Luis:
Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of the Distant Jaw podcast. I am Luis, your host in this podcast that’s all about building and leading awesome remote teams. My guest today is Mark Phillips. Mark is the founder of Nomad Stays. Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark:
Lewis, thank you very much for having me. It’s great to be here. You’ve got a great following and a great community around you. I’m looking forward to sharing some stories and hearing some feedback from them eventually.
Luis:
Yeah, that will be lovely. It’s a pleasure having you and let’s jump right in to talking about you and remote work. Right?
Mark:
Sure.
Luis:
When was your first contact with remote work and how has remote work shaped your career since?
Mark:
That’s a really interesting one. Let me go back. So I worked for Apple many years ago and was in the early ninety s and was going through one of those shrinkage events that happens to tech companies every now and then. And I saw that it was likely that I was going to be let go. Sure enough, it happened and I used that opportunity to create my first business, which was, as you can hear my accent, I’m Australian. So I took this opportunity to create an outback travel company. And so I was on the road taking largely American and European guests around the outback. And so I sort of started work in the 90s remotely. I had a laptop. We didn’t have the internet as we know it today. The World Wide Web wasn’t around, but there were bulletin boards and things like that. So that was my first engagement and then I guess ran that for a number of years and ended up going back into tech and working for Microsoft. Just after Microsoft, I went back working for myself and again I was working remotely. I was plugged in around the world. I was already a big traveler. And so it went from working from home to working while on travels and holidays. And then probably the big jump, we changed the houses, changed states a couple of times, but about 2015, my partner and I decided we would pack up, let everything go, and jump in a van and start traveling permanently. So we are in year number nine of traveling full time.
Luis:
Nice. And did this travel begin traveling for nine years? Does it match when you started your Nomad Stays? Because that seems like a long time ago. Nomad Stays just from the name. I was looking at the company profile earlier, but I forget when was the founding year? But Nomad Stays is a very modern name, right?
Mark:
It is, yes. The business is three years old. Okay. And we created it to solve our own problem. We were traveling full time and then we had to iron clothes, we had to jump on planes, we had to do business in other states, other countries, occasionally, and we needed somewhere that we could stay longer without paying tourist prices for internet. And a lot of the leisure tourist places in the world not really designed for that sort of thing, but a number of them were and they had empty rooms. And we tested this out in Australia. We said to a few of these properties and said, hey, why don’t you give us a great price and we’ll commit to a couple of weeks or a month. Now, the overnight rate might be lower than what you traditionally get, but we’re giving you two weeks or one month worth of booking so your invoicing is much larger. And another number of these properties did and sure enough, they started not only diversifying their risk profile and increasing their additional market, but they made more money. They said, Actually, this works for us. So we turned that trial into a business. At that time, Airbnb didn’t have internet, you had to make requests you couldn’t book instantly, there were no working areas, none of that sort of stuff. So we created all of that and became the innovators to this nomad friendly business. Now, as we know, wonderful COVID-19 thing popped up and it had such a long term effect that it created a big mass movement into remote work. A lot more people left, corporate life went contracting. Hybrid work from people working around the world suddenly became normal. And so our market, which we profiled about 3 million people in the world, suddenly grew to whatever it is today. 50 plus million people. We’ve been riding the waves of that around the difficulty crossing borders that COVID.
Luis:
Brought with that’s so interesting and fun because most people that I’ve talked, I guess we wouldn’t call it hospitality industry, but I guess sort of lie, right? They said that COVID nearly ruined them. So interesting to see someone that’s thriving. Right. Very positive mind shift. Right.
