Radio Vagabond where he documents his journey with a lot of field recordings from the places he visits. 

I highly recommend The Radio Vagabond podcast; you can tell Palle had a prior long-standing career in the radio business because the production value is incredibly high, and it has has an immersive element that most travel podcasts lack. The episodes are relatively short and strike the perfect balance between entertaining and informative. 

This Interview is a Departure From the Norm. 

Not only is this interview in person which is a rare pleasure to do, but it’s also a mutual interview, that is appearing on both his show and mine! 

So we had a table full of microphones in front of us, and no plan in particular – we simply let the conversation take us on a journey, and it really did. Unlike most of my videos in The Remote Work & Travel Show which are more one-sided, this was a fun conversation that also ended up being illuminating for each of us – and I hope for you as well. 

Watch our chat here! We have some fun with this one.

Need more of a reason to commit to watching? Okay. We discuss things like: 

• Palle’s quest to visit every country in the world and how it’s less about country-counting than one might think
• We debate how long you need to stay in a country in order to say you’ve “been there”
• “Mosically” and whether it’s actually a word (spoiler: it’s not)
• Why I chose the moniker of “hobo” and Palle chose “vagabond”
• The book I wrote and never published, as a response to the ever-popular book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term Travel 
• How we most certainly do not see eye to eye in our respective travel styles (and why I get tired just thinking about how Palle travels the world)
• How I managed to stay in Australia for two years 
• Knowing when it’s time to stay for a while, and when it’s move on 
• Nomad Cruise, and why I initially thought it was a terrible idea but as it turns out, I missed out
• How Toastmasters and Rotary have been immeasurably valuable for both of us over the years
• Does the digital nomad lifestyle have a shelf life? (Why I’m being called on to revise my initial hypothesis thanks to programs like these) 
• What drives Palle’s desire to travel the world 
• How time moves slower when you travel 
• The first thing I do in every new destination and how it plays into my entire motivation for travel
• Palle gets direct and asks me why I got a place in Toronto (which I wrote about here, but discuss even more in-depth in our chat)
• What it was like for Palle to be proverbially homeless during the pandemic (See also: How 8 Digital Nomads Survived the Pandemic)
• Why Palle had a hard time trying to cross the border into Canada and how it reflects on ways in which Canadian culture changed during the pandemic
• At the end Palle sticks me with the question: will I ever be nomadic again? 

Check out these other incredible interviews: 
How to Get Your Own TV Show, with Rachel Rudwall, Rachel Roams 
How to Bootstrap 7-Figure Remote Businesses, With Ray Blakney 
…and this chat with our mutual friend (who we give a shout-out to), Matt Bowles! 

This post Digital Nomad Lifestyle Chat with Palle Bo, The Radio Vagabond  appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Other Interviews to Check Out: 
Living Abroad and Buying Property in Mexico, with Tim Leffel 
Getting Residency in Montenegro with a Philippines Passport, with Kach Umandap
How to Get Your Own TV Show, with Rachel Rudwall, Rachel Roams 

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Meet David McNeill, Expat Empire 

David McNeill as worked a variety of jobs in China, Japan, Germany, and Portugal, and has thus navigated the experience of relocating, getting visas, and experiencing expat life in multiple locations. 

Now, as the founder of Expat Empire, David is inspiring people to move abroad and helping them do it. Originally from the United States, he has been living abroad permanently since 2014 and has traveled to nearly 60 countries so far.

David’s passion for living abroad was cultivated through his studies of the Japanese language beginning at the age of 12. He studied finance and Japanese at University and on graduating, he began his career in investment banking and then transitioned into software product management in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

During his first product management role, he was offered the opportunity to work at the company’s Beijing office for three months, which reignited his desire to live abroad for the long term. Six months after returning from China, he received a job offer in Tokyo and finally achieved his dream of living in Japan.

After spending two years in Tokyo, David lived in Berlin for three years and has been living in Porto, Portugal since 2019. He started Expat Empire in 2018 to empower more people to experience the joys of living abroad. Expat Empire offers content such as courses, books, podcasts, blog posts, and events as well as personalized consulting services to support people in taking their next steps abroad.

How to Get Jobs Abroad and Become an Expat 

In my interview with David, I grill him on getting foreign jobs and various expat dynamics. 

We cover things like: 

• The various jobs David has had in China, Japan, Germany, and Portugal.
• How David managed to find jobs in countries abroad, get visas, etc. (spoiler alert: it isn’t easy)
• The specific experience on David’s resume that made him stand out from local talent so he could land jobs.
• The importance of LinkedIn networking in developing a professional presence around the world (Jordan Carroll, who I also interviewed, speaks very favourably of LinkedIn as a way to get remote jobs around the world – which is exactly what Jordan helps people do).
• David’s experience is in tech (software product management), but I wanted to know if it’s still possible to find employment abroad without tech skills.
• The importance of a “unique and differentiated skillset” in getting working visas at foreign companies.
• The value of getting some work experience in your home country before trying to translate those skills to work abroad.
• What a skills shortage visa is, and how it can help you get jobs in foreign countries.
• The sort of help a foreign company will (or won’t) give you in terms of facilitating the visa process and relocating you.
• Advice for making the immigration and relocation process easier (like, pay for help!).
• What happens when you’re laid off from a foreign job (as happened to David three times), or the job isn’t a good fit and you quit (as also happened to David three times).
• Just because you found a job in a foreign country doesn’t mean it’s going to work out.
• What it was like for David to realize his lifelong dream of living and working in Japan, and to what degree his expectations were met (if you’re wondering why I asked such a question, then you’ll want to read about my observations about why I could never live in Japan after spending a few months there).
• Going from Tokyo Japan to Berlin Germany, and how these places differed culturally in terms of living and working.
• Meeting David’s Japanese wife in Germany, and what it was like for them to move to Portugal (a foreign country for them both).
• How Expat Empire helps people (retirees, remote workers, and digital nomads) relocate and live abroad, taking them from step one (contemplation) to moving abroad to settling in to their new home.
• The #1 misconception people have about moving abroad, and top tips for making the process go as smoothly as possible.
  
  

Learn David’s Top Tips for Moving Abroad and Getting Jobs! 

Click here to watch our discussion on YouTube, or watch below! 

Going away for a shorter period of time? Here’s how to get travel jobs and work abroad for temporary stints. 

This post How to Move Abroad and Find Jobs, David McNeill, Expat Empire appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Other Interviews to Check Out:
How to Bootstrap 7-Figure Remote Businesses, With Ray Blakney  
Kach Umandap: Philippines Passport Travel, $ Tips, and Montenegro Residency  
20 Years of Travel, Trading, and Kids: Pat Schulte, Wanderer Financial   

Meet the Amazing Rachel Rudwall (Rachel Roams)!

As an EMMY-Nominated On-Camera Host, Producer, Camera Operator, Writer, and Photographer, Rachel Rudwall has traveled all seven continents, lived in three countries and journeyed through nearly 70 nations. 

Rachel loves dropping herself into faraway lands to relate their stories to outsiders. In fact, she does such a good job of it that she was recently named an Explorers Club “Fellow” alongside greats like Buzz Aldrin and Sir Edmund Hillary.

Rachel has had countless global adventures, ranging from TV hosting for Travel Channel’s Epic Lists and HLN’s Vacation Chasers, to digital hosting for TIME, Inc. and Tastemade, and from brand content creation for BMW and Chase Bank, to producing (producing!) shows like Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men. 

She’s the real deal when it comes to the tv business. 

Beyond the screen, Rachel writes articles and shoots photography for magazines like AFAR and Forbes, and shares further global inspiration through Speaking, Keynote Addresses, and Conference Workshops.

Rachel has worked in every stage of media production, from development and pre-pro to field and post, and is skilled with varied editing systems, digital cameras and gear — drones included! 

Her audience spans over 300,000 adventurous souls around the world. And, as a result of her extensive travel experience, Rachel has been a featured expert for Travel + Leisure, Forbes, Marie Claire Magazine, TIME, and many more.

Are you Impressed? I was. 

I met Rachel in person at Women’s Travel Fest in Portland earlier this year, and I was fan-girling her so hard, I was totally tongue-tied. It wasn’t until she emailed me afterwards (she! emailed me!) and we had a real conversation over zoom that I realized this TV star is friendly, approachable, and soooooo funny. So, I booked another zoom conversation with her, this time to record it so you can enjoy her awesomeness as well. 

After I finish telling her how amazing she is, I get down to the nitty gritty by asking her how she got her chops in the TV business. From there we cover things like: 

• The importance of storytelling in media production, sometimes as the only differentiator when anybody can get high-quality equipment these days.
• How digital media democratized the process of getting a tv show, and yet television is no longer the ultimate end-goal that it once was.
• What it’s like to get noticed on YouTube and get a show from it, versus pitching a show directly.
• Advice for people who would like to get into the tv biz with a show of their own.
• Rachel’s lifestyle of living out of a storage unit for years.
• How Rachel’s husband “ruined” all her plans for being in grand motion forever (and in turn, she “ruined” his career and Alaskan paradise) – and how they’re both better for it.
• “You are your best storyteller when you understand storytelling from varied perspectives” – and what that has meant for Rachel’s career.  
• How Rachel transitioned to remote work because of the pandemic, and how it created huge opportunities for her.
• Having a baby, and how it changed Rachel’s career and lifestyle again.
• Why broccoli is a hard sell (you gotta watch the video to know what that actually means).
• How Rachel has shifted from constantly reaching goals and then saying “okay, what’s next?” to instead staying “I’m here! What’s this like?”

At the end, she goes all Yoda on me and drops some amazing wisdom as it pertains to lifestyle design, planning for the future (or not), and harmonizing the different versions of “you” – yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

Practical, Profound, and Just Plain Funny. (Also, hot.)

Between my brilliant editor’s audio and visual insertions and Rachel’s overall hilariousness, this interview is not only informative but it’s also highly entertaining. You don’t want to miss it! 

Please forgive the poor lighting and shiny face on my side. I was filming in a makeshift studio that also happened to be a bazillion degrees. I’m lucky I didn’t fully melt. 

