Lea Woodward’s foray into freelancing began in the area of personal training, but she quickly found that her skills in marketing and business would take her to the next level. Lea and her husband, Jonathan, freelance together and are lucky enough to be able to travel, live and work all around the world. She shares her experiences with John Brougher in this interview–how she got to where she is today, how her marital team works as a unit and the ups and downs of the jet-setter freelancing lifestyle. Her blog, Location Independent Professionals, can be found online at locationindependent.com, and Jonathan’s blog on illustration can be found online at two4joy.com.

John Brougher: You started out as a personal trainer, and then switched over to the business side of that industry. How did you make that transition? What kinds of struggles did you face?

Lea Woodward: I owe that transition to the wake up call I got when working with a business mentor - it literally shocked me into action. She’d asked me to visualize where I wanted to be professionally in 5 years time and on completing the exercise, I realized that in order to be where I thought I wanted to be, I’d have had to do umpteen more qualifications, become an expert in some really boring topics and be charging £300 per hour for sessions. It seemed like an awful lot of hard work and when I looked at it that way, I realized it just wasn’t what I wanted to do.

At the same time, I’d been spending a lot of my time giving marketing tips to colleagues in the gym and realized that the business and marketing aspect seemed to be a universal problem in the industry. I offered my help (at “mate’s rates”) to a couple of friends and colleagues to get some testimonials and test out my approach. When that worked out well and they’d already begun referring more clients to me, I got the courage to start marketing the new services and built up the business from there.

As far as struggles go in making the transition, I had a minor crisis of confidence when it came to re-inventing myself yet again and change what I was doing for the second or third time in as many years. I’d just spent two years and several thousands of pounds training as a holistic personal trainer and there I was calling myself something else that I’d had no history in, nor experience of. On the plus side, it helped that I’d been a management consultant specializing in CRM strategy and core business processes (I never, ever thought I’d be saying that!) - it at least gave me some business credibility - but I felt a bit of a fraud initially, because I didn’t have a huge client base nor a fat folder of glowing testimonials to back me up.

JB: You and your husband, Jonathan, freelance together. Why did you decide to freelance with your husband?

LW: It wasn’t so much a freely-taken decision, but more something that was forced upon us when Jonathan was made redundant last year. After a bit of a panic and knee-jerk reactions, we decided it was time to “get serious” about what we actually both wanted to do with our lives and realized that our future happiness lay in running our own businesses instead of working for others. As it was his second redundancy in about three years, it wasn’t like he’d had the type of steady, stable, guaranteed job-for-life that makes freelancing seem such a risk in comparison.

We both do quite different things - me with my business coaching, blogging and writing and him with his illustration and graphic design which plays to our strengths. I’m very left brain dominant and he’s the total opposite so it does make for quite an effective combination in business, which is what we’d hoped would be the case.

JB: What kind of challenges do you face working with your spouse? Feel free to be candid, of course.

LW: Well, because we tend to work quite separately, work disagreements rarely result in fisticuffs! Some of the main challenges we’ve found however are around the areas of communication and agreeing upon responsibility.

We have to be very clear about who “owns” a project, especially if we have a shared client. As I’m the driven and more organized one, Jonathan will sometimes abdicate responsibility for a project (even when it’s his), thinking that I’m managing it and will wait for me to shout at him until he’ll make any progress on it (he has read this and doesn’t disagree!).

The other thing we disagree on is who has to stop work to get food ready when both of us are full on, working to deadlines or on client calls; it usually results in sniping little arguments until one of us relents or gets so hungry we’re about to faint.

We are also both very conscious of not spending all hours working and talking shop but sometimes have to drag each other away from our laptops to go and enjoy the beach. Conversely, when one of us is busier than the other, it requires self discipline on both sides not to skip the work because the other is coaxing us to go out and have some fun.

JB: What are the benefits of working remotely?

LW: Aside from the fact that I’m writing this on the beach (see the pic), it’s the fact that we can choose where to go on a month to month basis - this year we’ve lived in Panama, Buenos Aires, Toronto and we’re currently in the Caribbean. When we’re inside working it’s not so important where we are but for us, it’s what’s waiting outside that is the bonus. At the moment it’s an idyllic Caribbean island; next month it might be the mountains; the month after it could be a buzzing city.