Mark:
I think part of it comes with age and having been in the travel industry a long time, there has been a number of shocks that the industry goes through periodically. We know they’re not long term. What happened with us is that we applied for a visa to come to Europe. We got the French visa, it’s the startup visa, took a while for the French to organize the paperwork and so we just arrived in the town where we were being sponsored into and 2 hours later we got locked down with COVID We had been open six weeks at that point in time, so our bookings had stopped. We’d seen from the launch business going up and then stopping. We knew COVID was going to be big and suddenly we’re locked down in a foreign country. We’d booked for a week and now couldn’t leave. And so we said, all right, this thing’s going to last for a while. If it’s as big as what everybody says, it’s probably going to be like the Spanish flu after World War I. It’s probably going to go for a couple of years. We can keep building this in the background without spending a lot of money while the market gets ready to return once once travel became easier. So we just knuckled down, started building, modifying, trying and living off our savings. It’s our own investment that we put into this. And sure enough, as different countries allowed travel to begin again, we started picking up transactions again, we started doing bookings again, and the demand continues to grow, and we pretty much bootstrapped this into the 71 countries we’re in today.
Luis:
Nice. That’s actually a great service. I am going to recommend you to.
Mark:
People because thank you.
Luis:
Look, I get people all the time. I live in Portugal, right? And I live in Portugal near the beach, which is very touristy, and I get a lot of people complaining, look, Louis, I want to go to Portugal. Seems like a lovely country, but the prices are insane, right? Because yes, it’s like you say, it’s touristy prices. Lisbon and the beach areas, they are dominated by rooms that cost, like here in my region, it’s like $500 a week. $500 a week is a lot for many people.
Mark:
So this comes and goes. We were in Portugal. We actually got invited out to Madeira there about 18 months ago.
Luis:
Gonzalez thing, right?
Mark:
No, actually, it was the startup madeira has an incubator program, and they did a digital nomad thing based on the results that Gonzalez had created during the Pandemic, that Nomads were the thing that kept Madeira’s industry going. So the government doubled down. They brought about a dozen companies in from a whole lot of countries and and ran this accelerator program. So we we traveled through to that, jumped on the plane, went down there. But here we go. 18 months ago, we were renting out apartments there in Lisbon for €500 for the month. For the month. Web Summit was again about 15 months ago. We were still paying only 500, 600 a month in Lisbon. Then a couple of months later, it went through the roof. We couldn’t get anything under about 1800, 900 at wholesale prices.
Luis:
No, it was still great, man. Look, 18 months. 18 months ago when you got apartment in Lisbon, right? 500 a month. Correct. Look, my sister was living in Lisbon 18 months ago. She was paying 700 a month, and it’s a hole. I don’t think you would be able to rent her apartment because that does not look good on photo.
Mark:
Well, again, being part of the industry and having access to lots of customers, and we’ve got four, four and a half thousand members in our network now. We get access to wholesale rates, and we got access to new properties that are coming on the market, all of that sort of thing. So it’s a little bit different than if you’re just starting out.
Luis:
Yeah, I should tell my sister to just become a digital Nova then. It work with you guys. Right? Nice. That is interesting. Tell me a bit more about the inner workings, the setup of the company. So I assume that your partner is with you. So is it a bit of a hybrid model where you and your partner work together? Right. And then you probably outsource the rest?
Mark:
Or do you have that’s exactly right? So we’re definitely not typical. I have not been with my partner now for four months. She has been back in Australia doing some family things and she’s now in India having a holiday and building up some of our Indian properties. And she’ll be flying back to Europe next week.
Luis:
So it’s really remote, right?
Mark:
It is fully remote. I’m in Slovakia today, myself and our dog. We travel with our dog and we’re in Slovakia. We’re a resident in France. We have been to about 20 countries in the last year. And yeah, sometimes we do business. I was at an international travel show in Belgrade a couple of weeks ago doing some stuff down there. I’ve just been meeting some people here in Slovakia. So, yes, we have a technical headquarters. The company is now headquartered in the United States and that’s principally to be ready for a capital raise from hopefully rich investors. We have subsidiaries in three or four other countries around the place. We do use a lot of outsources and contractors. Typically the team runs between five and ten, depending on what’s going on. And usually almost everybody is from a different country. We take a lot of interns, for instance. So interns from UK, India, Pakistan, Ghana, Australia, Germany.
