Nov
First LIP Location: Realistic choice for your start-up business?
When we were researching all the wonderful places that we wanted to visit during our first LIP year abroad we had visions of sun, beaches, relaxation and beautiful scenary to wake up to. We still do!
Our LIP year starts in February, which in London means the middle of a cold, dark and wet winter! To find the sun and the warm climate that we want usually means jumping on a plane for at least seven hours or as long as 30 hours.
When you run an online business that provides a coaching service to clients in one or more countries around the globe things can get a little tricky…
- How will your coordinate your own schedule with that of your client with big time differences?
- How will you balance your work and the desire to explore all of your dream location in a limited period?
- Is your first LIP location so different and wonderful that you find it hard to settle into your normal work routine?
- Does your choice of location have a broadband internet widely available or only in the major cities?
All these questions popped into our heads and are easy enough to answer given enough thought. Moving to your dream location, wherever that may be, is important. But it needs to be an informed choice. Invariably, most people will choose a cheaper and less stressful place to live. God, I can’t wait to leave London commuting behind me!
But money aside, are your client relationships, marketing and business processes robust enough to survive and support what can be a distracting, wildly exciting and challenging period?
These are all questions that Claudia and I have asked ourselves and we’ve made the choice of location that we currently feel comfortable with.
If you have a fledgling business and you want to become location independent what would be your first port of call and why?
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- Pingback by Relaxation » Blog Archive » First LIP Location: Realistic choice for your start-up business? on November 17, 2007 @ 6:17 pm
Hi,
I love your LIP life! I’ve always been dreaming of living a LIP life, too. However, due to budget-constraints I thought WAH life will do in the mean time.
“If you have a fledgling business and you want to become location independent what would be your first port of call and why?” — It’s gotta be Hawaii simply because most of my clients are based in Hawaii, which is not something I ever planned to happen and I’m not complaining. Also, the climate is not too different from the Philippines where I’m based.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’d love to spend a year traveling by land (except the Darien Gap) from the US to Argentina, but it’d be difficult to work at the same time. More realistically, I’ll probably end up flying somewhere like Buenos Aires and setting up shop for a while. From there it’d be easy enough to take trips to various parts of South America for some exploration. Good post, these are definitely important points to consider.
@Matt - yes, very sensible to avoid the Darien Gap…I think your idea of basing youself somewhere to begin with is a sensible one and then when you get more of an idea of how everything is going for you and how you feel working/travelling, you could adjust.