It also takes the pressure off the earnings side if we’re living in countries with a cheaper cost of living but still earning in GBP. The fluctuations in income that come with freelancing and never quite knowing where your next client is going to come from, don’t seem quite so scary if you only need to generate £400-600 ($800-1200) per month to live the good life and can manage your outgoings on a month-by-month basis.

The exposure to different cultures is very stimulating - both visually for Jonathan and also from a business perspective for me. You see opportunities in all sorts of places and we have picked business up in some of the places we’ve been to.

JB: What is the downside of working remotely?

LW: For Jonathan it’s not having his own studio to work in and being surrounded by his reference books and art tools. It also means that we have to be careful about what we carry with us - I’d rather not pay huge excess baggage fines - and we like to travel really lightly. We’ve got a medium-size suitcase between the two of us for four months on the road.

There is also always the risk that if something goes wrong with our laptops (I’m a PC user, Jonathan is a mac user - you can imagine the “discussions” we have about which is best) and we’re in a more remote place, we would be stuck without our main business tool but we do plenty of backups and have hopefully covered all bases.

We’ve learned from our past mistakes and now we usually try and spend one to three months in each place. When we first started out we moved to a new country every month for the first 3-4 months and found it, unsurprisingly, quite unsettling and hard to concentrate on the business. Settling in naturally takes a bit of time and whilst that feeling usually goes away, it does make it harder to get back down to business and focus on the work whilst you find your feet.

JB: Travel is clearly important to you–where do you think you’ll go next? Do you think you’ll always be on the move?

LW: From here, we’ve got flights booked to spend a month in Dubai over Christmas with my brother who lives there. We’re then flying on to South Africa for three months and after that we’re thinking of Asia (maybe Thailand or the Phillipines) or perhaps somewhere in Europe like Croatia.

We get itchy feet frequently (as you can see!), so for now this kind of lifestyle suits us. You never know what can change though, or how we might feel next year so if and when the time comes that we want to settle down somewhere, we’ll hopefully have found a place to do that. Our dream is to find 2-4 places we absolutely love, buy homes there and then shuttle between them throughout the year. Our families would quite like that too.

JB: What advice do you have for freelancers looking to emulate you and work remotely?

LW: A whole book of advice is in my ebook! But in summary, I’d say this:

• If you’re unsure of whether it’s going to work, consider making trial runs of a week, then a month away and adjust and resolve any unforeseen challenges before going away longer term.
• Be upfront and honest about what you’re doing with clients - no sneaking off hoping they won’t notice! You may also need to reassure them that it won’t adversely impact the work you do at all - if they already trust you, then this shouldn’t be a problem and if great customer service is something you strive for anyway, then you’re probably not going to let this slide just because you’re halfway round the world.
• Ensure your marketing plan will continue to be effective and work independent of your location. If your current form of marketing is all offline and/or location-specific then you are going to need to change this or find someone who can continue to do it on your behalf when you’re not there.
• Choose your first destination very carefully - if you haven’t done much traveling or you’re unsure of what it’s going to be like, then don’t jump right in at the deep end like we did (we went to Panama, without speaking a word of Spanish and we’d never been before, nor knew anyone who had!) and choose somewhere that is going to give you a relatively easy experience and not be too much of a challenge.

JB: Finally, do you have any tips for two-freelancer households?

LW: Yes, they are:

• Be clear on lines of responsibility, don’t just assume one or the other has something covered, communicate about it and agree.
• If you service the same clients and customers, ensure they know who to contact about what or give them one main point of contact and establish between you who owns the client relationship.
• If you can schedule your work so that when one is busy, the other is less busy - then you hopefully avoid the arguments about whose turn it is to cook, pick up the kids, do the cleaning and all the other household chores that still need doing.
• Make sure you take time out to switch off, have fun and socialize separately and together. Try not to talk shop all the time and cultivate other interests, if possible.

John Brougher

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