Luis:
Big fan of that approach as well. But I usually get my marketing teams with a lot of interns. Right. So that’s definitely very cool and interesting. So how do you keep all these people on the same page? What does your virtual office look like?
Mark:
So we do daily stand ups with.
Luis:
People across all that from US to India.
Mark:
Yes, it’s quite interesting. So Indian and Southeast Asian model, they’re very used to modifying their lifestyles around their clients time zone. So they will work very late in the night to be able to work US. Employers or in our case, European headquarters. So that’s very good. Europe is a lot easier. Europe and Africa, we’ve got the same time zone late in the day. We can bring in the East Coast and the United States, where we have a team, usually some people and some advisors and some places get hard. Not a lot of crossover with Australia. New Zealand at the moment, west coast of the US. Is pretty difficult. But two thirds of the world is pretty accessible on a daily basis.
Luis:
Yeah. So what do those stand ups look like? Is it standard scrum or do you have your own thing?
Mark:
Well, we literally jump on a video team meeting and Linda and I, our job is to help people do their jobs. So we’re asking what’s getting in the way, what are you discovering, what’s new, what do you need help with, what have you been doing recently? Let everybody else know. And so literally it’s a speed sharing episode where they get to highlight if they need some extra work, which we take offline and do. That intensely nice. That also builds camaraderie. It’s not all business. We’re talking about what everyone’s up to on the weekends and what movies they’ve been unseen and all of that. So it’s much more of a friendly, almost family like atmosphere. Got it.
Luis:
So this is what? About 1 hour, 30 minutes per day?
Mark:
30 minutes max. We tried 15 minutes but we do 30s just as the team comes and goes. Sometimes tech gets in the way.
Luis:
And you said that depending on time you could have as much as 15 people. So 15 people in 15 minutes is a bit that’s it, right?
Mark:
So that we use Slack as a general communication tool. We have our own system, obviously. We’re a travel tech company. We’ve got a purpose built platform that we have created. So a lot of the information is kept within our databases and on our own screens. And then we use all sorts of other tools to assist depending on what’s going on. Corporate WhatsApp we’ve got, CRM systems, we use Trello, ease of use. Again, as we use more and more contractors and freelancers, we tend to choose easy tools that they’re familiar with so that there’s not as much time that they take to come up to speed course.
Luis:
And what’s your onboarding? I find that a lot of people come to me saying that one of the key challenges working with outsourcers and freelancers is the onboarding, right? And some people are reluctant to invest too much time and effort into onboarding someone like that versus someone that they are hiring. I personally don’t believe in that philosophy because I’ve seen many a freelancer eventually become a retainer and then become part of a company. So I think that is always time well spent. But this is where we are, right? People find it a bit more challenging to onboard freelancers and outsourcers. So how do you usually do it?
Mark:
Do you have any this is one of the critical aspects. So we’ve got some freelancers that have been with us for three years. They’re part of the family, there’s no doubt about that. Usually we spend more time on recruiting, we’ll spend time finding the right person. We’re looking for an entrepreneurial spirit, not an employee spirit or mindset. And you get that from language and writing and emails and all that sort of thing. So a startup needs entrepreneurs, it doesn’t need employees. So we cut out a lot of the employees we start them with. We have an onboarding process but we expect people pretty much to self study that maybe one or two meetings and be ready within two days and ready just for their job just in time. We usually start them with small tasks in small areas and see how they go and as they master that in the company, they grow and grow and grow. We run a large internal wiki with answers as well as a growing external one for our partners and suppliers. So every time we need to capture some knowledge, we write it down so the next person has got access to it. Nice. So it’s all just in time learning in effect.
Luis:
Yeah. No, I like that. So what about the recruitment process? I’m a big fan of remote first recruitment. I think that there are a lot of people out there that have splendid qualifications and are no doubt fantastic at their job, but they’re not great at specifically working remotely right. I agree to filter for that as well as the more standard skills. What do you do in that direction?