Click here to watch our chat, or press play below! 

Learn More About and Connect With Rachel Roams

Rachel could totally be a bitch and everybody would still love her. But she’s not. In fact in the interview she invites people to reach out to her and talk about random things like life and stuff. 

You can do that on her website Rachel Roams, or just search Rachel Roams on your social channel of choice to find her: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

This post How to Get Your Own TV Show, with Rachel Rudwall, Rachel Roams appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Other amazing interviews to check out:
Full-Time Travel as a Digital Nomad Family of 5, Growing Up Without Borders
Boat Life as a Family of 5! With Erin Carey, Roam Generation
21 Years of Full-Time Travel with Wandering Earl, founder of Remote Club
How to Bootstrap 7-Figure Remote Businesses, With Ray Blakney  

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Meet Pat Schulte, Wanderer Financial 

Patrick Schulte was a commodities trader in Chicago before veering off of the American dream. He and his wife were in their 20s, and were financially successful, but didn’t feel like they had really done anything. 

In search of adventure, they left work, sold everything they owned, bought a boat, and set sail. While this was supposed to be a temporary adventure, by the time they were halfway around the world they had decided that they were never returning to normal life. 

They sailed around the world for four years, raced a ’65 Porsche across America, and they lived in a ’58 VW bus for two years traveling from Alaska to Argentina, and eventually across Europe. Then they bought another boat and had children in Mexico. They traveled across the U.S. and Mexico in a vintage motorhome, and now for the last five years they’ve been cruising the islands of the Caribbean.

Twenty years later Patrick has never looked back. Throughout his thirties he traded stocks online for himself in order to finance their travels. He has blogged about all of his travels at Bumfuzzle.com and he wrote a book called Live on the Margin about trading and the traveling life. 

Eventually he created Wanderer Financial where he has mentored hundreds of others who are inspired by his lifestyle, teaching them how to trade and grow their portfolios so they too can live a life of freedom.

What is 20 Years of Travel, Online Trading, and Raising Kids REALLY Like? 

On paper Pat’s lifestyle seems idyllic. I wasn’t convinced, so in our interview, I pushed him to answer some tricky questions. Questions like how he manages an online trading career without stable internet, why he chose to run a travel blog all this time without monetizing it, and when he thinks he and his family will need to “settle down” for their kids to have a more stable social life. 

We also cover topics like the following: 

• Why Pat decided to make travel a permanent lifestyle.
• How changes in the trading industry played well into Pat’s plans to take his trading career online.
• The different trading styles Pat has depending on his current travels.
• Advice for people who want to use trading as a way to finance a travel lifestyle.
• What FIRE means to Pat.
• How his blog Bumfuzzle developed and inadvertently fed his other business ventures.
• The beauty of having a travel blog that is not monetized.
• The extra motivation to travel with children.
• Why Pat and his wife had their two kids in Mexico.
• What it’s like to raise children while traveling full-time, and their “unschooling” techniques.
• Ways in which technology has changed how kids grow up.
• Why Pat wrote Live on the Margin, and how it led to Wanderer Financial.
• What it’s like to balance a travel blog, online business/community, trading career, plus raising two kids! 

See also: Worldschooling Communities, Courses, and Hubs to Get You Started

Watch Our Interview Here! 

Click here to watch my interview with Pat Schulte. And while you’re at it, please subscribe to my channel, like the video, and leave a comment! (I’ll take any one of those three things if you’re feeling picky). 

Also, would you like to support this series, and other efforts of mine over the last 16 years to create free and useful content? You can “Buy me a Coffee” here! 

This post 20 Years of Travel, Trading, and Kids: Pat Schulte, Wanderer Financial appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Get your entrepreneurial kicks on with these other interviews:
How to Run a Remote Company Better Than a Physical One, with Chris Dyer 
What it Means to be a Location Independent Entrepreneur, with Jason Moore 
How Julia Taylor is Helping Women Start Their Own Coding Businesses  

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Meet Ray Blakney, 3^rd Culture Kid and Remote Business Entrepreneur 

Ray Blakney is probably like every other award-winning Filipino-American entrepreneur who grew up in Turkey and lives in Mexico that you know. 

Which is to say, he’s truly one of a kind. 

He started his first business, with his wife as a business partner, in 2008. Since then he has bootstrapped multiple 6 and 7-figure remote businesses. Most of this was done from home in his superman pyjamas.

He and his businesses have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur Magazine, The Boston Globe and other top publications. Ray has also been a speaker at multiple conferences around the world.

Some of his businesses include Live Lingua (one of the top online language schools), Twiducate (a social network for schools with over 200k registered users, and Podcast Hawk (an SAAS product that helps you get booked on podcasts on auto-pilot).

He is also host of one of the top language learning podcasts on iTunes called Learn Spanish with Live Lingua, releasing a new episode daily. 

When he is not perusing another wild business idea, he likes to spend time with his wife, son and dog at their house in Querétaro, Mexico and helping other entrepreneurs create location independent online businesses.

See also: How to Become Fluent in Spanish and Other Languages

Ray shared his remote business advice with me in person! 

Ray and his family drove from Querétaro to where I was staying in San Miguel Mexico, and while I’ve known him online for a decade, this was our first in-person meeting, and it sure didn’t disappoint. He is funny, personable, utterly brilliant, and incredibly inspiring. One afternoon with him helped me level up my online entrepreneurial game significantly. 

So, I turned on the camera so we could share all this goodness with you as well. In this interview, we discuss: 

• How a Filipino-American guy ended up growing up in Turkey
• What kinds of games the kids in Turkey played
• The challenges of moving to the United States and integrating as an adolescent
• The irony of looking and sounding American but not fitting in culturally 
• The moment Ray realized he wasn’t cut out to be an employee
• Why the Peace Corps changed his life and career trajectory
• How Ray and his wife started Live Lingua
• The businesses that followed live Lingua, and the entrepreneurial education therein
• Why they converted Live Linga from brick & mortar to remote (hint: it was because of a pandemic, but not COVID)
• How SEO and google algorithm updates can make and break online businesses 
• The irony about Google
• Ray’s formula for picking a winning business idea
• Multi-tasking multiple businesses 
• The importance of outsourcing and creating SOPs 
• The secret to working, living, and parenting together with a spouse

You really won’t want to miss this one. Click here to watch our interview on YouTube, and if you find it as entertaining and informative as I think you will, please like and share it! 

Are you as curious about the numbers as I am? Don’t worry – I got you covered, in this Financial Case Study with Ray that profiles his lifestyle and income trajectories over the last six years or so.

This post How to Bootstrap 7-Figure Remote Businesses, With Ray Blakney appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Learn more about Tim and his lifestyle abroad, his remote travel writing career, and much more, in this (in-person!) interview in Guanajuato Mexico. 

Curious about Living abroad and Travel Writing/Blogging? Check out these interviews:
Living in Montenegro and Getting Residency, with Kach Umandap
Freelance Writing, and why Leif Pettersen left the biz
Being a Digital Nomad versus having a Home Base, with Sherry Ott 

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Meet Tim Leffel, Venerable Travel Writer Living in Mexico 

Tim Leffel is an author, travel writer, and publisher with more than 25 years of experience. He has won dozens of “best travel writing” awards over the course of his career and is frequently invited to speak at writers’ conferences and travel industry events. 

He began as a travel freelancer while circling the globe three times over several years of travel and has written for Outside, Lonely Planet, USA Today, Global Traveler, and multiple newspapers and airline magazines. He is the author of five books, some of them in multiple editions, including The World’s Cheapest Destinations and the best-selling moving abroad title A Better Life for Half the Price.

As the head of Al Centro Media publishing company, he oversees five online magazines and blogs. 

His Cheapest Destinations Blog is one of the longest-running travel blogs on the web, established in 2003. 

His Perceptive Travel site features narrative stories from published book authors and has been active since 2006, winning awards each year and getting stories into several book anthologies. 


Tim grew up in Virginia and has lived in five U.S. states and three foreign countries. When not traveling, he is now based in Guanajuato, in the highlands of Mexico.

Get Real-World Advice from Tim on Expat Life and Travel Writing

Tim’s pragmatic and lighthearted approach to his life and career made him a great guest for my show, as you’ll see below. 

Here are a few of the topics we cover: 

• How Tim came to choose Guanajuato Mexico as his home.
• What it was like to raise his daughter in Mexico.
• How his daughter, now a young adult living back in the United States, views her time in Mexico.
• Why living in Mexico during the pandemic was a blessing.
• The funny thing about time zones, and the ease of working remotely in a similar time zone to clients and colleagues.
• How foreigners getting residency and living abroad is a net gain for the country they’re moving to.
• Tim’s top picks of the best countries to live abroad in (including some places in Europe that you might be surprised to learn are cheaper than Mexico).
• Various ways to integrate into local culture, and the surprising benefits thereof.
• Celebrating little accomplishments when integrating and learning a new culture. 
• How Tim manages five (5!) websites.
• Why Tim started the Cheapest Destinations Blog in 2003, before blogging was even “a thing”.
• Tim’s advice for aspiring travel writers and travel bloggers.
• Making a bonafide living as a writer (he wrote the book on it…literally; it’s called Travel Writing 2.0), versus getting exposure or having travel expenses covered.

Learn more about Tim, his various projects, and his lifestyle abroad in this short fun interview! 

As always please do give the video a like and leave a comment if you’re inspired. It’s a bigger help than you know. 

This post Living Abroad in Mexico: Tim Leffel, OG Travel Blogger and Travel Writer appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Other Amazing Interviews to Check Out:
Helping Women Learn Coding and Work Online, Julia Taylor, GeekPack
The Challenges of Full-Time Travel on a Sailboat, as a Couple, with Ryan & Sophie Sailing
Mental Health as a Digital Nomad, and Virtual Assistant Ethics, with Hannah Dixon  

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Meet Kach Umandap, Two Monkeys Travel

Kach is from Laguna, Philippines. In 2013 after working in Kuwait and Iraq for a few years, Kach quit her 9-5 job and headed off backpacking SE Asia. In late 2014, having embraced a nomadic lifestyle, she began travel blogging on a full-time basis with Two Monkeys Travel. 

