Innovation, Influence, And Reflections On A Remote Life Anniversary

A life-altering transformation often starts with a single moment whose significance is not obvious.  Mine was the day, a quarter of a century past, that I left my 'normal' office job for the final time .

Since then it's been a convoluted journey that eventually lead to the creation of  Remote Work Europe, though it took me a while to figure out that ultimate destination!  But here we are, and what started as a modest Facebook group for Spain people is growing into a flourishing network, which has been recognised on the prestigious Remote.com influencer list for 2024.

The collective efforts and dedication of key members and collaborators have been instrumental in creating our platform, and when I look at the other people we are featured alongside, it makes me even more happy and proud. You'll find plenty of podcast guests past and present, as well as an array of people doing diverse and fascinating work to raise the remote work agenda, and professionalise and differentiate the space.

In this episode I reflect on my own journey, and the dearth of remote influencers, or bandwidth, available back when I started in 2000.

I open up about my own odyssey of tech, regulation, social acceptance, and family priorities, which eventually led us to the shores of Mediterranean Spain. And I hope it will contextualise why it means so much to me, to be able to help others create the same transformation in their lives, through the work we're doing with Remote Work Europe.

This episode is not just a narrative of personal transformation and global mobility; it's an invitation to join a community that empowers and educates anyone seeking to integrate flexibility, independence, and adventure into their professional lives.

Join us as we explore the boundless potential of a European remote work lifestyle, at Remote Work Europe!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

You're listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast, the show formerly branded as the Future is Freelance. The name has changed, but our values have not. We're still the podcast for solopreneurs, digital nomads and slowmads, consultants, remote workers, e-residents and everyone living a life without traditional boundaries. We're here for people who defy categorization, those who make a living and a life their own way in Europe and beyond. Fortnightly, on Fridays, we're serving up expert tips, inspired insights and stories from the frontiers of freelancing and the remote work revolution to help you achieve success with your borderless business and liberated lifestyle, whatever success means to you as you live life on your own terms. Hello, hello, remote Work Europe podcast listeners, it's great to be talking to you today. You've just got me today, actually, and I'm hoping my voice holds up.

Speaker 1: 1:07

This is Maya Middlemiss, here on her own, and part of the reason I'm hoping the voice lasts is that I'm going to be honest with you because this is such an intimate and honest medium of podcasting. I'm actually recording this twice because I didn't record it the first time, so you can even say I've practiced this podcast, delivered the entire thing. Nothing captured whatsoever, happens, tech fail, so hands up. I want you to know that it happens to me and I'm happy to share these things. So I'll stop screaming and kicking things, calm down, hit record this time, make sure it's actually capturing and let's start again. So why am I talking to you today? What are we going to look at? Well, the reason I'm in a reflective mood is because there's some old things and some new going on, and one of the things that's gone on just lately is the remotecom remote work influencer list has been released. This was last week. Now we're recording at the very end of April 2024. And it was very exciting to be listed in the remote innovators category. Now I've been listed in this report before remote work influencers, but this is the first time that I've been recognized for the work that I've done with Remote Work Europe, so that brings me incredible pride. I think pride's okay, isn't it? I don't believe in humble bragging. I am proud that Remote Work Europe, although it is a team effort, it was always my vision and my baby. I couldn't deliver it without the support of all the people you know well, but to have it recognized as part of a global movement of remote work is really gratifying and exciting, and it validates everything that I've been trying to achieve here.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Remote Work Europe started as Remote Work Spain, a Facebook group about two, I want to say two and a half years ago now. It then grew sideways into initially Remote Work UK, then we added Sweden, then we added all these other country groups. Now we've got loads of them Ireland, italy, germany, czech Republic, netherlands, turkey, cyprus. I'm sure I've missed some Belgium. If we haven't got a Remote Work Europe community for you yet, then let me know, because I'm looking for country leaders in new areas. But we are now coming of age. It feels like that we're being recognized among this global list of really amazing people, and that's why I'm proud to be among them.