Mark:
So it’s tricky. We did an advert a couple of months ago, LinkedIn I think we had 283 applications which we whittled down to ten candidates, largely using algorithms without a lot of personal time invested. So there’s some great tools in LinkedIn for that. First of all, we’re needing people that have experience as a freelancer, one group of people. So if you say you’re a freelancer, show us that you’re actually doing it and you’re not just trying to pick up a side gig on the back of employment somewhere else, because those people don’t have enough invested to deliver on time. They don’t have enough discipline. As a general rule, everybody’s different. But we’ve had a lot of failures at that second job sort of category.
Luis:
It’s hard. We are going to do jobs, right?
Mark:
It is sometimes push comes to shove and something needs to give and like we’re waiting for something, we don’t have a week to wait for it, we need it in two or three days. Exactly. So we actually have better success with interns. People that are in university, they’re getting ready to do career placement, they need to do job experience and again, we’re looking for people that go beyond so they have usually got some sort of extracurricular activity they’ve members of clubs or sports or something like this. They get involved in debating or chess or the tennis players, or they’re showing some level of initiative, so they tend to get through to the next round. But we do several rounds and we often find that somebody’s presented beautifully the first time. We give them a bit of a test and maybe they don’t turn up. The second time, maybe they don’t do the test. The numbers of second interviews of people just not even turning up is actually phenomenal considering the amount of work and money that’s available for these people to pick up. So recruitment is a challenge with remotely it’s constantly changing but the real element is that we’re looking for initiative, drive and self determination.
Luis:
Yeah. What do you think are some good markers for those qualities?
Mark:
As I mentioned before, the extracurricular activities is great because it shows some level of personal pride, maybe trying to achieve something beyond what the job is. Charity work is another one we’re looking for. How have you volunteered? How have you contributed to making the world better? So that’s part of it. Have you worked as an entrepreneur? Have you started a business? And doesn’t matter whether it’s failed or been successful, but have you gone to that next level where you’ve had to juggle so many different things at the same point in time? That’s really important for startups because things change quite a lot. Obviously, you need to understand technology. There’s a level of English language that we use. We’re expecting a certain standard of understandability that the rest of the team can get in a verbal sense, not just a written sense. And then there’s a lot of gut feel. We drill down a lot, usually on people. People as a person. What are your aspirations?
Luis:
Where are you going?
Mark:
What are you trying to do? And there’s no right or wrong answers here. We’re just trying to figure out who you are. So we spend more time on that than whether they’ve got technical skills. Because learning technical skills can actually be quite easy.
Luis:
Yeah. Especially in the age of the internet. Right. And these days, I find that if you’re committed to what you want to do, you should be able to pick up a new skill within a couple of weeks and become really good at that skill within three to six months. Right. Really world class. Right. If you’re able to focus on something for six months with the Internet of your fingertips, you should be able to become world class at it. Right? That’s my feeling.
Mark:
So we ask people, show us what you’ve done. Show us what you’ve done at school, at university. Show us your projects. Show us winning or losing a competition. Show us the pictures, all that sort of stuff. So proof points is one of the things that we look very carefully for now. We didn’t initially, we were taking people on face value, but we found that a lot of people are very good at pitching but not necessarily good at delivering. Today proof points become more important in our valuation process.
Luis:
So what kind of test would you give someone that you’re considering hiring?
Mark:
It depends on the job. So we might give a high school student that might be doing an internship. We might say, okay, your job is to go through this part of the website, or maybe it’s the help center and give a review. Spend a couple of hours reviewing it and tell us what’s wrong with it and tell us what you would like to see. And tomorrow you’ve got to give us that answer in about ten minutes. So we’ll often give them a test that they only have a short period of time to think about. They’re going to have to report on it tomorrow or the next day, not in a week or two. We won’t necessarily write it down. So what we’re doing is we’re testing people’s understanding, picking up of the concept, whether they can understand this strange Aussie accent a bit. We’re just trying to sort of get a feel for how they’re going to operate, whether they ask questions, whether they define things or not, just how does this person operate. So that’s all part of getting a feel for them as they come on. So we take on interns every three months. So we’re typically turning this over every three months. One, we get to meet some great people. Secondly, we get to hold onto them occasionally. Most of them go and get jobs before we full time jobs somewhere else based on our experience, unfortunately. But it’s a good model for us. We found it’s really helped skill young people, usually younger people. And also we get some great results from things that we just don’t know the answers of. That’s new what’s changing in our own buzz.