Then after four years of adventure traveling followed by two years of sailing the Caribbean (which she writes about here), she moved and bought a stone house villa in Montenegro in 2019 to start a new expat life with her cats.

Aside from writing about her adventures, Kach has been blogging about traveling around the world based on her experience of visiting 146 countries. She aims to travel to every country in the world using only her Philippines passport (and Philippines passport travel is no easy task, but she makes it work in very creative ways). 

We talk Philippines passport travel, messy breakups, and lifestyle changes here.

In this refreshingly honest interview, we discuss: 

• How growing up in the Philippines influenced her career ambitions
• What she learned from going to the wet market with her grandmother at 4am as a child
• The challenges of traveling the world with a Philippines passport, and how to get around them
• What happens when Kach is held by immigration (and how she ultimately ends up getting immigration officers as followers!)
• Her ethos and tips for traveling with money (including why she’s never had a credit card!)
• Why she loves Montenegro and has pivoted her lifestyle and business because of it
• Lessons from separating from her husband who she traveled and ran a business with
• What she learned from hitting rock bottom

Click here to watch this amazingly candid chat! Please remember to like and subscribe to the show so other people like you can find content like this. 

Travel with Frequent Flyer Miles 

Travel Security, and keeping your stuff (and digital identity) safe

Various strategies for Traveling With Money (including cash, cards, and more) 

Wise (formerly Transferwise) and why we both adore it 

Love on the road, and what happens when your life and business are all wrapped up in one person 

This post Kach Umandap: Philippines Passport Travel, $ Tips, Montenegro Residency appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Are you interested in eco travel and sustainable tour companies? Check out these search engines, tour companies, and booking tools that help you find socially responsible and eco friendly travel experiences.

Other Environmental Issues and Engaging Interviews to Check Out:
Eco-Friendly Travel Products to Check Out
Pros and Cons of Being a Digital Nomad vs. Having a Home Base, with Sherry Ott
Solo Travel over 50: What It’s Like
How to Run a Remote Team Around the World, with Chris Dyer
My Zero-Waste Kit for Travel  

Meet Joao and Sara, No Footprint Nomads 

Travel often inspires major life turning points, and J (Joao) and Sara are no exceptions. In 2010 they decided to travel slowly around the world, and their lives were never the same afterwards. 

J realized his heart wasn’t aligned with his current career path while volunteering on a permaculture farm in Nicaragua. 

After that, he was incapable of returning to his career as an Industrial Engineer in big corporations, and he decided to focus all is efforts on a more purpose-driven work life balance. He started a company called Clube Greens and then embarked in online work without ever looking back.

Sara decided to become vegan in Argentina (which even she admits was an ironic twist given the fame of Argentina’s barbecue culture). 

She cofounded Summit Food With Conscience, an event that raises public awareness on the topic of sustainable food production and consumption, while promoting projects with an impact.

Together, J and Sara are No Footprint Nomads, and have lived nomadically since 2010. They organize summits and collaborate in projects (like Thriving Nomads) that focus on sustainability and remote work. 

If Thriving Nomads interests you check out these other Top Digital Nomad Conferences!

In this interview, we discuss things like: 

• How J’s life and perspective changed on a trip to Nicaragua, and the effect it had on his career
• J’s difficult transition from a corporate career to a passion-based business, and why the first one failed
• How and why Sara became a vegetarian and the effect it had on her life 
• How they ended up running purpose-driven passion-based online businesses 
• The societal and environmental advantages of remote work 
• Is being a digital nomad environmentally friendly? (Spoiler alert: there’s a lot to consider)
• Why both J and Sara as well as myself committed to a zero-waste lifestyle (and we geek out on zero waste tools)
• And we all share our top tips and tools to live and travel with zero waste (or close to it)
• How to not only reduce our environmental impact as digital nomads, but how to create a positive impact!

Watch our Interview Here! 

You may have noticed that in the last few episodes of The Remote Work & Travel Show, I have transcribed the interviews here on my site. But things didn’t work out with my transcriber, and I began to question whether my efforts in transcribing these interviews were worthwhile. 

What do you think? Would you rather read than watch? Leave a comment with your thoughts, and I’ll take it into consideration. Thanks!

In the meantime, click here to watch our interview on YouTube, or simply click play to watch below. 

This post Is the Digital Nomad Lifestyle Environmentally Friendly? No Footprint Nomads appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Other Amazing Women You’ll Want to Know More About:
How Beth Santos (of Wanderful) is Changing the Travel Industry and Women in Travel
Remote Careers and VA Ethics, with Hannah Dixon of Digital Nomad Kit
Creating Purpose and Connecting People, with Lola Akinmade Åkerström 

Jump right into my Awesome Interview Series videos on YouTube here – and please give it a thumbs up, leave comments and subscribe!

Introducing Julia Taylor

Julia Taylor is a self-taught web-developer and online business owner who founded WP Rockstar and GeekPack® in 2018. She is passionate about empowering women and girls everywhere to create better lives for themselves by teaching them tech skills and subsequently managing their own businesses in the digital realm.

Her own journey into the world of coding began in 2008, for reasons we get into in this interview. She ran her own business location-independently as a WP developer including living and working from an RV for two years.

Eventually she transitioned into teaching others how to code and develop their own online businesses. Julia has empowered over 3,300 women to learn to code and work on their own terms as virtual business owners through WP Rockstar. Her recently launched GeekPack program is on a mission to empower women to make their dreams a reality through community-supported skills training, with over 550 students enrolled to learn all sorts of skills, from Digital Marketing and Copywriting to SEO and UX/UI Design.

In this interview, we discuss:

• Why it’s important to take imperfect action.
• How entrepreneurship is a learned skill, and how Julia made the transition from freelancer to running an agency to having a full online business.
• What it was like for Julia to live and work full-time in an RV for two years (spoiler alert: it’s not all it’s cracked up to be).
• The GeekForGeek program, and how Julia is teaching underprivileged women around the world to code and earn money online.

Watch our interview here, or if you prefer to read, check out the transcript below. 

Interview Transcript with Julia Taylor of GeekPack

Julia: Hi, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here. 

Nora: Excellent. The enthusiasm is mutual. Now, before I dive into some of the more specific questions I have about what you do and why you do it, I’d like to take everybody back to 2008 when you were a military spouse.

How Julia’s online career got started

Nora: My understanding of anyone who is a military spouse is it’s a very transient lifestyle. It can be very difficult to manage a career. How were you managing your own career in this time and what was your lifestyle? 

Julia: I’ll take you back to 2008. I actually didn’t become a military spouse until– gosh, I had to think about it, 2011– but in 2008 is when my journey began. I used to work for the U.S. Intelligence community. In 2008, I was deployed to Afghanistan. That was my first deployment. I did six months there. While I was there, not long after arriving, I met and fell in love with a guy. He happens to be British, and that’s the plot twist there.

We dated, in so much as you can in Afghanistan. Of course, I then– I know it was, it was bizarre and thinking back to that time– and I did six months there. He was doing a lot of time there. I came home and we decided to stay together, and we did long distance for about a year and a half.

I deployed again. He deployed multiple times. It was a lot of just going back and forth. Professionally, I loved what I did. But personally, it was not working. I decided to leave my job with the government and moved to the UK to get married. In 2011, I did officially become a military spouse.

As you mentioned, we moved a lot. Here I’d gone from having a fantastic career with the U.S. Government. My career projection was just going up and up. I left that to follow my heart, as cliche as that sounds. We’re still married to this day. We just celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary a few weeks ago.

I moved across. We got married. I found myself moving every couple of years with his job. I realized very early on that if I wanted to have any kind of career again, I needed to find something that meant I could be location independent. Because of his job, we were very location dependent.

Earning money online and starting an online business 

Julia: I was desperately looking for something and I didn’t even know where to start. I didn’t know that online businesses were real. Of course, I thought everything was a scam. I didn’t have any education in anything techie. I’d never coded before. Nothing like that. 

I randomly came across coding, kind of forced into it, by a boss at one of my nine-to-fives. That’s when it clicked. It was just completely magical for me. My boss asked me to do something. I Googled what he asked me to do, because I didn’t know what he was talking about. I found this line of code and I figured out how to put it into the backend of the website.

Again, Google. It was my best friend back then. Sure enough, it worked, and all the light bulbs just went off. I thought, “If I could figure this out in five minutes, what if I were to learn this as a skill? Then surely companies would want to hire me and I could work remotely.” I had this dream idea that a real job would want to hire me. Of course, that didn’t work out. But, yeah, that’s my story and how I got started. 

Nora: For anyone who is watching this, it’s very important to remind you that this is 2011. This is when words like ‘location independent‘ didn’t even exist. The idea of a remote career– like you said, you look at these websites on the internet and they look more like scams than real deals or possibilities. 

Coding as well was certainly not in its infancy, but it was certainly in the process of being developed. Really 2011, in my opinion, was really when the move to online e-commerce and entrepreneurship and businesses was really getting going. That’s when the demand for coders was really getting rolling.

Because you were starting this location independent business and developing this new skill in the very early days, you, like me, probably stumbled your way up the learning curve. I made a lot of mistakes. I’m sure you did as well. I’m curious what it was like for you in those early days and what you learned and how that has evolved?

Julia: It was really hard. I try not to say the word ‘mistakes’ too often because I made a lot of them, but I learned a lot of lessons. I try very hard. Now, I have the absolute honor and joy to teach other women how to code. 

I kind of fell into it. 2011, 2012. But I didn’t actually start my online business until 2016. That is a huge gap. I don’t want my students to have to do that. I learned a lot of lessons in that time. I had imposter syndrome like no one’s business. I tried to get a real job. No one would consider me at all.

It wasn’t even something that anyone would even look at a resume, because I didn’t go and get a fancy degree, or I didn’t have 82 years of experience, or whatever. I was really, really discouraged. Even though I taught myself and I was super passionate about it and I loved it and I was pretty good at it. No one would still ever look at me.

