E03: Build Your Business From Anywhere

Hey, what's up everyone? Jim Doyon here, wanted to welcome you to another episode of remote start. This episode has to do with creating your desired lifestyle, or specifically running your business and living your life from anywhere. I feel it's a very fitting episode, as I'm sitting here recording this for my RV in the town of Boulder City, Nevada. This is actually where I grew up and where I still have a lot of friends and family. Not only we’re here to visit family, but we're also using this opportunity to move our items from our old RV into a brand new one we just purchased. I'm excited to share it with you down the road in future episodes. On a side note, if you're in a mountain biking like I am, the next time you come to Vegas, do yourself a favor and take the small half an hour drive to Boulder City and visit Bootleg Canyon. It's a downhill in Enduro playground, and it's an absolute blast. If you don't have a bike, all Mountain cyclery in Boulder City, can rent you an e-bike or a full suspension bike, it's up to you, but either way, get out here, enjoy it, it's awesome. And as always, I want to thank you so much for listening. I'm very excited to be starting this journey with you and the rest of the remote start Nation. Before we get started, I want to remind you that if you haven't listened to the first episode yet, I urge you to do so. On it, I go into detail on who I am and why I started the remote start podcast. I also go into detail on the format and give three takeaways from things I wish I would have done sooner in my business Journey. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, I encourage you to go back and give it a listen, likeall the solo episodes, it's quick and it will be worth your time.

My mission with Remote Start is to help you learn from the successes and mistakes I've made over the past 20 years my entrepreneurial journey. In it, I'll be bringing you actual strategies roadmaps and stories for my diverse group of experts on how to start a business, build a brand and create your desired lifestyle. Each episode, whether I'm interviewing someone or going solo will relate to one of the three areas.And honestly, I feel all three intertwine, but I like to break them down so we can understand how they all work together, so when we put them together, we can scale our business and move to that next stage of growth that we're trying to achieve. So let's get into it.

What does it take to run your business remotely or even move your business to your dream location? Does it mean leaving your clients, does it mean leaving your team, changing your business model? Truthfully they look different for everyone. Let's dig into it.

We've seen a lot of changes, the past couple years and with those we've seen a progression in the ability to work from home or better yet to work from anywhere. It's become more acceptable and a lot more common. In fact, I mean, people every week on the road who left their home to explore the country, some of them work for themselves, others work for other companies, but are still able to work remotely. And a contributing part of that is actually due the pandemic as well as the acceptance of using video conferencing to communicate with friends, staff and clients. It's opened up the opportunity to go remote, to explore the country and to get away. An opportunity to be relieved from the stress of the daily commute and being forced to live close to your place of business.

So remote start Nation, if you're starting a new business and you want to get away from your current town or you're sick and tired of the daily grind associated with having a physical location. What's holding you back from making a change? What's holding you back from going remote or leaving to open another location in the town of your dreams, on the beach, in the mountains in your favorite City, what's holding you back? And not everyone has a luxury to make this change, but there's a large percentage of you business owners out there or soon to be business owners, that could have this freedom, if you make it happen for yourself, but you need to start planning now, start today and get the wheels in motion to setting a departure date.

Back in August of 2020, my wife and I sold our house to leave on a journey that would take us across this country in an RV with our kids. We're still on it. We didn't just get up and leave, it took a lot of planning and for me who has a team, an awesome business partner, as involved in the community, it took time, it took a lot of baby steps to finally pull the trigger and make it happen. And depending on what you do or how involved you are in the day-to-day operations of your business, the difficulty and steps required to make the leap, it'll vary but regardless, you can make that decision and make the changes necessary to move forward in your desired direction, I'm going to say that again in your desired direction. Because in the end, you need to create the lifestyle for yourself that you want to live. And yes, it sounds selfish, but I'm asking you to dig deep, reflect and think about what you desire, what you want, because in the end, if you're happy everyone else around you is going to be happier than they are right now. And that's hard to do, it's hard to sit back, reflect and really think about what you want.And I'm not sitting here saying, “Hey listen to this, you need to leave and move to a different location”, not at all. But if you have thought about it, if you're holding back for a reason, stop, make it happen. And if you haven't started your business yet, if you don't already have a team, an office, a foundation of clients, then your decisions a lot easier.But if you're in a position, like I was, you might have to make some hard decisions, you might have some really hard conversations to have, but in the end, if you have a clear understanding of your goal, you will make the right decisions. For me, I had to change my business model, which took a lot of strategic planning. I didn't have to gate it with my business partner and I had to make sure it would work for him as well. I to roll out a new structure with my staff, make sure they were bought in, and to be honest with you, it didn't work out for everybody and some that were bought in the beginning, as time went on, they realized it wasn't the business model that they wanted, so they moved on and that's okay.Because in the end as a business, it was the right decision to make and the business has grown since, and everybody's happier. On a personal level, my wife and I had to plan for the sale of our home with a transition into homeschooling the kids, we don't look at buying an RV that we had no prior knowledge of, by the way we end up going with a fifth wheel, absolutely love the layout and our first one, had a bunkhouse and this one is they called a toy hauler, the new one and it's even better, I wish we would have gone with it in the beginning.We could talk about that on and on another day.But to get back to what we were talking about, I want to let you know that I did not make this transition perfectly, in fact, there's a lot of stuff that if I went back, I do differently, but that's why I bring this up now because I've had the time to learn about it, I've documented it and hopefully, I can share with you a few things that help me to make it happen.

