Embracing Global Freelancing: Opportunities and Challenges in Borderless Business

Welcome to the Future is Freelance podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads, slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and people living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for everyone who defies categorisation and makes a living in a life their own way. Every other Freelance Friday, we're serving up an audio cocktail of expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing To help you achieve success with your borderless business, whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms. Thanks for listening to the Future is Freelance and for being part of the Future of Work Revolution. So welcome, welcome, future is Freelance listeners, wherever you are joining us, wherever you are in the world. I've been looking at some of our listener metrics lately and we really do have a community in all parts of the world. There's a concentration in Europe and in North America, as you'd expect, but we can definitely say that the Future is Freelance is completely global nowadays, and that's actually the topic that I wanted to explore with you today. Being a freelancer in 2023 means you really can collaborate with anybody anywhere in the world, whether you're working with them as a contractor to help you with services that you need, whether you're working together to provide something to a client, or whether you're working for somebody paying you to deliver some work from the other side of the world. We really do have the world at our feet now, thanks to the technology and communications that we have available, so that's really exciting and it's an amazing thing to be part of. And, as many of you know, my personal situation is that I'm a native Brit, but I've been living in Spain for many years. Now My business lives in Estonia hello, estonia and I have clients pretty much all over the world. At one time or another, i've worked with people in every continent. Well, no, not Antarctica. I'll take that off the list so far. If anybody in Antarctica wants unique content about future of work technologies, please, please, get in touch with me, because I'd love to complete the set. But for the main part, i'm dealing with people in typical business centres around the world, and you can too. So what are the benefits of working globally in this way? Well, of course, there are many. The most important one is simply the diversity of income Being able to earn from all over the world. You can have clients who aren't tied to any one income stream. It enables you to diversify your own sources of income and to go where the work is. Quite frankly, you're not tied to one economy. Any economy can suffer. Recent events have taught us that things can change very quickly, whether due to geopolitical changes or natural disaster. If your business is tied to one particular location, that has inbuilt vulnerabilities which we don't have to accept in our work as global freelancers, we can decide that we're going to diversify by working with people from all over the world. This also feeds into another important advantage, which is that of geo-arbitrage. Now, geo-arbitrage is, simply put, the idea of living in a low-cost environment while earning in a higher income one, and this is something that digital nomads and remote workers have known for a long time. It's a tricky one when it comes to employment, because things are changing now that people are able to work and move and take their work with them to different countries. But certainly as a freelancer, as a solopreneur, you get to choose, and if it makes sense to you to live in a low-cost environment and you find that you can do everything that you want to there in terms of your business, services and connection and the way you can collaborate and you can work with clients in a higher income environment, then that difference is basically your advantage. You can definitely leverage that. We can extend the idea of geo-arbitrage to embrace the idea of digital arbitrage. It might make more sense for you to do as I've done and live in one country and have your business located in a third one to work with clients from wherever. So you need to weigh up all the different factors that can go into the choice that you want to make And, of course, obviously we all do things for money and make choices on that basis. But you also have to factor in what you want from your life generally. Some of the lowest cost of living places in the world might not be places that you actually want to base yourself in terms of quality of life. So, depending on your own priorities, you need to weigh all of this up and also be aware that maybe your decision isn't a lifetime commitment. It's not easy for many of us to uproot ourselves and move to another country if it doesn't work out, but it's also not impossible either to do it for one possible trial or an opportunity to go and live and work somewhere else. There are so many digital Nomad visas now. I've been writing about that recently and I'll pop a link in the show notes to the article, but there are at least 40 different countries around the world who will make it possible for you to go and settle there for up to a year just to see if you like it, and you can see what the quality of life and the cost of living is like compared with your income and where your work is coming from. Maybe you can make it work there And as a solopreneur. You don't need anybody's permission I mean you might need permission sort of within your family and household. If you're going to take them with you. They can enjoy the benefits too of a completely different way of life or pace of life and cost of life in a new location. So don't run out geo-arbitrage. Don't assume it's only for some digital nomads, people who are really foot loose and can just follow a currency around the world. You can do it on a slower scale if you want to. You just need to know which factors are the most important to you in your lifestyle and optimize for that, simply being aware that things can change and you might have to change with them. What people get, for example, moving from the southeast of England to Spain, is they often get a significantly better lifestyle in terms of they can afford a detached