A friend of mine, he was actually a friend of my husband’s, who was retiring from the military and starting his own business. He said, “Do you know how to build websites? Can you build me a website? I need one for my business.” And I was like, “That’s silly. Who does that?”

Sure enough, he convinced me and I did. I built him his website and he loved it. He’s like, “This is it. This is what you should do. You should start your own business and build websites for small businesses.”

I was like, “That’s not a real thing.” I was so against– no one in my family was an entrepreneur. I didn’t really know what that meant. All I ever knew was having a real job. It really took a lot of time for me to get over those hurdles. I finally thought, “Okay. Well, I’m not getting a real job. No one’s considering me. This is what I love and what I want to do. So, why not? I’ll give it a go.” 

So I did. I started a business. Even once I technically started it, it still took me about a year and a half before I found clients, because I didn’t know I could find clients on Facebook. I didn’t know– and of course I wasn’t that savvy with social media back then because of my last job.

It took me a little bit longer to get into the social media realm of working online and things like that. It all started to pick up and late 2016, early 2017. I found a community of other women in a Facebook group and they all had their own online businesses.

I thought, “Oh my gosh. There’s other people that I can talk to about this, and we could share experiences.” That really opened my eyes to, “Okay, this is not a scam. This is a real thing. I have a real, tangible skill that I can offer. I can help people with all sorts of stuff in the tech side of their business. Their website, hosting, domains, all the stuff that goes along with it.” I did client work. Working with clients. I ran an agency. For a couple of years, really. 

While I was running my agency, my husband decided to retire from the military. He did 21 years. We thought, “Well, what’s next? Is he going to get the Real Job?” He was looking at places in Silicon Valley. We thought, “Why don’t we–” We love to travel. We didn’t know where we wanted to settle in the U.S. We thought, “Well, why don’t we just sell everything and live in an RV and just travel around the U.S.?” So we did. It was the most freeing experience.

We sold everything. Vehicles. Furniture. Everything. Moved into an RV. For two years we traveled around the U.S. I was working. He was working, starting his own business. It was while I was traveling and I’m sharing my experience on Instagram and people were saying, “How are you able to travel full time? Are you independently wealthy? Are your parents paying for it?” All these things. Which, of course, none of those things were real. 

Learning to be an online entrepreneur 

Julia: I said, “No. I taught myself how to code and I build websites. I have my own business.” Everyone was like, “I want to learn how to do that. You know, that sounds like a real legit thing to do.” So I thought, “Okay. I’ll give it a go.” I’d never taught anything before, but I had a lot of experience learning. Being self-taught, I knew what worked for me when I was going through the learning process. I thought, “I’m just going to teach it the way that I wish I’d been taught.” It’s the only thing I knew how to do. 

Sure enough, people enjoyed it and they wanted to learn more. That’s where the education piece came in. Now, full time, I get to teach women how to code and build online businesses and work from anywhere and have the location independent lifestyle that they want and need. I’ve been doing that since 2018. 

Nora: You pretty much answered every question I have prepared for you. Thank you very much, everybody, and goodnight!

Julia: Oh, I’m sorry. 

Nora: No! That was absolutely perfect! You’re obviously a very accomplished guest because you know how to create the story arc and to really lay the foundation for what it is, this career progression. You did so many things, you’ve experienced things. You were self-taught. Then you were looking for jobs, traditional jobs, with that skill. Realized that those weren’t really available to you. So you went out, and you did it yourself as a freelancer, and then you turned that freelance work into an agency. Where I’m assuming you employed other people in addition to doing your own client work.

Then, as you continued to network and your business continued to evolve, you saw a new need, very entrepreneurial you, in realizing that there were other people who wanted to learn the skills that you had already developed by yourself, with the learning experiences along the way. That’s an amazing story.

Now, prior to this, did you have any entrepreneurial experience or did you just feel your way into this whole thing? 

Julia: I didn’t. No. None. I felt my way into it. Now that being said, I do have a business coach who I actually met back in 2017. I’ve been working with her ever since. I was just at a live event with her and all the other people she coaches last week.

I do things pretty slowly. I like to watch, and watch other entrepreneurs and I see what they do. Then I go, “Ooh, I like that idea, but I’m going to tweak it this way.” Or, “I like that idea. I’m going to tweak it that way.” There’s not a lot of things that I do that’s like, no one’s ever done before, but I don’t want to reinvent the wheel.

I do things pretty slowly and in my time. Which has worked very well for me. There’s times to move quick, and there’s times to move slow. The growth of my business has– I have just taken a lot of advice from a lot of other people, very successful entrepreneurs, because I don’t really have that bone in my body.

It’s a learned skill. Growing my team, running my team, is something that I absolutely love and adore. That, again, is a learned skill. I’ve had a lot of people help me, give me ideas and things. I’m very, very good at taking advice, and running with people that give me good advice, and just going for it. That’s really how I’ve built the business and grown the business. 

Nora: I so appreciate the fact that you’re saying that this was a learned skill for you. I think that there’s a school of thought out there that entrepreneurial-ism, or someone who is an entrepreneur, is a born entrepreneur. They’ve got that magical DNA that makes them a good entrepreneur.

The fact that you can say, “No, no, no. It’s learned.” The fact that you didn’t try to reinvent the wheel. You learn from the people who were doing things and doing them well. You got the coach. You invested in yourself as well as in your business and your skills. And you applied everything that you were learning into your business.

That’s entrepreneurial-ism at its finest. You have done an exemplary job of that. Good for you. What are some of the key differences that you experienced between when you first started freelancing and then– What was the inspiration, and the differences, between when you went from freelancing on your own, to running an agency, to then running GeekPack? What was your inspiration to scale in that way? What changed for you in terms of how you managed your business and your daily operations? 

Going from freelancing to running an agency to having a full business 

Julia: When I was freelancing I loved it, because I was doing the thing that I loved. I got to code. I got to build websites. I got to get in and do all the dirty work. And I loved it. When I was freelancing, I thought, “Why would I ever do anything different? I don’t have to manage anyone. It’s just me. I do what I want.” And this and that. 

I very quickly got way too busy. I said, “Yes” to way too many jobs. It got to a point to where I was literally working nonstop. That was not all that much fun. Here I’d tried to create a business and lifestyle for myself where I was location independent, but I was working all the time. It didn’t really matter where I was working. I was just working all the time. I thought, “Okay, I’ll bring in some help. Then I can start to outsource some projects, and manage it, rather than being the one that was doing it.” Surprisingly, I really enjoyed having other people doing things. I enjoyed that aspect.

But that was probably my least favourite phase in the business because they weren’t employees. They weren’t on the team. They were subcontractors. They were doing other things and my business was not the focus. I didn’t feel like we were a team. I wasn’t doing the thing that I loved. I was making more money and I had more clients, but it wasn’t as fulfilling. I felt kind of lost in that stage. 

When we started traveling and had people ask me to teach, the next phase that I went into, that I absolutely loved, was seeing other women who had never, ever coded before– nothing, they never thought they could do it– their reaction when they did something that they’ve never done before. When you hear “learning to code”, immediately, people think, “Oh, that’s going to be hard.” Because Hollywood makes you think it’s harder.

It makes you think that only men can do it, that have 82 years of experience, or whatever. There’s all these misconceptions. When I was able to come start from the very, very beginning and show them these cool tricks, and see it happen on the screen, and their reaction, “Oh my gosh. Me. I can do this.”

That was what I kept hearing. It was incredibly fulfilling to think that I could share that magical moment with other women. I get, at the end of the day, I teach a skill. However, when women learn that skill, it’s their confidence that skyrockets, and that is what we teach. That is what we empower women through learning this “hard skill”. When you see the confidence just skyrocket, that is absolutely amazing. That was the next phase that I loved. 

As GeekPack really started to grow, I thought, “Okay. I need a team. I need employees. I need people who are working in my team and just on my team.” That’s where I am now. It is, I struggled not to get choked up, but it is the most incredible and rewarding experience, that I get to work with women on my team who love my mission, the GeekPack vision, the core values. They live it and breathe it and they believe in it.

Everyone that’s on my team came through my program. They learned how to do all the things. They project the same love and care and support and encouragement to my community that I used to. Now I get to empower my team so that they know that they can then go and empower all the women in my community.

That’s where I am now. I don’t think I’ve ever actually said all that out loud before. Being able to go back and watch the growth and the change, I’m just so incredibly fortunate that I get to. As I said at the beginning, running a team and all of the things that come with that, that is a learned skill.

I didn’t know how to do that. I’d never managed anyone before. I read a lot of books. I listened to a lot of experts. I take what works for me personally. I just try to make sure that my love and passion for GeekPack and the community of women that we have, that goes to my team. They take that and they push that down to the community as well. That’s been the progression throughout my career so far. 

Nora: One of the things that occasionally happens for entrepreneurs when they evolve from working in their business to working on their business, is they find that they’re no longer doing the tasks that they trained themselves to do, and that were really the impetus for starting the business to begin with. It sounds from your own progression, that’s exactly what happened. Your daily tasks now are completely different from what they once were. You’re definitely working on the business and you’re managing empowering a team to do it. You’re speaking about it with great passion and enthusiasm. I feel like you’ve made that transition well. For someone who might feel that they’re not, that they’ve maybe lost sight of the ball, would you have any advice for them?

Julia: Lost sight of the ball in the sense of the thing that they started to do, that they loved initially?

Nora: And suddenly they’re now lost in the weeds of working on the business as opposed to in it and doing the tasks that they initially enjoyed doing. 

Julia: Sure. I still struggle with this. I’m not so sure that it’s something that I’ll ever get over. I love to code and I still love all the nitty gritty. However, what I love more is growing my team. Growing my community. Empowering more women. Impacting more women.

That’s more of a longer-term result. It’s almost like when you’re a little kid and you want some candy and you don’t want to wait until dinner. What immediately gives me pleasure is coding. However, long-term, that’s not getting me, my business, my team, my community, where I want to be.

I have to keep sight of that. I constantly remind myself of my vision. It is reach. It is impact. It is “how can we empower as many women and girls all around the world as possible?” I have to keep that long view because short-term, I absolutely just want to do the things, but the long view.

