People often ask me how I manage to run a training business for UK small businesses while spending months at a time working from Southeast Asia and Europe. The honest answer is: it's not complicated. It just requires a few things to be set up right — and the willingness to let go of the idea that you have to be physically present to run something well.
I've been doing this for twelve years. I'm 59. I've had twenty years in digital marketing before that, running agencies and consultancies from offices with commutes and meeting rooms and all the rest. What I know now is that most of what happens in those offices doesn't actually need to happen there.
The tools are not the point
Every article about remote work eventually becomes a list of tools. Slack, Zoom, Notion, Asana. And yes, I use some of those things. But the tools aren't the point. The point is clarity about how you work, when you're available, and what clients can expect from you.
My clients know that I'm in a different timezone for parts of the year. They know my response window. They know when they'll hear back from me and what happens in an emergency. That expectation-setting matters far more than which project management app I'm using this month.
The morning system
When I'm in Southeast Asia, I'm typically six to seven hours ahead of the UK. That means I have a long stretch of morning — from about 5.30am until lunchtime — before the UK working day begins. I use that time for deep work: writing, planning, content creation, the things that require sustained thinking rather than rapid response.
When the UK wakes up, I shift into reactive mode. Emails, calls, WhatsApp. I'm available for about four hours, which covers the UK working day up until early afternoon my time. Then I'm done. Clean split. No blurring.
Asynchronous by default
The biggest mindset shift for running a business remotely is moving to async communication as the default. Not everything needs an immediate response. Not every question needs a call. I write clear, complete messages that don't require a back-and-forth to get to the answer. I ask clients to do the same where possible.
This isn't just useful for travel — it makes the business more efficient generally. When every communication is written down, nothing gets lost. When you're not constantly interrupting each other, more actual thinking gets done.
The practical setup
For what it's worth: I use a UK-based phone number that forwards to wherever I am. My banking is online. My accountant is used to me being abroad and we work entirely by email and video. My contracts and invoicing are digital. There is genuinely nothing in the running of Small Business Academy that requires me to be in a particular postcode.
Could I run a business that required physical presence — a shop, a factory, a restaurant — this way? No. But if your business runs on knowledge and relationships, which most service businesses do, the physical constraint is largely in your head.
The one thing I'd tell anyone thinking about this
The biggest barrier isn't logistics. It's permission. Most of us have spent decades in a model where work happens in a place, at fixed times, and being somewhere else feels like truancy. Getting over that feeling — giving yourself permission to work differently — is the hardest part. Everything else is just admin.
Start with two weeks somewhere. See what breaks. Almost nothing will. And then you'll know.