Travelling while working sucks

I have been travelling this last week with my family, and it makes work so hard.

Anyone who hypes up the digital nomad lifestyle, I am convinced, is not serious about running a business.

Travelling while working sucks.

I know I probably sound like a broken record right now, but I keep talking about it because, as a young man starting my business, this was the dream I was sold:

Get your business to $20k a month, chill on the beach.

Now, I never bought into that dream. I love my work, love building my business, training my team, implementing new strategies for my clients and producing content on my YouTube channels. But I wanted to write this in my newsletter to let people know what the reality looks like, at least in my eyes, from someone who has gone through the stages of building a company over 3 years, and how those stages really match up to the dream that was sold to many people who started at the same time as me.

For context, my agency has been doing north of about $120k NZD per month at this point, so I cannot speak to anything beyond that, but I will speak to the current stage and the stages preceding it.

First off: THE WORK NEVER STOPS.

I think a lot of people believe there is this magic number you will hit where you can ease off the gas, chill, travel the world and sip margaritas on the beach. I have tried that, and while I didn’t really enjoy it in the first place, I also noticed an instant decline in my business:

• Calls being missed

• Issues not being addressed

• And most importantly, momentum being lost

I do believe that if your business is not growing or you are not actively investing in it to grow, it is dying. At the stages of business I've been through, that growth almost always comes from the founder. The moment you take your foot off the gas, the sharks start circling, your team starts to lose respect (why should they work hard if you won’t), clients feel the lack of enthusiasm, and other people’s strategies become more effective.

The dream of making XYZ money and chilling is not achievable until you have a bigger business than mine. It certainly doesn’t happen at $20k per month, I will say that.

You need to be constantly grafting, hustling and trying to get new work, or building systems that help you get that work in the first place (mine was YouTube).

If you are not incrementally improving day by day, and working at doing so, the competition will.

Secondly: Your strategies need to change.

I am constantly adjusting the strategies we use for our clients across the board, and nothing makes me happier than when I audit an account and see email automations, for example, that were built on knowledge from 2020.

The way tech is moving, things are changing daily. You can’t simply learn something and then build systems around it, hoping it will work month in and month out, years into the future. I know how it happens too: some agency owner learned a way to do something that worked years back, built a system, trained their team on it, and then was too lazy to adjust it when the market changed.

Then guess what happens?

You get someone like me or someone from my team who goes into an account, audits it and gets the work, because our systems and processes are not only better, but current.

I say these two things to illustrate that you cannot do this while trying to pursue the digital nomad lifestyle, at least not in the agency space.

It does not add up.

To grow and survive, you need to work.

Now, I know some people are able to strike some balance here; they are able to generate a bit of income, normally sub-$10k per month, and still travel the world. But at the same time, I see these people constantly fretting over money, worrying about losing a client because that will literally be 50 percent of their income, and struggling to retain good staff because the staff they can afford are part-time.

Clients know this too. They know that quality work comes from those who work.

To me, this is more of a headache than having to work hard, and if that isn’t the case, it would cloud all the benefits of living on the beach working 10 hours a week while not knowing if my copywriter is alive or dead because I can’t afford to pay them full time and they only respond to Slack messages on Tuesdays at 11:48 pm after a bender.

Anyway, just my two cents on the dream of digital nomading while building a business.

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