Archive for Remote Work
How I Went from Cubicle to Cabana
Posted by: | CommentsWell I’ve really outdone myself this time! Not only did I get a record hourly rate on this current contract in this horrible recession, but within 3 weeks I managed to get a remote key fob so I can work remotely. I now just booked a flight to Florida to visit my family who’s vacationing there! Great stuff because it’s very cold up here in Calgary, Alberta!
After a couple weeks of stressing out because I didn’t have network access, had insane deadlines and so on, one of the projects I was working on moved out of my scope. So I then only had about 50% workload and upcoming work nowhere in sight at the moment. So I mentioned this to some of the managers. ‘We’ came up with the idea that I work from home part-time and wait out the upcoming work, which they couldn’t say when would happen exactly. The key takeaways are that I mentioned I didn’t have enough work (which many people don’t want to admit at their job) and secondly that you present it in a way where they can come up with the idea themselves.
So on friday I just picked up the key fob (for remote vpn access) and today I just booked a flight to Florida! After I got the key fob it suddenly hit me: Once you are able to work remotely you can basically work anywhere in the world! My family (mom, 2 sisters and brother-in-law) is renting a house in Palm Beach for the month of February.
It’s hard to believe but I’ve actually talked to people who would rather go to an office to work so they don’t have to do work at home. They forget about getting dressed for work, commuting, buying lunch, dealing with annoying co-workers, cubicle hell, meetings, parking and so on!
So plan to start working remotely. Ask the boss to work one day a week from home or find another job that let’s you work from home one or more days a week. I recently applied for a job that is completely virtual. And read the book ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ by Tim Ferris. Time to live the dream baby!
The Dot Com Lifestyle
Posted by: | CommentsHere’s a great video by John Chow. The Internet provides a way to gain freedom, it’s not all about the money! I myself am sitting on my deck right now writing this – the community is quiet as everyone’s downtown working!
Getting Remote IT Contracts
Posted by: | CommentsLooks like I’m going to be doing a part-time remote IT support contract for about 6 weeks starting in late september. The main reasons I am able to get this kind of work are:
-This is for a previous client of mine (from which it is often easier to get remote work)
-I asked to work remotely over time
-Job was in another city so I became tired of travelling
-Lack of available talent in area (due to my choice of niche which I talk about in my ebook)
If you would like to know my secrets to making more money as an IT consultant and working remotely check out my e-book on secrets to getting high hourly rates as an IT subcontractor.
Implementing the 4-Hour Workweek
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’ve read the 4-hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, you might share the dream of gaining freedom. Freedom to live, work, and play anywhere. Now whether you want to work 4 hours a week, or even if you don’t believe that is possible, the bottom line is we all want to achieve that freedom. Freedom to work when, where and as much as we want. In order to achieve this we need to have our own business without any (or many) employees. The crux of obtaining this freedom is to sell products via the internet. This is because it is incredibly cheap to get started (no storefront or inventory required). In order to make this happen you need to:
- Find a product to sell
- Sell the product online
- Deliver the product
- Handle customer support
- Transfer the money into your account
Instead of having your own products, packaging them up and shipping them to the customer you can use a drop shipper like Doba.com. Some like Doba will even handle obtaining the products for you so you don’t have to send them the products. Instead they handle all the gory details for you. You can even sell them via Ebay.
Flexible Work Arrangements
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been preaching about the benefits of working from home – happier employees, more productivity, less commuting stress, cheaper leasing costs, better for the environment – just to name a few.
Looks like I’m getting some agreement on flexible work arrangments.
Use Elance to Work Remotely
Posted by: | CommentsAs someone who has really fallen in love with working remotely it recently dawned on me to start using sites like Elance.com. In the past I didn’t think to use it because my expertise is in large integration projects using webMethods. As I’ve mentioned before I asked one of my out-of-town clients if I could work remotely after travelling for years to their office. These are usually long projects spanning for 6 months to a year or more. With Elance you can bid on much smaller projects which requires more marketing time (finding projects, submitting proposals, reporting, etc) and these allow you to work remotely. They don’t just have programming jobs, there is video/audio creation, copywriting, sales and marketing and many other categories.
Over the years I’ve built lots of websites and I recently realized that I have a lot of skills to offer clients in the Internet space – from setting up websites and blogs, to adding email autoresponders, shopping carts and membership sites. Not only that my ability to communicately clearly with non-techies is also valuable. Whenever I talk to people who need a website they often spend tens of thousands of dollars and the projects go off the rails due to all the custom coding. The sites I create are easy to update for a non-techie saving them money in the future usually spent to update the site. I’ve also figured out ways to get more traffic by adding Google analytics and seeing which sites and keywords bring the most traffic.
I like to use hosted solutions (also called software as a service) because there are no installs and upgrades required. You just pay a monthly fee to get ready-to-go code which has been fully tested. I use email autoresponders, a content management system and shopping cart systems that are all third party. You just have to copy some html code for the sign up forms and you’re good to go. Then you can focus on adding the content and marketing the site.
Getting back to Elance.com I’ve bid on a few website jobs over the last few days. In general the budgets are fairly low (given by the buyer) and the most common problem is a lack of clear requirements – do they need a header logo? Will they enter the content themselves? Do they know how to add content? How many iterations will there be if they want changes?
Some of this scares me but we’ll see how it goes. My feeling is that over time I will find a few high quality clients that will be the majority of my focus. Just like with webMethods the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of the work and revenue comes from 20% of the clients. Here’s my Elance profile.