I do things like this. I am being on shows and podcasts. I will network. I build relationships. Those are the things that will take GeekPack to the next level. Which means I can grow my team. I can grow my community. I can impact and empower more women. 

I have to constantly keep reminding myself of my vision in order to keep moving the needle forward. I would say that’s probably the most important thing that I’ve done in my business. I spent a good amount of time figuring out, “What is the GeekPack mission, our core values, and our vision?” I remind myself of those things every single day. 

Every decision I make in the business, “Is it in line with our mission, core values, and vision?” If it’s not, I don’t do it. If it is, then I do it, and I figure out the timeline. Figuring out those things was so impactful that now, not only for myself, but for my team and my community, we know where we’re going and we’re all on the same path together. That’s probably the best way to keep the eye on the ball.

Nora: You found the entrepreneurial secret sauce, which is the vision, the mission, and the goals. Absolutely. The overarching vision is what keeps you really getting out of bed every day and doing the thing and moving towards something else. And like you say, also inspiring your team members. Brilliant. 

Living and working in an RV full-time

Nora: I want to pivot, and I want to go over to your experience of living and working from an RV full-time for two years. I had a very short dally with camper van life. At which point I realized that that was probably not my thing. But I’m also well aware that van life and RV life are two different things, and they come with a different set of lifestyle, and equipment, and all that sort of stuff. 

What was it like for you living and working from an RV for two years? 

Julia: It was nowhere near as glamorous as Instagram influencers make it seem. It was not. As I’ve mentioned before, that was probably right in the period of my business when I was working the most. I was still running my agency and starting up the education side at the same time. I was constantly having to find an internet connection. That was just a nightmare. It really limited us as to where we could go. Running an agency and building an education piece to your business. It was hard, hard work. It’s only now this year where I’m starting to reap the rewards of all of that hard work. It was. We were constantly chasing an internet signal. It was not the glamorous sunsets and hikes. We did. We still did all those things, but nowhere near what we expected.

My husband was starting his own business while we were traveling, as well. It was amazing to get to travel around. We traveled through the town that I live in now and we fell in love with it. We’re like, “This is it. This is where we want to settle, in as much as we can settle.” It was a fantastic experience, but it was not so much the glamorous lifestyle that I think we expected. 

Nora: I’m really glad that you shared the reality versus the Instagram version of the lifestyle. Is that why you ultimately came off the road? Did you come off the road because you found the place at the town, and the place that you wanted to live? Or did you come off the road because you just found that it was not a complimentary lifestyle to the work that you were looking to do it?

Julia: The second one. We were not enjoying the travel because we were working so much. It didn’t quite fit with where we were in our work, where we were professionally, and where we wanted to be personally. Honestly, we got very lucky with the house and the area that we settled in. 

But now, my husband has a truck with a rooftop tent on it. We still go and travel and camp. We’re three hours from Moab. National Parks at our doorstep. We still absolutely do the travel. We’ve gone down to Baja, Mexico. Anywhere we can go in the truck with a rooftop tent.

That’s really, at our core, what we love. Now that I have a team, I’d still take my laptop everywhere I go. If I have a connection, I will check and see how things are going, and this and that. Now, when I travel I try very, very hard to be in the moment. To be intentional about my time, and not try to take all the Instagram pictures to show off. 

I got to do that, and it didn’t feel honest and genuine and authentic. Whereas now, because I have built the business and I have the team, I know that everything is going fine with the business. When I get to travel, I can check in, but I really try to just be in the moment and be present. We still get to have amazing travel experiences, but I don’t feel the need to show it off as much as I used to.

Nora: I’m glad that you’re not glorifying the lifestyle. Thank you for that. Thank you for your honesty around that. I did an interview with Gary Arndt a few moons ago, and he said it very well. 

See also: Podcasting vs Blogging After 9 Years of Full-Time Travel, With Gary Arndt

He said “You can travel. And you can work online. But you cannot do them simultaneously.” You can work online while you’re on the road. But the time and energy required to work online, it doesn’t really matter where you are in the world, in that time, all you need is the internet connection. So the lifestyle of travel is often dictated by your work. 

While you were in the RV, you were also in a transitional phase of your business. I’m sure that even more of your time, and energy, and really just psychic mind space, was in your business to the point where you weren’t really able to appreciate the wonders that were around you in the travel experience. 

For you to now separate out the travel experience from the work. You’re still working on the road, but you’re able to even just mentally say, “Okay, I’m having a travel experience right now. I’m going to throw myself into this. Then, when I get back at the end of the day, I’m going to throw myself into work.”

I think that is really a necessary thing for anyone who is looking at working abroad. That’s also a skill that is learned. One of the things that I really like about GeekPack’s vision is that you are empowering women, and women around the world, to learn to code and develop these online businesses.

Empowering women around the world with coding skills to make money online

Nora: How is it that you are reaching some of the women? Some of the people whose lives you can really change in effect would be women who are in developing countries. With this skill, they can then develop businesses that would really give them new opportunities, and new ways to provide for themselves and their families. How is it that you reach women around the world with GeekPack?

Julia: We just started, literally a couple of weeks ago, a brand new program to do exactly that. Because it’s hard. I guess my first question is, are you familiar with TOMS Shoes? The shoes. The shoe company. They have a one-for-one marketing model. Are you familiar with those? 

Nora: Yep, absolutely. For every pair that somebody buys, they donate a pair to a homeless person. 

Julia: Now, the extra pair of shoes goes around the world. But it started with kids in developing countries. But yes. One-for-one. Someone buys a pair of shoes, and then a pair of shoes is donated to someone who needs it. 

I always had a big dream for GeekPack that I would one day start a nonprofit. Nothing gets me more excited than thinking that I could have a nonprofit arm to GeekPack. When I started to look into it, come to find out, setting up a nonprofit, running a nonprofit, and all the stuff that goes along with it, is a real pain because there’s all the rules and the bureaucracy that goes along with it.

I thought, “It’s effectively starting another business. Why would I put myself through that? When I have the means now, with the success of my for-profit business, that I could do something like what TOMS Shoes has done.” I had this revelation. I thought, “Why don’t I create something?”

And I did. I’ve called it GeekForGeek. It’s exactly that. I say it’s exactly that; it is still very much in its infancy. This is a really, really good example of taking imperfect action when you’re very passionate about something. I tell my students all the time to take imperfect action, even if it’s not right, even if it’s scary, all these reasons.

I thought, “I better show up. If I’m telling them to do it, I better do it. I decided I’m just going to get it set up. I’m going to get it started and see how it goes. It will iterate and it will change. A year from now, GeekForGeek will probably look different than it is now. I just wanted to do something.

I reached out to an international nonprofit called Dress for Success. They work with women in rough financial situations to– The way it was started was to dress them in suits when they go into interviews. Their organization has morphed to really work with women, primarily single women, all around the world to make sure that they’re helped out in rough financial situations. 

I partnered with Dress for Success, and they were able to identify 20 women who really could use my program. We brought them into the program. We have these 20 women who otherwise would not have been able to join the program and they get to be in the community, and learn the skills, and take that on. And either apply for that job, or they can start their own business, or they can get that raise. All the things that they could do now with these tangible skills. Like we talked about, that’s the beginning of GeekForGeek. 

I am right now on the hunt, trying to find other non-profits all around the world to partner with who can say to me, “We have X amount of women who need your program.” So long as it’s the right fit, we will take them into our program. It’s just that. GeekForGeek. Ideally, one day, I would like it to be when someone joins my program and pays the amount that someone else is then able to join. That’s where I would like to get in the future.

For now, I am able to say my for-profit business can take X number of women and we will bring them through the program. I’m incredibly fortunate to be in the position to be able to offer this program. Like I said, it’s imperfect action combined with a passion that I have, and I don’t have to mess with the whole bureaucracy of a nonprofit. I just get to do it because I want to. Because I have an amazing team. Because I have an amazing community. And because I know it will impact so many women’s lives that wouldn’t otherwise be able to do something like this. That’s one of the ways that we are growing, and we’re trying to impact as many women as we can, regardless of their financial state.

Nora: Everybody who is watching or listening to this here, Julia, now. If you run or know somebody who runs a nonprofit who can identify women who can learn, who could use these skills and would like to learn to code and start a digital business and help themselves and their families have a new life together. Get a hold of Julia at GeekPack. Thank you for that. Julia, this is brilliant. It’s been fantastic and informative and inspirational. Where can people find you and connect with you? 

Connect with Julia here! 

Julia: The easiest place is probably just my website. It’s GeekPack.com. I do have an Instagram account and all the other social media. On social media, I’m typically Julia the Geek. But my website is GeekPack.com, and we’ve got lots of stuff on there. The charities that we support. I mentioned our mission. Our core values. Our vision. All of that is on there. And all the other things that we do in GeekPack. That’s probably the best place to go.

Nora: Excellent. I noticed that you have a very full YouTube channel. Full of all kinds of instructional and inspirational and fun videos as well. You’re very fun on the camera. 

Julia: Well, thank you.

Nora: I’m going to link to all of that. Your site. Your channels [Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn], including Instagram, in the show notes or description.

Thank you so much, Julia, for joining me today. It’s been a real pleasure. 

Julia: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure. 

Nora: I’m Nora Dunn, and I’m otherwise known as The Professional Hobo. I will catch you next time.

Conclusion

While there are many self-taught coders working online today, very few have taken their hard-earned knowledge, their passion for coding, and their desire to help others make money online, and made the type of impact that Julia Taylor has. 

Since founding GeekPack a few short years ago, she has empowered over 2,400 women to develop the skills and business knowledge to successfully create careers earning money online. Whether through freelance developer jobs, working for and creating their own agencies, or seeking employment as remote workers, these women now have the skills and confidence and support to create the lives they seek. Julia continues to grow GeekPack and increase her ability to positively influence even more women each year.

This post Helping Women Work Online and Learn Coding, Julia Taylor, GeekPack appeared first on The Professional Hobo. Please click through to read it in full!

Also, if you want to dominate in the remote leadership field, you’ll find a very special secret discount at the end of this article! 

