It’s been nearly a year since we launched our business Mortified Cow, so to celebrate no anniversary in particular, I thought I’d run through the stuff we now know after lots of trial and error, lots of fist clenches, a fair few tears and an all-encompassing obsession with creating “processes” for every blimmin’ situation.
Let’s get started…
1: The right clients don’t mind
If you’ve got clients who are a bit iffy about Skype calls and constantly enquire as to when you’ll be back for a face-to-face meeting, you won’t be able to change their attitude enough for you both to be satisfied with the end result. They’ll always think the job is inferior because you’re not in the same country as them, which means you won’t get the referrals you deserve – and your client will never be a dream to work for.
There are plenty of people who don’t mind AT ALL that you work from around the world. In fact, many of our clients love the fact that we’re not stuck in an office trying to brainstorm with fellow cubicle dwellers whose only inspiration comes from the magical properties of an after-work pint.
2: Let me clarify… the right clients don’t mind as long as you put their needs first
NEVER schedule a meeting using your timezone rather than theirs.
NEVER use delayed flights or Delhi Belly as an excuse for being late with work.
NEVER say the wifi hotspot at your Bali beach isn’t up to scratch, so is it OK to call them when you’re back at the apartment?
Those things are our problems as digital nomads, and our clients don’t want to think that our lifestyles are leading to inferior or delayed work.
3: Clients are happy to use Skype
We were surprised by just how many clients (even much older ones) were happy to take down our Skype usernames and contact us that way. There was no need to “play normal” by having a Skype inbound number or anything.
4: Ad-hoc client calls would be a no-no even if we were based in a traditional office
Clients are unable to call us whenever they have a question because we don’t have Skype switched on the whole time – and we work different hours from them anyway. But even if we were based in their country and had an office and everything, we still wouldn’t take their ad-hoc calls:
- Sporadic phone calls would interrupt our work and our productivity.
- We wouldn’t be prepared for whatever the client is phoning about, which doesn’t help them or us.
- We’d often be working on a different project at the time, and be in a totally different headspace.
- We’d still probably work different hours from them – even if we were in the same country.
In order for us to do our best work for our clients, we need to have set times for phone call meetings.
It was a relief for us to realise that we wouldn’t change anything even if we did have a landline and a traditional office set-up – it meant there was no reason not to run our business from anywhere.
5: It’s probably easier to have clients who are based in your home country
At least to begin with.
First of all, there’s the “we have so much in common” factor. We’ve found that when our British clients hear our British accents, they immediately feel like we “get” them and understand where they’re coming from – even if we’re on the other side of the world. It makes them feel more at ease that although we’re thousands of miles away, we still have the same reference points and understanding of how they want their business to run.
The second reason is banking. We’ve had some wonderful US-based clients in the past, but when it comes to paying us it’s a nightmare. They ask for things like W9 forms – and it doesn’t matter how many times we say they don’t need one from us because we’re British – they still insist we need one.
When we eventually get over the W9 hurdle, there’s always some other problem to do with transferring the money to our UK bank account. If our client has a finance department, we can guarantee we’ll be toing and froing with them for weeks about something or other.
And then of course, there’s the issue of currency conversion: your bank will always charge you a fee for converting the currency. You could ask your client to take the hit, of course, but then that would bring us back to point #2…
6: You should never respond to a client’s email straight away
Because the moment you don’t, there’s the risk that they’ll think “Oh, they must be on a plane or something. Gee this sucks. I wouldn’t have this problem if I were working with a non-digital nomad.”
The key is to be consistent. We commit to responding within a maximum of 24 hours, but we always try to delay responding by at least an hour – even if we’re sitting at our laptops and working on that particular client’s project at that moment.
It’s not just about the digital nomad factor, of course; it’s also that you shouldn’t be at your client’s beck and call anyway. It creates massive expectations on the part of the client, and soon you’ll find you’re spending far too much time responding to their every email (which become more and more frequent) than actually doing the work.
7: You can only “train” clients in your methods up to a point
In my old job, non-tech-savvy clients would literally mail CDs of photos over to the office because they didn’t know how to send such large files any other way.
And they’d print and sign their agreements with the company, and post them to us.
We don’t have the luxury of a mailbox. (And actually, we’d hate to do things that way anyway.) So we have to insist that everything is done over the internet.
For document-signing we’ve tried very very very hard to insist on HelloSign. But some clients are having none of it. So they print out a document, sign it, then either take a photo or scan and email it back to us.
For photos and images… it’s a process. We try asking for Dropbox-sharing, Ge.tt uploading, YouSendIt… anything. But the vast majority of clients just can’t figure out how to use any of them. So we’ll get photos sent to us one by one over email instead.
At some stage we’ll probably hire a VA purely for the purpose of corresponding with our clients during these early asset-collection stages.
8: There are some godsendy tools out there
(Even if some clients refuse to use them.)
World Time Buddy helps you schedule a meeting across timezones – you can even send a link to the meeting time in both their country and yours.
For communicating via voice or video chat, Skype is hard to beat. But if you want to set up a meeting with multiple parties, Go To Meeting or meetings.io might be your best bet. You might also have situations where it’s useful to be able to share your screen so that you can talk someone through what you’re doing. Screenleap is a great way to do it without needing to install software.
Setting up a meeting normally deterioriates into a “I can do Tuesday but not Thursday” / “Oh, I can only do the morning on Wednesday” back-and-forth that makes you want to kill yourself. Doodle helps you find a time that works for everyone without all the back-and-forth.
Sometimes you need to communicate with someone without worrying about whether you both have compatible software installed. For text-only chat, Cryptocat lets you set up a secure chat room without downloading any software. (For video chat, meetings.io and Go To Meeting work the same way.)
Need to send a client bank details or information that you’d rather not just relay over email? Lockbin is the easiest email encryption service we’ve found yet.
9: It’s not that different from a regular client-facing business
Really it isn’t. Depending on the industry you’re in, you’ll probably still need to pass documents back and forth (and you’ll have just the same grrr moments with version control if they refuse to use Google Docs). And you’ll probably still need to get contracts signed. You’ll still need to arrange calls – possibly conference calls with lots of “stakeholders” who may well be dotted across the company in other offices.
And the fundamentals are identical: you’re solving your client’s problem by providing top-notch work on time.
—
If you run a client-facing business from around the world, do you agree with these points? Would you add to them or change them in any way? Let me know in the comments!
If you’re thinking of running a client-facing business while you travel, do you have any questions about how to make things work? Again, let me know in the comments!