home with a pool. They might be able to afford something like a cleaner or child care that they would find very difficult to support back in the UK. I know a lot of people who have made that move specifically to upgrade their lifestyle for the same income, and for other people that trade-off simply won't be worth it because they have family or they enjoy the culture and the lifestyle in the UK and for them the geo-arbitrage, the digital arbitrage, simply doesn't add up. So it's a very, very unique thing. What I want you to do, what seed I'm trying of an idea I'm trying to plant, is the idea that you have that choice now because of the way we can work and this is just one of the many advantages and opportunities I'll give you another one. When you work globally, your customers can be anywhere, so you can be very, very specific about who those customers are. We've known for a long time that the best way to increase your value to customers is to be very specific about what you offer, perhaps to be the only person in the world who's offering that unique thing the way that you do it. Now we have an interview coming up It might be next week actually, with Dominic Kent, who is a very specialized content creator. He has made a niche for himself that's so deep that he is the absolute go-to person in that area and brands from all over the world find his work and seek him out and hire him because he's so good. Now, there's absolutely no way he could have a business like that if he limited his clients to people in the same country. It simply wouldn't work. He would have to specialize more broadly and therefore he wouldn't have developed his skills in such a niche way and he wouldn't be able to attract the rates that he charges. It's the same for me in lots of ways. My particular beat relates to future of work and business without borders. That means I do a lot of work in Estonia, but it means I can work with brands and companies and publications all over the world who are interested in that future evolution and that space, and I don't have to be bound by the geographies. If I spot something interesting going on somewhere, i can connect with them and build a relationship with them and see if we can do some work together. The bigger the pond, the deeper you can go. I'm not sure if that metaphor completely works, but I hope you understand what I'm saying. It's a little bit like search and search engine optimization. You have to be very, very specific about what it is you're optimizing for, because then you will be the one and the person searching for you will find you at the very top of the list. As a freelancer anybody offering business or creative services at any kind of knowledge work freelancer you can think about going really, really specific. As long as the market exists, provided it's not bound by geographical constraints the deeper you go, the more important you become, the higher rates you can command, and for that you need global reach. It's really, really important to make sure that you have that. And finally, it's a real advantage to many and it's something I really like Simply being able to work and talk to people who are from different cultures and countries. You might get the opportunity to travel there as well. Go to conferences and events, go to meet clients. It's a big world out there, you know. You really don't want to limit yourself to working only with people who are like you or share Things in common with you by geography or or cultural background. Of course, there are challenges, and I'm going to talk about those shortly, but There's so much interest to be gained. It's so fascinating. I learned so much every time I work with the client in a new business or a new country, a new industry. There's always something there that I didn't know, that I can learn, and it's fascinating and interesting and that will help me next time. It helps to build relationships. I love the fact that I collaborate with people. There are people I've worked with for years who I've not managed to meet yet. That situation happened with a lot of my Estonian colleagues, actually, and when I went over in May, i met people I've been working with really closely on some quite intense con content delivery, including the inception of this podcast, and I didn't meet them for the first time until May this year, after we've been working together on it for a long time. So there's so much to be gained by building connections around the world. You never know where it might take you and it's really enriching to have these cultural experiences and connections. A lot of reasons for, and one of them might be simple expectation and practicality. I believe we are incredibly fortunate to be alive and working in a time where we have these tools at our fingertips. We have collaboration, communication and connection tools at such low cost, accessible through tiny portable devices, that we really can work with anybody in a way that it's easy to take for granted. And it's only because I've been doing it so long, since this really was not always the case, that I can often remind myself how lucky we are to be able to do this. So maybe some people simply don't embrace the opportunities that are out there because they don't know about them. And again, as a freelancer, as a business person, that already gives you an advantage, that gives you a leg up the fact that you are looking to the future, you are open minded, you are embracing the new. That gives you access that they do not have. So, whilst I encourage everybody to consider the opportunities on offer, you can definitely consider it a competitive advantage if you're already there Now, why might you still have difficulties? Well, of course, difference creates challenges of its own. When you're working with people whose language or cultural differences very much contrary to yours, then you can have misunderstandings. Communication needs to be boiled down to its most simple, the least nuanced, the most clear. You might have to think about how you discuss things. Things like contracts might be written in incredibly complex language which might be hard to understand, even in your native language, and then, once that's translated, it can end up something that you don't even recognize And you certainly can't agree to be