Speaker 1: 3:38

There are lots of people who've been involved in the Remote Work Europe journey, and a special shout out to Mina Dedica, who leads our Turkey community and obviously does loads of other interesting activities within the remote work space, which is why she's been recognised in her own right. We have podcast alumni Pilar Orti, in fact, my oldest podcasting buddy, who finally made it onto this show earlier this season I don't know why it took so long. Lena Alia from season one, I think. Michelle Coulson from Remote Rebellion, who joined us last year. In fact, judging the contest, we had some podcast alums as well. Chris Serra from Nomad List was here last year and right back in season one we had my lovely remote buddy, rowena Hennigan, and, realizing that that was about two years ago, we had Runa on the Rowena Hennigan and, realising that that was about two years ago, we had Ruina on the show. I think it's high time we had her back again. So definitely there's a great alignment between the Remote Work Europe community and the people being recognised in this report. And actually our next guest episode coming up in May 2024 is with Lorraine Charles from N from namal, and I'm really looking forward to sharing that interview with you about the amazing work she is doing with refugees and remote work. So somebody else again who's been recognized rightly so in this list of remote work influencers.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Now it's a great privilege to know so many of these people, either online or I know their work. Many of them I've met in real life, even if I haven't got them on the podcast yet. Some of them have been guests in various Facebook communities or on remoteworkeuropeeu. We've got webinars and broadcasts with many of these people. There are people I've interviewed for different publications outside of this podcast and there's people whose work. I know people.

Speaker 1: 5:29

I'm looking at that list and thinking I wonder when we're going to meet in real life, because we've bumped into one another online for so long, or I've read this stuff and also among that 150, I'm really pleased to say, there were people I'd never heard of, people I still haven't managed to connect with. Because that's what it's about. It's about surfacing what's really happening right now. Who's making moves, who's up and coming, what publications are starting to take remote work seriously, what big employers, which organisations? It's really showing a snapshot of how this space has evolved and come of age, and it's a privilege to be among them. All these people who are innovating, enabling and accelerating remote work worldwide are part of a very exciting movement. And that idea of a coming of age is particularly resonant with me right now because I'm coming up on an important anniversary.

Speaker 1: 6:33

I don't know quite when to celebrate it, because it was definitely some time in the summer of 1999 that I worked, not remotely, for the last time. Let's put it another way At some point that summer I went home from somebody else's office for the last time. I had put it another way At some point that summer I went home from somebody else's office for the last time. I had no idea at the time that was what was happening. I was in early to mid-pregnancy. At that point I'd had some run-ins with health issues during the pregnancy but I was fairly certain that I would go on working.

Speaker 1: 7:02

My plan was to, like a lot of people with a decent maternity package but keen to make the most of it. I had planned to work right up to the last minute before the scheduled arrival of my millennium baby in the new year and I obviously hoped to take as much as possible of that paid leave after the fact rather than before it. But best laid plans, as health and pregnancy matters tend to be, you plan and they laugh and things changed and I ended up having to take medical leave a lot earlier and I was unable to go back. I did actually try to do some work from home for a while. It wasn't a huge success. The technology just wasn't there. I had things brought around for me to sign and stuff like that, but it really wasn't great and I did have to spend a lot of the pregnancy literally lying flat, which wasn't very conducive to doing anything at all Anything except worrying about the future, because I had no idea how I was going to manage, whether there'd be anything left of my maternity entitlement, how I was going to succeed financially.

Speaker 1: 8:09

All my plans had been to resume work, and we were actually lucky enough to have a nursery, a creche, on site at the university, which was incredibly rare, and I had a place booked in there. But while I was on medical leave, I not only had HR throwing the book at me, my role had been in what was then called equal opportunities, so it often brought me head to head with people who were only too glad to apply the letter of the rules once they had the opportunity, but also during that time. One thing that this particular university was famous for was this endless game of musical chairs, and they moved my entire department to another building in another town, which was a half hour drive from the one with the crash in it. So I could just see all my plans for my reasonably organized and baby-focused professional life were just going out of the window, and I had no idea what this new phase of my life, this new millennium, this new life stage, was going to look like for me, how on earth I was going to continue. So, as well as worrying.