So, with that said, I have a question for you, Remote Start Nation, if you could go anywhere in the world, anywhere in this country, maybe it's staying in your current state, maybe it's moving away from the city you’re in now, to a city that you've dreamed of, if you could go anywhere, where would you go? And furthermore, what would it take for you to get there? What changes would you need to make, who would you need to include, who would you need buy-in from or would you need to make a complete change to your business model completely? I'll tell you something, this RV life, this journey I've been on has really opened up my eyes. I absolutely love the freedom of being on the road and the time will come when we'll settle down again, but the beauty of this journey and the life we've created is that when we stop or where we stop, it's on our terms, it's going to happen because we want it too, and again, this didn't happen overnight, and there's still a continuation of communication and, working things with the team and making sure everybody's on board and,making changes to make everybody else happy knowing that I'm happy being on this journey. Now is different when I was in the office, and it could be the same for you, if I can do it, I assure you, anyone can do it, and no, you shouldn't expect it to happen tomorrow, but if it's something you really want, then you need to stop procrastinating and making excuses and start putting the wheels in motion today.

So remote start Nation, I have an exercise for you, grab something to write with. I'll give you a minute. If you're driving play along in your head and then come back to this later when you're at your destination, you can write it out. And while you're getting ready to write this out, if you remember from the last episode, I talked about reflecting and really figuring out what you want in your life and how that ties into your business. I want you to make sure your passion and goals are aligned. This exercise plays into that, it follows our episode of working from anywhere, but it's in line with our thought of reflecting and making the changes we want as entrepreneurs to live our best life. All right, here we go, I want you to write really big on that note pad, on your iPad, whatever it is, right? Really big, the one place that came to your mind earlier of where you would want to go if you could run your business from anywhere, where would it be? And if it's being a nomad like me and moving all over the place, that's cool too, write it out.Underneath that, on the first line, I want you to write out who, who you would need to get on board to make this happen, would you need to hire someone new? Would you need to promote someone? Would you need to get your significant other on board? Would you need to find a new production partner, a new fulfillment partner? What needs to happen? In order for this to take place, who is it that you need to have a conversation with? So you can make this happen for yourself.

Number two. For every “who?” that you wrote down, next to them or next to that company, whatever it is, you need to write out what would need to change, what conversation needs to be had? That might be tough, there might be some hard conversations in there. In the end, remember, this is your decision, but you need to make sure that the people around you can get on board with it, and if not, you need to figure out a next strategy or a way to start new or whatever that is, but it's very, very, very important to make this work that you communicate properly with everybody that you wrote down as your who.

Lastly on the top of that paper, next to your place that you want to be, I want you to write out a future date of when you want to implement this change, right out the date of when you are saying, this is the day I'm going, this is the day I'm changing and I'm living the life that I want to live. Now, take what you wrote and use it to start moving the needle, little by little, make it happen. Crunch the numbers, forecast for it, see in that new area who you need to communicate with as a new client, do whatever you have to do to plan for it to make it happen.

Remote Start Nation, I believe you can do it and I believe, together, we can start something special.

I wanted to sincerely thank you for joining me on this episode.

And as always, please leave a comment provide feedback and share this with the fellow entrepreneurs in your community so we can all grow together.

Until next time, I wish you success in starting your business, growing your brand and building your desired lifestyle.