bound by, for example. You can navigate these changes, these challenges, though for certain you know and again this is part of the cultural learning and growth and the richness that you can experience working with people who simply think differently to you. There's a book called The Culture Map, and I've gone completely blank on who the author is now, but I'm going to pop a link to that in the show notes. It's a book that really helped me understand the way that different cultures do business and how that can impact on the way that you collaborate together, even the way you have a conversation or have a meeting or make an agreement, for example, you'll find in the conversation with Olimide recently in a recent episode he was talking about doing business in Japan and how really the first meeting, nobody expected you to talk business at all. That would have been quite rude and you really needed to spend some time building the relationship and socializing and getting to know one another before you talked about anything as uncouth as a deal. I've worked with developers in India and again, this isn't to do with race or language. Half of my family is Indian, but they're West London Indian people who I grew up with, and it's very different from working with a supplier in another country who might find it culturally virtually impossible to say no to you or to tell you that a project isn't going well. The amount of times that I struggled to get accurate, timely updates from people who would have really not wanted to offend me by telling me things weren't going the way that I hoped they were or that something couldn't be done. It was just this automatic yes even when I knew the answer should be no, so it was difficult to carry on that conversation. Another example I've come across, which I think may have been in the culture map book as well, is somebody, a colleague, who relocated to a Paris branch of a company when we were both employees and found that the way meetings were conducted was much more confrontational, and she found it almost aggressive at first, but then she realized that this was the way that French people did things, the way that they analyzed each other's arguments and they weren't attacking the person, but they were ruthlessly unpicking the arguments, and that is the way that they're taught in school to build an essay to start with your thesis, then the antithesis and then the synthesis, bringing it all together, and it's a very systematic process of this is the argument. This is the counter argument, and that's what communications all about. Is working through that, maybe the very opposite of the Japanese extremely gentle and polite style. Now, if you don't know what you're dealing with or if you're on the other end of that spectrum, your personal experience or your preference is really different then you might feel that a conversation hasn't gone well or a relationship isn't going smoothly, or are we ever going to get this deal across the line or this project signed off, because I don't feel like we're really connecting and the other party to that conversation might have a very different feeling about it. So the only ways to overcome this is to remember that what's normal for you is not normal everywhere, and this is something that people who travel very quickly learn, and it's why I think that some kind of an overseas gap here ought to be like a kind of military service, but in service of peace and understanding, and cross-cultural communication ought to be more or less compulsory for anybody who's standing one place and thinks that the norms and manners and culture and ways to communicate of their own culture is universal, really needs to be exposed to other things, because then you you learn to look for these possible areas of misunderstanding. Of course, there are practical things as well. When you're working with global clients, they might be. If they're on the other side of the world, they'll be in a very different time zone to you, so it could be that you have to coordinate that quite carefully. It's much easier with tools, things like. I use Calendly and Google calendar for scheduling, because when people start to say, are you free for a call at 5 pm mountain time or so, they have a clue what they're talking about. But if I send them a Calendly link, they can see if the time that they're talking about is free in my time and it will take care of everything like daylight saving time and summertime and wintertime and clocks forwards and back. You can end up with a complete mess. There is that overlap bit of the year where the US and Europe adopt summertime at different times. So for me it makes total sense to use a scheduling tool and if you come across the occasional Lada client who absolutely refuses, then it's best if they set the appointment and send you a calendar link or something so that you can be certain that you're going to turn and it will happen at some point. You will show up an hour early or god forbid an hour late to a meeting and you'll have to reschedule and you'll laugh about it, and it's one of those things that happens when you're working in this way. Another thing about time zones is sometimes you have to be a little bit firm, especially if you're the freelancer in the client relationship and just say look, you know, i'm. Of course I can work with you if you're in I don't know the west coast of the US and I'm in Europe, but it's going to have to be in your afternoon. I'm actually not prepared to get up and do a meeting at two o'clock in the morning. You will not get me at my best. It will not be productive. I mean, the world is round, right? I think eight o'clock is the cut-off point as far as I'm concerned for meetings, and I will always give the client the option to be the morning or evening person. If you really are on opposite sides of the world, you can do a meeting at 8 pm, 8 am respectively, and nobody needs to get up or stay up later than that for a work meeting. As far as I'm concerned, different people make different rules, and I once had a client in Hawaii. I think that was the only time I've had the complete 12-hour offset, but that's how we did it. Eight and eight. Oh, i had another one in New Zealand and yeah, that worked fine and he didn't mind getting up really early, so I