Other Remote Interviews to Check Out:
Running the World’s Only PR Company from a Yacht, with Erin Carey 
Being a Remote Employee vs Remote Entrepreneur, with Victoria Puzach
How to Find Remote Jobs with Jordan Carroll, The Remote Job Coach
Running a Remote Real Estate Business with Matt Bowles, Maverick Investor Group 

Introducing Chris Dyer, Remote Team Productivity Maven and Pioneer

Chris Dyer is the founder and CEO of PeopleG2, where he manages 30 full-time remote employees and 3,000 contractors. PeopleG2 is routinely ranked one of the best remote companies to work for and has been listed as one of Inc.’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies. 

He made the transition to remote work during the recession in 2009 with stunning success, and Dyer is now a world-renowned expert on remote leadership and productive remote company culture. His commentary is featured regularly in leading media outlets such as Fast Company, Forbes, Inc., BBC, NBC and The Telegraph. Dyer is the author of Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce and The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits. 

In this interview we talk about:

• How and why Chris took his company remote in 2009 (spoiler alert: it wasn’t because he had a crystal ball)
• Remote team communication styles, tools, and tips
• It is better to be an introvert or an extrovert in a remote work environment? 
• How remote company culture is better than a traditional office
• The 4 different meeting types and how the intentionality behind them increases remote company productivity and culture dramatically 
• What “feed-forward” is in relation to feedback
• The opportunities remote work presents to people who might otherwise be impossible to hire

Check out our chat here! You won’t want to miss it. I was fascinated in particular by his 4 different meeting types. So unique and helpful to remote teams! 

Interview Transcript: Remote Team Productivity and Remote Company Culture Hacks

If you’d rather read than watch, then please enjoy this transcript of our chat. 

How and Why Chris Dyer Went Remote in 2009

Nora: I definitely want to start at the beginning and the beginning is 2009, when you took your company remote in the recession. This makes you a thought leader because remote work was not even a thing back in 2009. You, like me around the same time, probably found yourself stumbling up the learning curve. I’m curious, what was your inspiration and what did you learn from this experience?

Chris: Well, this is when I admit something that I don’t like admitting, which is I didn’t do it because I had a crystal ball, and I didn’t do it because I thought it was the future of work, and I didn’t do it because I thought it would be better for our employees. The only reason we went remote was to save money. That was our starting point because it was a recession. I thought, I need to keep my people. How can I keep my people? The only way I could come up with was to get rid of rent, and to get rid of the telephone costs, and to get rid of all these things that we couldn’t afford to pay for. 

We could either pay for rent or we could pay our employees. We had that choice. I thought, “Well, I can get rid of rent pretty easily.” I’m very fortunate that our lease agreement was coming up in a month. I said, “Let’s just not renew. Send everybody home. We’ll survive, and then when we’re ready, we’ll come back and we’ll get a new building.” 

It wasn’t until we went remote, and about two weeks into it, that everyone went, “This is awesome. We love it. What the heck were we thinking?” Then we began to think about this some more inspirationally and figure out, “How can we keep this?” And, “Wow, this is so much a better way to work.” 

Practically speaking, I did it to save money. I did it to save my people. That’s a story I do like to share with CEOs who are thinking about right now, “Do I go remote? Do I go hybrid?” I can usually give them a pretty good argument how it’s going to help their productivity, their performance, and their profitability. That gets them excited. Then, it’s great for their people, too. But that’s what the “C level” people are thinking about first.

Nora: I anticipated the pandemic would change the face of office space because once all these companies figured out, out of necessity, they had to go remote. They, like you in 2009, were looking at their bills of their office lease and the amount of space they had, and realizing, “This might not be entirely necessary.” This could be a new way for companies to completely restructure and save a lot of money, in that way. That’s an opportunity, a silver lining, we can attribute to the pandemic. 

Remote Team Communication Styles, Tools, and Tips

Nora: You did a TED Talk called “Why Failure Doesn’t Suck.” Which is great, in that you talk about how one of the very necessary things for remote teams is open communication. That’s not the easiest thing to create an environment where employees can communicate very openly in a remote work way. How do you facilitate the kind of open communication that’s necessary to keep the team moving forward in a remote way?

Chris: I learned the lesson over the years that if I was loosey-goosey, cool guy, “Hey, whatever works for you guys is fine”, that we were going to fail because what employees want is rules. This drives me nuts because I wish they didn’t, but what anybody wants is structure and rules and how do I play the game of work here? We had to come up with very specific things that we reinforce and that we expect from our people, that then facilitate high amounts of communication.

I’ll give you some examples. One, all internal communication must be in Slack. We do not allow email, just internally. All the email addresses are just for people in the company. No, it’s in Slack. We don’t text unless it’s an emergency. That way we keep people from feeling like we’re going to come after them and bug them.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, just recently Portugal passed a law that your boss can’t text you after work. We had already put that in place. Unless it’s an emergency, you shouldn’t be texting your coworkers. It needs to happen in Slack. So they have the ability to track it, to see it, to remember it. If it’s in a room, it’s now transparent to the whole team about what’s happening.

And, if you want to be off you can just mark yourself inactive and you don’t have to be being pinged while you’re watching your kid’s soccer game, or you’re at a beautiful meal looking at the Eiffel tower, or whatever it is you’re doing, that you don’t have to be bothered for that bit of time. You can turn off and then turn back on.

That was really important for us to create those rooms, those spaces. Then we curated very, very specific meeting types that allowed us to do these different types of meetings to help our employees understand, “How long will I be on the call? What kind of meeting will this be? Am I coming to help? Am I coming to teach? Am I coming to debate? Am I coming to learn? Am I coming to shut up and find out what’s going on? What kind of meeting are we having?” 

Because what I’m finding where people are failing with remote work is they just keep inviting people to an hour long meeting. And it’s the same meeting, but it’s not the same meeting.

So leaders are really frustrated, “Well, why aren’t my people coming with better ideas? And why aren’t they telling me what’s going on?” Because you didn’t ask them to prepare for that. You just told them to show up to a meeting, and then you magically expected them to have all the answers and have thought through this problem. Well, did you tell them what the problem was? No. 

There’s very few people who can just BS out of their mouth– I’m one of them– about something just off the top of their head. Most people need time to think about, to research it, and to come up with a plan, and ideas, and then present something they feel confident about. You have to create those good spaces for people. 

Nora: To build on that. People tend to process information differently, right? Some people are audio, some people are visual, some people are kinesthetic, for that matter. The communication style, when it comes to remote work, becomes very important. Because some people will get the message stronger in one way versus another. How do you address the different communication styles that people have and marry them within a remote team? 

Chris: We try to ask them to try to pick the medium that works best for them when they can choose. We also try to make sure we communicate important things in multiple ways. If I want my team to know something very specific, it is very common for me to write it in Slack, and then maybe follow up with a video of me talking about it. So, I have a video and then I would explain it. If they just want to read it, they can read it. If they want to watch me, they can watch me.

We use this a lot for training videos. We found that people did want to connect, and they wanted to have that moment with a trainer about how to use this new software, but then they also wanted that recorded. Or they wanted someone to demo that system in a recording, like on Loom, or Vidyard, or one of those.

When we surveyed our staff and said, “Well, why was that important to you?” They said, they finally admitted, “Because I can watch that video over and over again until I understand. And I don’t have to feel stupid that I have to go back to the trainer five times because I didn’t get it, or I didn’t understand how to do it yet.”

People would just not tell us. They didn’t want to raise their hand and say, “I feel stupid. I don’t get it.” They would just pretend they got it and do a bad job. Until you got mad at them and then it happened again, or fire them, or whatever was the outcome. Instead, they could watch that video a thousand times if they needed to, until they got it. Until they understood how to do that thing you wanted them to do. We found that the written and the video really works for our team. 

Introverts vs Extroverts in Remote Environments

Chris: You’ve mentioned the kinesthetic one. Maybe in other teams, you need to have them do other things. Maybe that’s important for that group of people. For my people, I don’t know why this is, we tend to have a lot of introverts in my organization that are really happy to just be left alone and read it or watch it on their own time. And then let me know if they have questions 

Nora: Certainly, I would think that remote work lends itself best to people who are introverted, for exactly those reasons. As you were talking, I was thinking, “What would be a kinesthetic application for someone who is really extroverted?” The only thing I can think of would be, and it’s not even entirely kinesthetic, would be the live calls.

Live trainings, or communicating with other people, will be the closest thing to what an extrovert would perhaps need. To have that live interaction. Versus an introvert who would prefer to just go back and watch and rewatch a video or read and reread some trainings in that way. 

Chris: Yeah. I will say extroverts do really well in remote environments as well. However, there’s a couple of things that are a little bit different for them. The first is we actively coach our extroverts that, “Hey, you’re going to have to have your social outlet. Some of the energy that you get from being social, you’re going to have to go and recreate it somewhere. 

You’re not going to get as much of it at work as you would if you’re working in the office. You need to go and join a club, or go to an extra networking event every week, or whatever it is you need to do. If you need a certain amount of hours of ‘I’m around people.’ Cool. You just gotta put it somewhere else. Because it’s not going to happen as much at work as you’re used to.” 

Number two, though. Extroverts tend to be far more productive in remote environments because, yes, they like people. And yes, they like to talk. But they like to talk too much. And they get stuck in too many conversations and their productivity goes down. 

I am a card carrying extrovert. And I’ll tell you, I love remote work because I can sit and work for four hours and no one bugs me and I can get my stuff done. I’m really happy because I feel like I was productive. Even though, then I need to go have two hours at a networking event to recharge. I can do that. 

I have a sales guy, and he was a good salesperson for us when we were all in one office. He is my best salesperson now because he’s at home. He would talk to a statue. This man talks nonstop. Removing him from being around so many people made him more productive. He recognized that. He understands that, “I’m now talking to clients. If I want human interaction, I gotta get people on the phone and talk to them.” Great. That’s great for selling.

How Remote Company Culture is Better

Chris: It’s just about knowing who your people are and then creating the right environments for them. I don’t know if you do the TikTok at all, but there’s been some really funny TikToks. People have, “Welcome to the team. Would you want to sit on the introverted side of the company, or the extroverted side?”

