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Recently, I spent 9 out of 12 weeks outside the U.S., but most of my clients had no idea I was gone for even a day.
I was drinking espresso in Istanbul, watching sunsets on the beach in Nicaragua, strolling along the Mediterranean sea and sailing down the River Nile in Egypt on a felucca….and I was able to run my real estate investment company without a hitch—taking calls from clients, conducting buying opportunity webinars, closing properties, prospecting for new business relationships, etc.—all from some of the most romantic locations in the world.
You have to remove geographic restrictions so that you can operate from remote work locations. With all of today’s technology this is much easier than you may think. You can either move towards a more virtual business model that does not require your geographic presence in one place OR you can build systems for your business and then delegate the geographically restrictive responsibilities to other people who can run those systems for you.
For some basics on this first step, see my previous post, How and Why to Run Your Business from Your Rooftop Pool Deck.
Once you establish the freedom of mobility and you can move around the country, stay in various places for extended periods of time, and operate without a hitch, you are ready to take it international.
A couple additional challenges arise when your remote work location is outside your home country, the primary one being phone contact (especially if you use the phone a lot for your business, as I do). Remember, my goal was to have people not even know I was gone (unless I wanted to tell them) so I researched all the possible ways to retain the same phone number coming in and going out.
With just about all phone service providers it is ridiculously expensive to make and receive calls from abroad (and many countries you cannot even do it if you want). The other option of swapping out the SIM card with a local one (i.e: in an unlocked iPhone) gets you a new local number but that doesn’t help when people call your regular number from your home country.
So, my solution was to pay just over $5 a month for a Skype phone number, but to use it only for routing purposes.
You can get unlimited outbound calling in your home country and unlimited inbound calls from anywhere (Just over $5/mo when I did it)
This will make the Skype app on your iPhone ring, and you can answer it and talk on your iPhone just as if somebody called your phone. This way, I can be half way around the world but nobody knows it because my clients call my L.A. mobile phone number and I pick it up just as if I was in LA (no way to tell the call has been forwarded anywhere).
The real kicker is that you can make outbound calls from your Skype number and it will reflect any number you want on the caller ID of the recipient. So, every time I made an outbound call from my Skype number it looked to the recipient like I was calling from my L.A. mobile phone number.
Whether the client was calling me or receiving a call from me, it appeared to be from my L.A. mobile number both ways. I can remember one evening receiving a call from an agent prospect who was interested in joining our referral network (who had called my L.A. mobile number). After speaking to him for about 15 minutes, just before getting off the phone he asked me how the weather was in L.A. I responded that since I was smoking shisha at a café in Cairo at the moment, I couldn’t be too sure. 🙂
To use the Skype app you either need to be connected to a wi-fi network or just have a local SIM card in your phone with an internet plan as you would in the U.S. (definitely preferable for longer term stays in remote work locations so you can have internet access all the time). If I can do it in Egypt and Nicaragua, you should be able to do it just about anywhere.
Meanwhile, my business partner Valerie is on her way to South Africa and my next stop is Buenos Aires, Argentina (known as “the Paris of South America”) for some incredible Malbec wine, beautiful people and late night tango dancing.
We are not a tax professionals, this is not tax or legal advice, and tax laws are constantly being changed and revised and may change the day after you read this. So, this is for informational purposes only, and it is your duty to consult with your own tax professional about your individual situation and the most updated applicable laws before attempting to implement any of the content in this post.
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