Paralegal Takes Flight with Remote Work

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

Did you know that the first person credited with the idea of using electronics to work remotely was astronaut Jack Niles? He worked at NASA in the 1970s and called this type of work telecommuting. We have come a long way since then. In today's story, a paralegal turns serial entrepreneur after getting the travel buck. She now lives in Thailand and helps others work remotely.

Now, by the way, being location independent doesn't necessarily mean that you become a full-time traveler and don't have a home at all. The key word there is independent. You may travel a little or a lot, but the point is you aren't tethered to a particular workplace that requires you to be physically present on a continual basis. And once you create that scenario, how much you travel and whether you actually live somewhere or not is up to you. So, as always, it's all about options. It's all about possibilities. It's all about creating freedom for yourself.

So you can do what's important to you. Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. At the end of the episode, I'll also give you three of my favorite tips for anyone hoping to pursue this kind of life for themself. So, stay tuned. All of it is coming right up.

Brittany Bond dreamed of working remotely. Even as a teenager, she was brainstorming ways she could take her future career in law and transform it into something that she could do from anywhere. Her journey accelerated when she graduated college and scored a job as a paralegal in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was there that she began to find ways to make her job accessible wherever she was. She encouraged her law firm to go completely paperless.

Then she nudged two more law firms to do the same thing. Not only was it practical, Brittany had the alternative motivation of making her work that much more location independent. Three years later, she managed to convince her company to let her work in San Diego for a while. If that went well, Brittany would be allowed to work from Costa Rica for another stint of a few months. Long story short, it worked out, and two months later, Brittany was on a plane headed south. She was excited.

The only downside was that her law firm viewed the trip as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would get the travel bug out of her system. But after a few months of surfing and lounging on the Costa Rican beaches, the travel bug was nowhere close to leaving. If Costa Rica was this amazing, Brittany couldn't imagine what the rest of the world had to offer. She came back from the trip with a new goal in mind, to become fully location independent. Soon after returning home, Brittany quit her job in Salt Lake and moved across the country to New York City.

Over the next two years, she scrimped and saved. She worked her day job, and in the morning, on her lunch breaks and at night, she worked on her new project, a travel company to help others who wanted to have location independent jobs. Having been a digital nomad for a few months, Brittany had an idea of what other people in the community would need. She would provide a space for them to work, and she would also plan fun excursions for her clients while they were staying in the area. She found a few partners to help grow the business, and together they decided to call it Wi-Fi Tribe.

Wi-Fi is the one thing absolutely all of her clients needed to do their jobs, and one of the biggest struggles people experience when working remotely. Brittany decided to stay at her conventional job for another six months before she quit. She needed to have enough savings that she wouldn't feel like she had to rely on her side hustle income immediately. She says that in her experience, stress can kill any blossoming idea. Finally, after a lot of homemade meals and frugal living, she had saved up about $10,000.

At that point, she was making close to $2,000 a month from her hustle and reinvesting it back into the business. In 2016, she left her job and hit the road to Europe with Wi-Fi Tribe. That same year, she started two more projects. One was a coding boot camp, and the other was a hip-hop yoga clothing brand. Since then, Brittany has started and ended a number of other location independent side hustles.

She makes the majority of her money from BondWorks, a consultancy where she helps businesses transform traditional jobs into location independent ones. She's also working on a series of courses about the same topic. This approach is less hands-on than her consulting work and has the potential to double or triple her income. Her courses will also free up some of her time, and she plans to use those extra hours to work on her women empowerment initiatives. Last year, Brittany hosted the first Bond Women's Festival in Chiang Mai, Thailand to foster a community centered around entrepreneurship and expression.

Her goal is to keep doing what she loves, see the world, and get paid while she does it. She already has a host of other projects in the wings, including the second Bond Women's Festival, a fashion line for women leaders, and a pop-up co-living space in Chiang Mai. Although staying present and avoiding overworking herself have been struggles, she's found the right balance of work and play by making weekends a sacred time to get away from work and by starting her mornings with journaling, yoga, and meditation. From there, she breaks up her days into 30-minute increments and only takes calls one day a week. Four years ago, Brittany had a goal to live a location-independent life.

By merging the right amount of risk and cautiousness, she was able to test out a series of projects until she found the ones that took off. As she gained experience, she took notice of the needs of her communities and based her new projects off of those needs. Now she's exploring the world with complete freedom, just as she imagined. All right, as promised, here are three top location-independent tips. These things have all come to me through much experience working completely location-independent myself for I have no idea how long now, maybe 15 years, if not longer, which doesn't mean I don't have a home.

Like I said at the top, it just means that I can do my work anywhere. I can travel whenever I want to, and I often do, as you might know if you've been listening for a while. All right, so number one, don't keep anything on your local computer. Use online services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote. It's really easy these days to keep pretty much all of your work online on the so-called cloud, which I always think is a weird phrase, you know, like the cloud.

What does that mean? Anyway, online. I also write using Scrivener. It's a program that I use to work on my books. I also use it to edit the scripts and commentary for this podcast.

So pretty much everything I do is backed up online. It's not like I want to lose my computer or have it stolen or something. But if that happened, it would be more of an annoyance or frustration than a life-changing disaster because all of my work is saved online. All right, number two, plan for things to take longer than you expect when traveling. Most likely, you won't be productive the same number of hours per day as you would in your home environment.

If you are, that's great. Consider it a bonus. The chances are, you know, things are going to take longer. That's just a part of it. Number three, have any conversations about remote work up front with potential employers or clients.

Make it really clear that this is important to you. Be willing to trade off something else to receive the ability to not come into a particular workplace or job site all the time. And you can do this even if you're local. Like even if you're not traveling a lot now, make a habit of working from home or elsewhere. This will get you used to it and it will help your employer and colleagues get used to it as well.

All right, I hope that is helpful to somebody out there. Thank you for listening. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/937. I'll link up everything mentioned in the episode, including Brittany's work.

Thanks, Brittany, and congratulations. Congratulations as well to our listeners who are taking big steps to create their own freedom plans, whether it's through location independence or something else. I am cheering you on every single day. Much more is coming up. Do be sure you're subscribed.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.