The Beauty of Travel and the Reality of Working Remotely
By Louise Smyth – Director of Livin Residential Lettings Ltd
Hi, I ‘m Louise and I am a Director of our business Livin Residential Lettings and I own a property portfolio with my husband Jamie.
Jamie started our business 10 years ago with my support and I joined him full time to run the business not too long afterwards.
I have always had a passion for travel and seeing the world but never had the desire to take a Gap year after University or just pack up and go for an extended period. I have always opted for the more consistent, considered approach in keeping with my personality, by taking holidays every year, often shorter and more frequent trips, visiting new places, seeing and trying new things.
I also have a keen interest in Photography and have taken various courses and evening classes to expand my knowledge. I am always the person taking lots of photos at family events, days out and lagging behind on holidays because I’m too busy snapping!
In 2008, my sister and family emigrated to New Zealand and a couple of years later, my cousin to Australia and suddenly I was presented with the opportunity to indulge my travel and photography interests and visit the other side of the world. This offered me the possibility of a whole new lifestyle because after my first couple of trips to New Zealand and my first (and only so far!) trip to Australia as a local authority employee, I was suddenly making trips whilst working full time for myself, needing to maintain a business whilst travelling and being away from home.
Over the last 5 years in particular, Jamie and I have travelled to many inspiring places all over the world including Europe, New Zealand, USA, Canada and Singapore whilst keeping our business going and the flexibility that the business has afforded us has been amazing.
In reality, running a business whilst travelling is not always what it’s cracked up to be or as simple as it seems. We had visions of organising each day, starting with a couple of hours work to stay on top of key things, continuing to make progress so that we could enjoy the rest of our day guilt and stress free. More often than not, these plans went out of the window, as with many best laid plans, due to other demands on our time for example other family members or other factors such as trips, weather etc..
Our reality of working remotely has been vastly different; no structured work hours, working when required, grabbing 30 minutes whenever possible and working from our laptops wherever necessary, including airports, trains, beaches or even from the boot of our hire car! (see photos) This is far from the ‘ideal’ and you definitely need to be disciplined, however we have come to realise that it actually doesn’t matter to us as long as the work gets done. Who says that working like this is wrong? I believe now that if you really want to travel, you can make it work for you whatever the circumstances.
We have just returned from 6 amazing weeks in New Zealand with my family, a really busy and exciting time and guess what…..? Our business survived perfectly well, as it did last time and the time before that. That is not to say that we never have any issues and challenges because we do but you can only deal with what you can control and actually, we realised that we were dealing with issues in the same way as if we were at home, so what’s the worst that can happen? We do have everything systemised and cloud based now, to make it as efficient as possible but we still have many improvements to add and new technologies are constantly making more things possible.
My intention now is to continue working on the efficiencies in our business so that we can work less and travel even more, or work from abroad for longer periods of the year! I would also like to indulge in some other creative interests of mine and maybe finally get some of my travel photos edited!
Lets make it an amazing 2020.