Luis:
No, it’s a great model. Right. Someone with the full university education thing. I sometimes felt that I spent way too much time in classes and I learned way too much after I left university, started getting my hands on. So I’m a big fan of internships. We used to call them apprenticeships. Right. I’m a huge fan of it. I wish I had had more of that right. Instead of my more classical education. So I definitely try to make that happen for other people. I do love it. I want to take a big shift in the conversation now because I have a note here. I flagged something that you talked before about you being there with your dog.
Mark:
Yes.
Luis:
So what are the top tips for digital nomading with pets? Because I have three cats and lemme.
Mark:
Okay.
Luis:
I love them, but they are a big issue when it comes to doing to making travel plans.
Mark:
Okay. So by its nature, being a digital nomad or remote worker means you’ve got to become a geo hacker. You’ve got a geo arbitrage. You’ve got to find the places nomad capitalists talk about that treat you the most. They’ll treat you the best. So in terms of dog travel or pet travel, europe is actually really quite easy. It’s very clear rules, they are quite standard across most of the countries in Europe. Occasionally you will have to bring out the dog’s passport and show it to some border people as you’re crossing borders. The reason that I’m calling today from Slovakia and not from India is because we discovered that India doesn’t allow you to travel with pets very easily. You have to be an employee of Indian company and have a two year minimum stay there with your pet. Wow, that is very strict. And so it was a bit of a shame. We discovered this after Linda had gone over there. But we change our minds and we choose somewhere else. But pet cages. We travel with a box. We put our dog on the plane pretty regularly. We have our own car. We often travels in the car as well, and he loves travel. And then we’re always looking for pet friendly places to stay. For instance, when we’re looking around for properties to stay that we don’t even have our own listings, we’re using the other leisure platforms, the tourist platforms, like booking and a little bit of verbo. Can’t really use airbnb because they don’t do pets. But we use other platforms to find places that have got what we need to stay. Usually platforms are a little bit faster than doing it individually through Facebook groups and things like that. But the the house I’ve got rented here was in central Slovakia. It’s not any not on any maps, it’s just we have a business colleague down the road. We found that on a Facebook group. So we’re hacking all of those techniques ourselves as we build up our own inventory.
Luis:
Are there any good resources out there or are you just power googling all this stuff?
Mark:
No, you do end up focusing on certain players in certain areas and avoiding some players. What we find is that the amateur social platforms, the Facebook, the Twitters in France, the labor cars, or the gum trees in the UK, they’re not very good filters of places. There’s a lot of scammers there. We’ve nearly fallen for a couple of ourselves. So we tend to deal with more professional platforms which meet the legal, getting tighter all the time. And then we negotiate for longer stays. So we might test a place for a few days and then say, actually this is quite good. Do you mind if we talk about renting it for a month or two? And then we’ll do that private negotiation. So use whatever country’s platform that gets you there the first and then negotiate privately. And that’s essentially what we do. At nomad stage is we do that negotiation ahead of time for you. So you don’t have to do that marking round yourself.
Luis:
Got it. Okay, so I want to, again, shift gears in the conversation. Let’s go for some rapid fire questions. The answers don’t have to be rapid fire. You can expand as much as you like.
Mark:
That’s fine.
Luis:
Since you travel a lot, right, you probably travel light. So what was the best purchase for your work life, right, for your work life productivity or work life balance or any metric that you care about in the past six months?
Mark:
I would have to say it’s the seating cushion that we travel with. Sitting cushion. It’s a cushion because, again, leisure properties which dominate the world, they’re not designed for people to be sitting down and working all day in the apartment or in the house. So the chairs often are very uncomfortable. So we travel with cushions that are designed to these are sitting down and working away. I’m sitting on one right now.
