Welcome back!
Hey what's up everyone?! After a few days off, I'm back with additional perspective; this time on working from home vs while traveling.
You are now reading my blog series "Life of a Liberty Entrepreneur" and this is part 4 "Building Freedom While on the Road."
If you've read parts ONE, TWO and THREE, then you know that I've decided to travel the world for 12-months. The trip takes me to 12 cities (all for 1-month each) and I travel in a group of 50 people. We are like a roaming, nomadic mob.
While traveling, I'm actively building my own business called Liberty Virtual Assistants (aka LVAs). Basically I help digital entrepreneurs hire experienced, affordable staff from the Philippines. It's a real Win/Win situation. (you can listen to this Liberty Entrepreneurs podcast episode introducing it HERE)
I've noticed a few differences between building at home and while adapting to the full-time traveling lifestyle. Let's get started...
Building at Home
Before starting this journey, I had been working from my home office in Denver, CO and was able to very quickly build the foundations for the business including:
- Website and Domain
- Graphics/Icons
- Content/Copy
- Web form for lead gen
- Setting up email accounts
- Hired 3 new Virtual Assistants
- Technical
- Client Services (new and current client-facing support team)
- Recruitment (VA-facing support team)
- Incorporated as an LLC (very annoying, can I just a DAO now??)
- Setup financials
- Business fiat bank acct at Wells Fargo
- Business PayPal acct
- Business Bitpay acct (yes, you can pay your VA in Bitcoin and we convert to Filipino Pesos)
- Bitwage (payroll service)
- Zoho small business platforms/systems
- Zoho CRM
- Zoho Desk
- Zoho Campaigns (for nurture email automatons)
- Created my first "opt-in giveaway" for lead gen called "Top 27 Tasks to Delegate to a Virtual Assistant"
- ...and countless little stuff that seems to never end
While I had previous experience building Euro Pacific Bank (read part 3 for more info on this) I was now on my own. No co-founder, CTO, CEO, etc. Just me. All decisions would be mine and so would all mistakes and missteps.
That didn't phase me. I had time to build and was super focused and motivated. This was it, I was building my first REAL business that had a very well defined revenue model. A monthly subscription combined with initial VA recruitment and interview assistance. It wasn't guess work because of the few ppl I told about the project, several already wanted to hire a Liberty Virtual Assistant! I call this purposeful entrepreneurship where you build because there's a need, not because you just want to build (sounds like a future post).
Building While Traveling
So now I'm building and traveling at the same time which has introduced a whole new set of complications.
Remember, I'm traveling around the world with 50 random people. Before the program started, I only had Facebook to learn about my fellow "Remotes" before we met in real life.
We all applied to and were accepted by a company called RemoteYear.com. Basically they organize the entire trip and help with:
- All travel to/from "host" cities
- Furnished apartment
- Setup utilities (power, water and wifi in every apt)
- Close proximity to a high-speed co-working space (super important)
- Community events, dinners, parties, etc
- Various "tracks" to visit and see different parts of the city
- Countless helpful day-to-day things like finding bicycles or recommending a restaurant or bar
- Local team members in all cities who live there and speak the local language!
While this is really awesome, all of the additional community definitely hampers my entrepreneurial focus and effectiveness.
First, I now work mainly in a co-working space where everyone knows my name and so basic stuff about me. Conversation can appear easily and quickly which of course can really damage focus.
Also, around 6pm every evening at least 10 people are ready to go out for dinner and drinks. Since it doesn't get dark until ~11pm this means long nights and typically late mornings. Hard to build daily momentum when starting work at noon or later.
The food situation is kind of difficult too. To my surprise, almost every single restaurant on the beach mainly just serves pizza, burgers and alcohol at lunch. You can find a few decent wraps, but the menu is quite basic.
I haven't been very disciplined with exercise and movement yet and def miss the structured yoga classes all so common in Denver.
I will say that having the constant perspective of "non-crypto" people has re-opened my eyes to how big the world is and given me a lot of areas to be curious about. My mind is going crazy with the types of services I could build to satisfy the growing curiosity from "normal people" about Bitcoin, crypto-currencies and blockchains.
Continuing to Build Freedom
All this said, it's just the life of an Liberty Entrepreneur. Craziness happens in everyday life as well as in business. The ability to adapt, stay patient and turn obstacles in to opportunities has not left me. In fact, the newly challenging experiences traveling the world while building my dream will only strengthen me and help me succeed.
Building Freedom is not easy. Being able to add enough value in society to support myself financially has changed my life. I no longer sell my time to someone else and thoroughly enjoy improving the lives of both of my clients, the digital entrepreneur and the virtual assistant.
So, here we are again...
- How are you building your personal freedom?
- What do you know that most other people don't?
- Where can you add value to society?
- How can you help me?
- How can I help you?
Leave it in the comments!
If you enjoy this blog series, please share, up-vote, follow and comment!
Want to learn anything specifically about me, my trip or my perspective? Just ask!
Until next time, keep building freedom!
Signing off from beautiful Split, Croatia!
In Liberty,
Ashe
Love this. In the next 6months I wanna start doing my own traveling — more in the US. like hitting up various cool cities that I’ve always wanted to visit and meeting…
but at the same time, i KNOW my discipline would take a huge hit — health / work structure … i could see it easily flying out the window for a minute.
I think it’s cool that you get the see new perspectives on the world tho, and find other things to build to solve problems :)
Over the next 12 months I’d love to hear more about how you navigate the “Explore new places vs Find a good Work flow” challenge.
glad you enjoyed the post @devanianjali!
I always wanted a travelling job! Instead i'm working in a cubicle writing code. It's not all that bad but travelling is amazing, and making money while travelling is the dream!! I love your post!! :) Thank you for sharing!! Upvoted!! :) Do check some of my work if possible :) Thanks :) Have a great day!!
thx for commenting! What type of programmer are you? There are a lot of travelling coders in our group.
I write java code. :)
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Good afternoon !
I always wanted to travel, and if I can still earn money, it's wonderful! I will try to realize my dream, thank you for your support!