It’s really funny how they differentiate that. I realize we kind of already have that here, in the remote space, because of the way we created things. The introverts can kind of clump up to where they’re really happy, and the extroverts can clump up to where they’re happy. And there’s a good amount of crossover that they can still communicate and work together really well.

Nora: What I’m hearing here is, ultimately, the secret sauce is in intention. Really for extroverts, again, creating a space where they can intentionally be productive and will not be distracted in a way that they might be if they were in an office and someone came in, and now suddenly they’re talking and they’ve lost that productive time that they had scheduled for themselves.

That intentionality of creating productive spaces, as well as recognizing the different work styles and personalities of all your employees, and being able to provide advice and various environments and tools to allow them to be their ultimate selves, and as productive as they possibly can be. 

I will say the one thing that I miss the most from working in an office was, I might be on my way to the copy room and I walked by accounts payable. I have no business with accounts payable, but I stopped briefly. I have that conversation with Sylvia because she’s there. Over the days, weeks, months, and years, I get to know these people who I might not necessarily have any other reason to be in touch with, except that we are in the same office environment together.

I guess it’s the proverbial water cooler. You’re at the water cooler chatting with different employees in the office. And although that might not quite be considered billable work from an employer perspective, in my opinion, it really increased the cohesiveness of the team, and the company as a whole, and created that company culture that really helps the company as a whole, and the team as a whole, move forward. 

That water cooler culture is difficult to replicate remotely. How do you create that cohesiveness with a team? 

Chris: I actually think that what you’re describing is good, but there’s actually a better version of that. We do two things that’s important. 

The first is, we have a water cooler room in Slack. We have a place where people can intentionally bump into each other. They share– I’ll give you an example. The day after Halloween, we had everyone sharing pictures of themselves, or their kids, in their costumes, and what they did for Halloween.

There was this opportunity for everyone, not just you and Sylvia, to have an interaction. Now everyone can see those interactions. We actually magnified that. Instead of it just being, “What happened to you and Sylvia”, it’s now, “What happens to you and Sylvia and everyone else in the company.” Inside of this room, we all get to share, we all get to see it. We kind of magnify that outcome. 

The second part is, you’re sort of saying, “Well, I’m able to maybe have some strategic conversation, or maybe we may get to see what she’s working on. Maybe I would not have ever noticed that she’s working on this one project that I could help her with if I hadn’t walked by her office.” And things like that.

We do ask people to be self-selecting onto our groups and onto our teams, our temporary teams. We don’t, as senior leadership, say, “I think these five people should go and pick a new CRM for us.” We go to the entire company and say, “We are thinking about a new CRM. Who would like to be on that team?”

That allows people from all different parts of the organization to say, “That’s interesting to me. I have experience doing that.” We do end up with a team where there’s a salesperson, and an accounting person, a customer service person. We get people that end up being on a team that can cross-pollinate across the organization, and share about what they’re doing, what they’re working on, so that they get those opportunities in a much more directed way. Again, it’s not just two people, it’s now five people, or seven people, that are having that interaction. We’re sort of magnifying or multiplying that outcome.

Four Main Meeting Types and What They’re For

Chris: The last thing that we do is we have very specific meeting types. If I tell you all of our meeting types, we’ll be out of an hour here pretty quickly. 

The most common meeting we have at our company is called the cockroach meeting. 

A cockroach meeting. If you have a cockroach in your bathroom, it’s a small problem. You may not want to be the one who cleans it up, but it’s one problem. It’s one cockroach, one problem. Anyone in the company can call a cockroach meeting. They have the ability, anybody, day one, your first day at my company, you can call a cockroach meeting, and you can invite any five to six people you want. It can’t be more than seven people on the call. 

You can invite the CEO, you can invite the head of sales, you can invite someone in IT. You can invite anybody you think can help you with whatever it is. Your cockroach. What your one problem is. No one in the company has to come. It is totally optional for you to attend a cockroach meeting. We just ask that if you can’t come, you would decline, so we know you can’t be there. The meeting is 15 minutes or less. Always starts on time. We always try to end early, and it must only be about one agenda. 

The last time I surveyed my team a couple of months ago, we do an average of 35 cockroach meetings a day across the organization. They are constantly popping in for seven to eight minutes on average, saying, “Hey, the client called, this is the issue.” Instead of them doing what you were talking about, walking down the hall and having one-on-one conversations, and bumping along like a pinball trying to maybe figure out, “What am I supposed to do about John at XYZ Company, who has this thing for me?” 

Instead, we’re intentionally bringing those people together. Maybe someone in accounting. Someone in customer service. Maybe that salesperson who originally created the deal. Maybe my manager. Let’s get in. “They asked for this. How in the heck do we make that happen?” “Ah, we had this happen once before. You needed to do this, this, this.” 

Or, “We had this happen before. We cannot do that. We’ve been told. Chris has said, ‘Absolutely not. That’s illegal to do.’ We need to go back and communicate that.” In seven to eight minutes, they communicated across the organization. They got their problem solved, and they didn’t have to bump around and have one-on-ones all day long to try to maybe come up with something that maybe is, or is not, the right solution, or without anybody else kind of knowing what they’re thinking.

There is a better way to do it. It just takes a lot of, to your point, intentionality to create and design that how we want people to operate inside that remote space. 

Nora: That is fantastic. I’d never heard of a concept like that. I think that that is amazing. And how many meeting types did you say that you have, in entirety?

Chris: There’s cockroach meetings, ostrich meetings, tiger team meetings, and tsunami planning meetings. Those are our four most common. Then we have the stand-ups, and we have the things you would typically expect inside of a team environment. But those four are the ones that have the funny names, that have very special rules that people know what’s going to happen.

Cockroach meeting, you know you’re coming to help them solve a problem. 

Ostrich Meetings

Ostrich meeting. It’s all the same things, 15 minutes and all that. But you know you’re coming to help teach someone something. If you don’t know how to do an Excel formula, “Who in the company knows how to make a formula that does this thing in Excel?” “Ah, I do.” And two or three people. Or, “I don’t know how to do that, but I would love to learn that, too. I know that you’re going to have that meeting. I’m going to pop on because I want to learn to write.” People can educate themselves and learn as they’re going along. If they’re interested. Because there’s the visibility, we’re saying, “Who wants to help me learn this thing?” That creates a lot of intentionality. 

Tiger Team Meetings

The tiger team meeting. Imagine there’s a tiger in your bathroom. It’s a lot bigger problem than a cockroach, right? You would need a dart gun. Tranquilizers. You need Animal Control. Maybe you might need a crane to get it out, or maybe seven or eight really strong people to help you carry it out once it’s asleep.

It’ll take a lot of coordination, and effort, and people to get a tiger out of your bathroom. That’s the same. If we’re going to call a tiger team meeting, it could be an hour. It could be two hours. It could be all day. It could be on Zoom. We might even fly people in. It might be in person if it’s that big of a deal.

“We’re going to land the million dollar client. We’re going to lose the million dollar client. They’re about to change the law that will totally, radically change our business. What’s this big thing we have to deal with?” There’s going to be a big agenda, and you’re going to definitely have an idea of what you’re supposed to do, and show up prepared, and have researched things, and talked to other people.

You’re going to show up to this big meeting. Again, five to seven people. And you’re going to help us solve a gigantic problem. Think about the energy, and how you would approach a tiger team meeting, if you were asked to come to one– that typically is called by management, it wouldn’t be called by anybody– and how that changes your focus. It changes your energy. 

As opposed to, “Well, I’m just being asked to go in this little cockroach meeting. I’m just doing someone a tiny favour for seven to eight minutes. I can do that, and then get back to my work.” 

As opposed to, “Well, this is a big deal. I’m going to be on this meeting all day. I’m canceling all my calls. I cannot meet with anybody on Wednesday because Chris needs me to come and help with this gigantic problem.” 

Tsunami Planning Meetings

The tsunami planning meeting is a fake meeting. We do this once a month inside of every team that is an infinite team. Teams that exist forever. Sales team, marketing team, customer service team. Things like that. Not temporary teams.

We do it once a month. It’s 30 minutes. We give all of our teams a fake topic. What would happen if there was a giant pandemic? What would happen if Chris got hit by a bus and was in a coma for six months? What happens if Starbucks called us tomorrow and said, “We need to give you all our background checks starting next month.” What would we do? How would we handle these imaginary things? 

Now, why would I want to do that? First of all, it is amazing what ideas people come up with when it’s a fake idea that you can implement for free, anyways. Go back and ask your team what they would do with a million dollars. Ask them to brainstorm that. “If I said, ‘You have a million dollars. You could do anything you want with it.'”

Very rarely does anyone say, “Give everyone a piece of that money. We just will take the money and walk home.” They always say, “Oh, we could do this thing and we could create this. And we could…” And usually most of their ideas are free, or cost very little. Because you’re getting them to think about things in a different way.

What we find inside the tsunami planning meetings is this creates psychological safety and helps us curate the meetings. That it lasts all month. We get this energy. People practice this disagreeing and arguing about a fake topic, are less afraid to give their ideas, because it’s not a real thing anyways.

They recognize that, “My boss didn’t get mad at me for disagreeing. No one yelled at me when I disagreed with them.” Or, “No one told me I was stupid when I came up with this idea.” Their psychological safety has been created. So, all month, they’re now doing great meetings with their teams and with different people because they have this fresh practice and confidence.

If you did any sports as a kid, you spend 99% of the time practicing. Most of sports is practice, and a little bit is showing up and actually performing. Yet, at work, it is almost 100% performing and no practice. We said, “We need to have a way to practice good meetings.”

The last thing that we do inside the tsunami planning is, if we see there’s something going on the leader might recognize. “I’m noticing that Jane isn’t talking very much.” Or, “I noticed that John is interrupting all the time.” Or, “I’m noticing that Kevin, that guy needs to shut up. He is just talking and talking and talking.” You’re like, “Wow. Okay.” 