was happy to do an eight-hour meeting. Of course, the idea is to work without too many synchronous meetings anyway. Try to establish good asynchronous communication protocols and see how you can leverage that difference to actually be more productive. For example, i've done news work for a client in the US where I was able to get ahead and provide their bulletin based on breaking news in Europe before they were even out of bed, and it's not the kind of work I do these days. I don't like that kind of always-on stuff, and that was quite synchronous, but it did really make the most of the time zone difference between us. So it's important to see that these things can be positive advantages as well, and teams can use them to get things done more quickly. Like you know, you brief something out to your developer on the other side of the world before you go to bed and wake up in the morning and it's done. That's amazing and you know, provided we do have these communication protocols really, really clear, because you don't want them calling you in the middle of the night when something's misunderstood, you have to be able to nail the asynchronous comms absolutely up front, and then things can really move, and it means you can use the whole 24 hours when you're working in a collaboration with people in different time zones. So that's a way you can turn a challenge into an opportunity and really benefit from it. Language, of course, can be an issue, and I've lived in Spain for many years, but I still don't work in Spanish, i don't write in Spanish, my clients are all in English speaking countries, because that's the service I offer, and language barriers are definitely there in synchronous communication. You can make an effort, you can try and educate yourself, but you do have to be careful of potential misunderstandings And again, i think we have tools now that really help us overcome that. I'll be happy to have a conversation, say, with a Spanish notary by phone about what we're going to do in terms of a contract, but then I will email them and I will get it professionally translated. If it's really high stakes, i'll get it translated by a human. If not, what can be done with tools like Google Translate? chat GPT does an extremely good job of translating both ways. You get something from a client in another language. You can ask chat GPT to unpick it for you and tell you what you need to know from it, rather than just translating it. So these things, they are barriers, but they can be perfectly well overcome And, of course, you can always study a language and learn it. It's something that I struggle with, given that I make a living from my English. I'm ashamed that my Spanish is still so far from perfect, but it's a work in progress and it will be for all of my life. So these are part of the cultural differences, and I do think you probably understand a culture better once you understand a little bit of the language. When you can understand the humor or the irony or the things that they have the same words for or different words for gives you insights into how people think. So it's well worth doing, if it's a culture that you're dealing with frequently, to learn a little bit of the language Not only really smooths the wheels of relationship building and communication, but it can give you valuable insight into the mindset as well. Other practical differences, of course, when you're dealing with other nations, is simply currencies and different fiscal systems. At the moment, we still don't have a global currency and we don't have any easy way of sending money without paying someone for it. I mean, yes, one day, hopefully, we'll all be able to trade in Bitcoin, but the reality at the moment is we can't. So you need to figure this one out if you're going to work internationally. For me, having my business located in Estonia makes it very easy to deal with multiple currencies and different fiscal systems, because my business is stuck in one place in the EU, even if I travel around. I use a wise account which makes it super easy to invoice clients in their own currencies. When you get somebody who says I can only think in Hong Kong dollars also, okay, i can give you an invoice in Hong Kong dollars and we have to agree a rate in Hong Kong dollars and you have to adjust the rate you would normally charge to take account of any possible divergence in that exchange rate by the time they pay you, for example, if you know that it's a currency that's really relatively stable against your own. You can fix the price quite easily and as a more or less one to one, because services like wise charge very little on the actual conversion, whereas if it's a currency that's much less stable, you might have to say all right, i'm happy to bill you in whatever dollars where you live, but there's going to be a surcharge of 7% on that because that's how much our currencies are fluctuated, and difference over the past six months is very easy to Google that data And you know you might gain on that if it goes the other way and you still risk losing if something unexpected happens. But it's a way of of hedging and protecting your interests. Or you can issue them an invoice in euros or dollars and they can pay it in that currency if they're happy to do so. It's just another thing to talk about. In fact, or in. Of course, they might have different fiscal systems as well. They might have issues with. Like with the US firms, you have to fill in forms to prove that you're not an employee, to prove that you're independent. There might other countries might have, have other have similar paperwork, just to to protect the person hiring you from the possibility of creating any kind of employment liability for you, so you need to make sure that you comply with whatever's asked of you there. Again, if you have an actual business entity, like a limited company, then this is often reassuring to the other hire that they're not going to accidentally employ you, because as a self employed person, it might be a little bit more of a gray area and every country is different, but you can figure it out with your clients and it's worth it if you're going to build a relationship and get a new piece of business out of it. The final thing is global payment platforms, and most of those