Luis:
Any specific brand that you’d care to recommend to the listeners?
Mark:
No. Again. Sometimes you have to google Travel Cushion. Yeah, well, the ones we’ve got tend to be reasonably hard. They have Aeration to give a bit of air movement, keep you a little bit cooler sometimes. Yeah, it’s a travel. They’re sitting cushions, and sometimes you got to throw them in the bin because you’ve got too much weight when you’re getting on an expensive flight and whatever. So you buy another one at the other end, sadly.
Luis:
Got it. So I assume that you’ve lost some favorite sitting cushions like that. Yeah.
Mark:
You become less attached to your goods as you become a nomad, it’s much more about the experiences. And there are shops everywhere in the world, so you can always buy something to replace someone you’ve lost.
Luis:
What are the three things that you would never throw away, regardless of weight restrictions?
Mark:
Obviously, the computer, the laptop is mandatory for working. Um, everybody’s got different approaches, so so I like a backpack that can be thrown around easily. My wife prefers a travel bag. The chicken roll roll out, so that’s different. We always travel with the dog. We wouldn’t leave the dog behind. He’s just part of the family. That would be very cool. Powerpoints. Power adapters. So you turn up a new country, you’ve got one adapter for the local socket, and then you’ve got your normal power board that you plug all your devices into. That’s probably one of the more useful things. Pocket knives are actually really handy to get all sorts of things done, so always throw the pocket knife in there, cork screws, you want to open a bottle of wine sometimes. If you’ve had a bad day traveling, they can be hard to find.
Luis:
I’m terribly uneducated on this. I love my pocket knives at home, but I never bring them travel because I always feel they give me a hard time at the airport in the hand luggage. Yeah.
Mark:
But if you’re checking luggage so if.
Luis:
You’Re carrying a 15K baggage, I’m a big fan. Right. This is my personal tip, right?
Mark:
Really?
Luis:
Because I always go to countries that are a bit cheaper, considerably cheaper than where I live. I never bring check in luggage. Right. I bring the bare minimum and then I buy in the place. Right. And then when I go away of the place, I go to a nice giveaway trift shop and I give it all away to whoever needs.
Mark:
Okay. Are you traveling a month at a time?
Luis:
Yeah, maximum one month. Right. I’ve never been traveling for more than one month. My sweet spot is three weeks. Right. So it’s definitely less than what you do.
Mark:
So hand luggage is often limited to about 7 kg these days. And your laptop. Is probably going to pull in three. Now, some airlines allow that as separate to your seven. Others, it’s in the seven. So you can waste a lot of your life trying to read all these rules and regs that different airlines have. So we always tend to actually always have one check bag as a general rule.
Luis:
Yeah. It’s worth the hassle, I imagine. Right. Especially if you’re going for more extended periods of time. And of course, you have an extra family member with you that can’t carry any bags. Right.
Mark:
He’s got his own bag.
Luis:
Really?
Mark:
Dog backpack. And in that dog backpack, he’s got his papers and his veterinary activities. He’s got his shoes, his chains, his leads. Nice. Straps over his back. And then he fits inside a travel crate with his own cushion. Cool. He’s actually better off than most of us.
Luis:
Nice. So you have a team of varying size, but relatively small.
Mark:
Yes.
Luis:
If you had to choose one thing to give all of them and you had to get in bulk right. You can’t give money or a gift card or another money equivalent. Right. You had to buy one thing 15 times, what would you give them?
Mark:
I would probably give a book that was inspirational. I’ve been fortunate to meet some amazing people that don’t follow the standard rules of society. They’ve done amazing things in their life and meet them by random. And you just get so inspired with what people have done in their lives and not necessarily be on television or famous or anything, but just to enjoy themselves and to push themselves and to create a life with more opportunities. Digital Nomads is all about grabbing this opportunity. You’ve got this chance for you’re lucky, at least a couple of years, if you’re longer. It’s a lifetime to go out and explore the world, meet heaps of other people and learn about their culture and what they’ve done. So that opportunity is something special. And to trigger that optimism and energy is what I would give everybody in the team.