As a leader, you can say, “I need to go back and help those people. I need to give them what we’d like to call feed-forward.” Instead of feedback, get rid of feedback. It’s terrible. Give them feed-forward. “What I need from you in the next meeting is…” Giving them future forward-thinking direction.

“John, I noticed that in this last meeting, you were really excited. I really need you in the meetings coming up this month. Can you help me with listening twice as much as you talk? Can you make sure that you’re not interrupting your team members? Let them finish what they have to say. What you have to say is important, but you let other people finish.” “Oh yeah, I can do that.” 

You’re curating these meetings. You’re sort of helping them and coaching them. Instead of having an annual review going, “Well, John. In all of the meetings all year long, you pissed everybody off because you were always interrupting.” How good is that? That doesn’t help. We need to tell them right away what we need from them. That sets the stage for all of our other meetings being successful. 

Nora: I’m assuming that people can dive even deeper into all of these different meeting types and how to hold them in your book. Is that correct?

[Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce]

[Chris’s new book: The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits]

Chris: Absolutely. 

How to Ask Your Employer if You Can Work Abroad

Nora: There are a lot of viewers here, or listeners here, who work remotely. They have remote jobs. They want to take their jobs abroad. They want to travel long-term while working remotely, but they’re scared to ask their employer for permission to work abroad for fear that their employer is going to say, “No.” What would you say to someone who’s in that position? 

Chris: If you really think it’s going to be problematic, but you think you can do your job anyway, sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

That would be the first thing I would say. If you can do your job, and you’re willing to work the hours when you need to work the hours, and maybe you have to work at night while you’re in London so no one knows. It’s not really their business. There’s that one perspective, right?

Go do what you want to. As long as you’ve figured out the legal ramifications and all that with being paid. If that all makes sense. I’m not an expert on that part of it. But, I know lots of people that that’s just what they do. Just going and asking HR, “Is it okay if I go work in London.” This sort of conduct can cause a whole other problem.

Now, if you think that they would definitely be really mad at you, and fire you or whatever, if you didn’t communicate, then yeah. I think what you need to is– what I have seen work really well is to say, “Listen, I love my job. I don’t want to leave, but I really need to be in this other place for a period of time. Would you mind if we try this as an experiment? Would you mind if we gave this three months, or six months, to see how it goes. We reevaluate, and if it’s not working out, I’ll come back.”

To give the employer lots of options and lots of the ability to say, “I just want to try this out.” If it doesn’t work out, well, then you can figure something else out. Typically, it does work out. They don’t notice any– all their fears didn’t come true. They’re just fine. 

It does help if they’re a bigger company that maybe already has a footprint in the country or the place that you want to go. So they already have the legal sort of setup. If you’re talking about working for a small organization that only has an office in California. I’ve had people that did want to work abroad and it was a temporary thing. It was totally cool by me. Have at it. 

But if they were going to permanently reside there, we had issues. We didn’t know how to handle some of the legal and compliance stuff. We had to think about how to recreate that relationship with that person. Do they need to continue to be employed? Could they become a contractor? Could they work under someone else’s– It was lots of really creative ways that we could help them handle that based on where they were going, but we just didn’t have any legal way to pay them if they were in England. You have to just sort of work through those complexities. 

The larger the company, the more likely they are to have some of those resources and abilities to do that. They’re probably also the more likely to say, “No” too. 

I say it’s good to have a two-pronged plan, meaning you should be looking for someone who you can work for in that place that you want to be. While at the same time, negotiating that with your current company. So you kind of have a little bit of leverage and you have a backup plan. That company says, “No”, you can still go and work for that other one. If they say, “No, you have to stay here.” “Oh, okay. I already have it in their job.” 

In this market right now, a lot of companies are jumping through hoops to help people stay. All you need is a relocation. It should be pretty good. Especially if you’ve already proved yourself to be a good remote employee, you’re kind of already halfway there. It’s probably figuring out most of the legal compliance stuff is the biggest issue. 

Nora: That’s certainly my understanding that the biggest obstacle from an employer’s perspective is, if you have more than a certain number of employees working at a certain geographic location, then that creates a whole new set of tax liabilities for the company.

Like you say, this is their murky waters, legally, to navigate as an employer. Especially if you’re a smaller company trying to figure out what’s allowed. And who’s where? And what? And why are they living there? Are they just visiting? What’s different? How long can you visit before you’re considered a resident? All of that sort of stuff can be very complicated, which I’m assuming would be one of the reasons why an employer would just go, “No.” 

How to Manage Remote Teams Spread Across the World 

Nora: I’m also wondering, from an employer perspective, do you notice any differences between managing a remote team that is all in the same city, versus across the state, versus across the country, versus across multiple countries and time zones? Are there differences for you as an employer, as a remote team manager, and how you manage those differences? 

Chris: The differences that are universal, are how you work asynchronously? That is an issue. You have to figure that out and be very intentional about, can this person work async? Do they have to work at the same time that everyone else was working at headquarters, or whatever your standard time zone is?

It’s pretty hard, more than five time zones tends to get a little bit sticky. You go six time zones and it starts to become like, people are on the same team. It’s really difficult to manage sometimes. If they need to be collaborative. Now, if they’re doing work that’s independent and they’re just kind of communicating with each other.

I have a research team. They could do their research anytime of the day, anywhere in the world. It doesn’t matter. As long as they’re just keeping up with each other about what they’ve done and what they haven’t done inside our Slack room, they’re fine. 

Customer service, that would be a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Because they would have to work when my clients would typically be calling in. They’re okay with that. Sure. I’m okay with that. If they’re not, and they’re going to try to answer tickets at three o’clock in the morning. Well, that’s not really gonna work. 

It does depend on the job and what’s happening. That is assuming that you’re talking about hiring people who are generally– let’s just say you had a company that you started in Toronto, you guys went remote, and then some of those people from Toronto decided they were going to go live in different parts of the world.

Well, those people are from the same place, speak the same language, have a lot of the same cultural values. That’s very different than a company in Toronto, and now we’re going to go hire people in London, and we’re going to hire people in the Philippines. We’re going to go hire people in Australia. You’ve added in the complexity of totally different values, cultural norms, language. That changes the game too. 

We have to think about what you’re really talking about here. The easiest to me is, “Hey. I’m John.” Who I know because he lives two blocks away. Even though he works remotely has decided he wants to go live in Tanzania for two years. Cool. Go make it happen. We’ll work with you. That’s totally different than me hiring someone in Tanzania and having to figure that out. You have to decide what it is you’re going to do.

Nora: You’ve definitely laid some amazing foundations here for remote work, from an employee and employer perspective. Forms of communication. Ways people can replicate the water cooler in even better ways than what exists in a traditional office environment. What it is to manage and work across time zones, countries and cultures. 

The Remote Work Future is Now

Nora: Do you have, no pressure, any final piece of advice that you would like to impart to people who are remote workers and/or remote employers?

Chris: I would say that remote work is a part of our future. One of the silver linings of COVID was that it probably fast-forwarded us by 25 to 30 years of acceptance. I think it was going to take a really long time to get a generational shift. It was going to take a whole bunch of people retiring and leaving the workforce for remote work to finally have a real stake. Now that we’ve done it, and almost everyone went and practiced it, and realized it was great, or they could handle it, or they could manage it, or it wasn’t that much different.

We fast forwarded really rapidly. Think about how your organization, or how you as a person, can continue to leverage this in a way that is beneficial for the organization and the employee. To have better outcomes going forward. Because for us, it allowed us to grow faster. It allowed us to hire people in places we never could have hired.

It allowed us to afford people we could have never afforded because honestly, a CMO in Kansas does not cost what a CMO costs in Los Angeles. There’s different costs of living. There’s different expectations. A different competitive market. So we could hire different people. It also allowed us to hire people that maybe we would have never hired before.

I mean that in lots of different ways. It helped us be a far more diverse company by expanding who and where we hired from. It allowed us to hire different groups of people that we would have never thought about hiring, that turned out to be fantastic. One example is, we discovered that spouses of enlisted military folks had a very difficult time being employed, or staying employed. If their spouse got redeployed to some other base, or some other country, they would lose their job. Typically, people knew not to hire the spouse of a military person because they knew they’d probably lose them in three months. They do all this training and they would lose them in three months.

We didn’t have that problem. You’re like, “Go. Go wherever you need to go. You can live on a base.” That’s different. Legality wise, that’s different. You’re living on a base. That’s America. That’s considered a part of it. We didn’t have to worry about wherever they were. Go wherever you want to go. As long as it made sense with the time zones for your job. We could hire a lot of incredible people, absolutely brilliant people, just smarter than anyone you’ve ever met. That couldn’t get a job just because of their situation. 

We’ve been able to hire very neuro-diverse people who cannot handle being in an office for long periods of time because of their anxiety. Because of maybe they’re on the autism spectrum. Whatever that may be like. They could not function long-term in a traditional setting. Yet with us, they flourish. They do great because they don’t have to deal with some of the things that are a challenge for them. 

We’ve been able to use this as our superpower. I’m happy to see other companies will be able to use it as their superpower. I’m a little bit worried we’ll lose some of our– it’s nice to have this untapped superpower that no one knows about. Now everyone kind of knows about it. But I think it’s good for society. It’s good for the world. It’s good for people in general, so I’m happy to share it. There’s so much that remote work can give to everyone involved for a lot of jobs. Not all jobs, but a lot of jobs. That can really help us, from a global society standpoint, be better. 

Final Words 

Nora: You are a pioneer in this industry. You are a thought leader in this industry. You are helping people adopt remote work in productive ways around the globe. Thank you for that. Where can people find you?

Chris: They can find me Chris Dyer.com. You’re welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you want to find me there. On all the other social platforms, if you prefer one of those. LinkedIn is probably the area where I do the most talking. On my website, there’s lots of great resources. 

Nora: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I’ll definitely include the links to your website, your social, and of course your book in the show notes or description. So please, everybody have a look for that.

[Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce]

[Chris’s new book: The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits]

Thank you so much, Chris, for joining me today. My name is Nora Dunn. I’m otherwise known as The Professional Hobo, and I will catch you next time.

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