work just fine. If somebody insists on paying you through PayPal and there's a currency conversion involved, you can end up losing quite a bit of money. So, again, you need to build that in to your invoicing and costs or say to them please can you just pay me by bank transfer? I'll send you a wise invoice with your local bank entity details on it. Please just pay that. For God's sake, don't let anybody and they still try this in the US send you a check that you would have to deposit physically at a bank branch and it will cost you an absolute fortune to do that. So you simply have to rule that out from the very start. There are also possibilities that you might need to get international tax experts involved at some point if somebody hiring you wants to deduct local taxes there or retain them, because that's how they used to dealing with local contractors and that won't apply to you. So you might need advice from your accountant if that happens, But it's pretty unusual. Hopefully that won't be something that you have to deal with with most customers. Of course, all of these differences are what keep things interesting and keep them fun, even the fact that there are different holidays and customs and cultures around the world. That's why it's so interesting working with people from different places. I'm recording this on the 7th of July and for the last week I haven't been able to get hold of a client in the US to sign off a piece of work or to approve anything or to pin down for a meeting, because of course, the 4th of July is their biggest thing. It's also difficult getting hold of anybody in the US for meetings through lots of December, for the same reasons that holidays are really important. My lovely Estonian buddies all disappear a week before that around the mid-summer festivals. It's huge there. The Chinese New Year is another one, and that's a moveable feast, so you need to be aware of that. If you're collaborating with people who for whom it's a holiday as big as Christmas might be to us in the UK and Europe, they're simply not around. There's no way they're going to have a meeting with you or progress any work that you're doing together. Talking about that, celebrating it with them, remembering to send good wishes for holidays that you don't share but are hugely important to the people that you're working with, is a part of that relationship building. Of course, you need to communicate with clients about your own availability as well. Don't assume that they all understand that a local holiday is something that is that important to you and you won't be around, just keep talking about it, enjoying it. You can buy, or you don't even need to buy. You can Google global holiday calendars and make sure that you're aware of the ones that allow you to impact the people that you're working most closely with or would like to work with. All of this is perfectly doable. It just adds to the richness and variety. It's one more thing not to take for granted. In conclusion, then, i just want to highlight how amazing it is. The unique opportunities of international freelancing. Of course, there are challenges, but I really encourage you to embrace those challenges. They're part of the journey. They're part of the advantage that we have. These unprecedented opportunities weren't there a decade ago, because it would have been costly and complicated to do the communications, to have the business entities to talk to each other even things like we take for granted, hopping on a video call through Zoom or WhatsApp. Now, all of that a decade or so ago was expensive and cumbersome and it probably didn't work. You couldn't take for granted that people could even get online in every part of the world. All of these things not only mean that we can travel and be digital nomads if we want to work from anywhere in the world. It means that we can work with people from everywhere. Even if we're very happy to stay where we are at home and we've never sought to do anything different, the whole world is out there for us to collaborate with. That is an incredibly inspiring idea to hold on to, because it's the title of this show The future is freelance. The future is truly global and international. I hope that you're considering ways to expand your business globally, if you haven't already. I really appreciate you taking the time to listen to these thoughts and tips. I would love to hear from you about your own experiences. What have you learned from working with people in different cultures and countries? What opportunities has it brought your way? What adventures? I love the fact that I've had the chance to travel to and visit some of the places that my clients are lucky enough to work. They might have an event or a conference there and need my input. These are the kind of things that can lead to. You never know where freelancing in 2023 might take you. Please open your mind, open your ideas, open your business to whatever comes your way. Of course, when you do, please come back and tell us, write a review and let me know what you have been inspired by in this week's show. I would love it if you would share this podcast with anybody who might have opportunities to work in new ways that they haven't thought of, might have new collaborations out there in their future. Just grab a screenshot of whatever you're listening to this show on right now and pop it on your social media. Perhaps people can find it. You don't need to dig out links and things like that. Anybody in the target market for this show can certainly find it for themselves. They just need to know that we exist. Thank you for listening to the Future is Freelance podcast. We appreciate your time and attention in a busy world and your busy life. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a fellow freelancer. Help us grow this movement of independent entrepreneurs. If you rate and review the Future is Freelance in whatever app you're listening to this right now or over at futureisfreelancexyz, then that will help spread the word and help us reach more people who need to hear this message and join the conversation. Together, we can change the world and make sure the future is freelance. This is my middle miss, wishing you success and happiness in your enterprise until our next episode.