Luis:
So is there a book for that?
Mark:
Well, one of my favorite books is called Spark Your Dream. I have an autograph copy. This was your dream? Yeah. Came out of Argentina. Couple bought a 1930s car probably 20 years ago, with a dream of driving from Born, his Ari’s up to the top of Alaska. And of course, nothing went to plan. They ran out of money within six months. And basically how they hacked themselves into this life of getting things done and taking advantage of so much love and help that other people gave them around the world as they chased their dream. The family Zap are still traveling. I was lucky to meet them in Australia many years ago, and they now I think they’ve got four or five kids and they’re still in this 1930s old American machine. Wow.
Luis:
Incredible. Nice story. Have you read Vagabonding by Ralph Potts?
Mark:
Only parts of it. I’ve not read the whole thing.
Luis:
I read that one right. It’s very interesting. But I’m definitely going to have to pick up the one you recommended. Can you say the others name again, please?
Mark:
Yes, the Zap family Z-A-P family Zap from bornizaris in Argentina. Spark your dream. Is that book? They’ve got a page on Facebook and a website and so forth.
Luis:
Got it. Thank you so much.
Mark:
Very inspirational.
Luis:
Yeah. All right, so final question, right? Obviously you’re all about spreading this message about digital nominism and remote work, et cetera. Let’s say that you’re hosting a dinner where the top people from very influential companies, tech companies, you know, tech companies, right, from all around the world are gathering for the dinner. And you, as the host, because you’re hosting the dinner in a Chinese restaurant, get to pick the message that goes inside the fortune cookies.
Mark:
Why is the message, oh, my message is have a go. Have a go, have a go. Experiment, test. Don’t overthink it. Just have a go and see where it takes you. You might find that you pick up some amazing hires, company directors, hacks ideas, business. You just don’t know where it’s going to take when you start delving into people’s passions and mindsets and different people’s cultures. It’s just so empowering to not have to follow a linear line to solve problems or grow a business.
Luis:
Got it. I think that’s a lovely place to end. Thank you so much.
Mark:
Wow. Thank you.
Luis:
Look, Mark, where can people learn more about you? Where can people learn more about your company and continue the conversation with you?
Mark:
Certainly. So Nomadstays.com is the easiest place to find us. A little bit of a summary about Linda and I there and the adventures and things that we have done in our lives. It’s not all about business. And we’re on social, Twitter, Facebook, Insta, all around the place. And you can always follow our dog, whose name is Jacques Dingo, who runs his own social media on occasion.
Luis:
So awesome. Okay. Thank you so much for being a guest.
Mark:
This was an absolute pleasure, luis, thank you so much.
Luis:
It was my pleasure, and thank you for listening, ladies and gentlemen, to the Distant Job podcast.
Luis:
And so we close another episode of the Distant Job podcast, and if you enjoyed the episode, please, you can help us out by sharing it on social media. That would be great. It’s how we reach more listeners, and the more listeners we have, the more awesome guests I can get in touch and convince to participate in these conversations that are a joy to have for me, and I hope they’re a joy for you to listen to as well. You can also help a lot leaving reviews on itunes or your podcast syndication service of choice. Reviews are surprisingly helpful in helping the podcast get to more listeners. Now, another thing that you might want to do is go to Distantjob.com Blog podcast, click on your favorite episode, any episode, really. And subscribe by subscribing you will get notification whenever a new episode is up and whenever we get the transcripts of the episode up, so you can actually peruse the conversations in text form. And of course, if you need to find a great employee for your team, a great remote employee, you should take the whole world into consideration and not just look to hire locally, not just look to hire in your country. Look around the whole world. Because that’s the talent pool that contains the best talent. And to help you with that, again, Distantjob.com is the perfect place to start. You will tell us who we need, and we will make sure that you get the best possible candidate 40% faster than the industry standard. And with that, I bid you adieu. See you next week on the next Episode this Job Podcast.