Speaker 1: 9:12

I ended up having lots of conversations and found myself in the position of being able to write a business plan for a family friend who wanted to develop a new service within her research agency. Now, it was a vertical plan to basically replace a category of supplier that they depended on, but to do it in a completely new way, without going into too many details. We were going to use that exciting new thing called the internet, because I was pretty sure that was going to use that exciting new thing called the internet, because I was pretty sure that was going to be massive and it definitely seemed worth having a try anyway at doing this service in a completely new way. But it was also important to do it quite discreetly at first, with a certain amount of plausible deniability if it simply didn't work, and also separating the brands and teams completely. So as such, it suited everybody for that person that is me to do this from home, and I had no idea what my health and mobility would be like once baby actually came along. As it was, I was fine. I just needed a baby to me, sorted everything. But I didn't know and I had no idea what my life would be like in terms of being able to manage and be a parent and do all of that mind-blowingly difficult new stuff which everybody seemed to manage. But you know, it's a pretty big deal at first and I knew that working from home would be the perfect solution for me.

Speaker 1: 10:39

I saw myself as fairly techie. Me and my husband were one of those weird people who had a computer in their house already and had an internet service. It was fairly easy to get a second phone line put in and in fact that set the pattern for the next 25 years of constantly being the early adopter, pushing the limits, trying to find the next thing, trying to figure out the direction the technology was going in and set up this business. And it did become a business and we did end up hiring people. Initially I had well, at first a couple of people worked in my house. I think we had thought that if the business worked out then the next stage would be to rent an office somewhere, because that's what you did when you grew a business. But there would never seem to be quite the right moment for that. And the people who were interested in working with me, they also liked the idea of working from home and by then the internet was becoming more accessible and affordable. We no longer had to unplug the phone to dial up and get it, or at least we could afford to have another phone line and eventually combine phone lines into ISDN. Eventually we even had ADSL and that was terribly exciting. We had Virgin Cable Broadband, which gave us something like 30 meg Life-changing. But it was all coming together and the business was growing and I was able to hire people who wanted to work in the same way.

Speaker 1: 12:00

But back then in year 2000 there was no I mean there were not 150 influencers. I did not know one other person who worked from home. We didn't call it working remotely then, because working from home was the only option. If you'd seen these cumbersome beige boxes that occupied an entire room in my house, I mean there was more work stuff than there was baby stuff going on. The new business took up more room than the newborn, no question, but it did mean that I could be in the same home as her and I could feed her and care for her. I had childcare, but it was very flexible and arranged around work. But I couldn't ask anybody else how they did it. There were no blogs, there were no podcasts. There were no remote work organizations, there were no employers of record, there was nobody I could look at for a model of how to do this, because it wasn't a thing and really it was a secret.

Speaker 1: 12:52

I mean, I certainly didn't tell clients straight up that I was working from home, generally speaking, because we were an auxiliary service, we didn't tend to meet people. We got hired online and I would do a couple of projects with a client and really then the suggestion of a meeting was tended to be about relationship building and consolidation rather than winning the work. So it was kind of after the fact it was no, no, I'll come to you, that's really not a problem, and I would go up to their plush West End offices. We worked for some lovely brands in commercial research and user experience. And then the question of so where are you based? Would come up, and that's when you know it wasn't like a big reveal, but I was. Oh, you know, I didn't realize it wasn't common knowledge. But I work from home and the person who managed your project, she lives over there and the interviews who worked on it are located here and there, and at first you know that was the first that many of them knew about it and it was.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Sometimes it was a huge talking point, sometimes it was really not of interest, or sometimes people would say something like I could never do, that it wouldn't suit me, or they never let us do that here. Other people were really curious and even quite wistful and envious. People like young mums my sort of age at the time were the ones who had dropped their kid in a crash before eight o'clock that morning to get the early train into that office where they would spend the rest of the day. Some of them, you know, were really. I wish I was somewhere I could help them work the way that we did, but I couldn't. There wasn't anything we could do and all I could do was carry on providing a service to them, build a business, establish credibility with them and their associates and offer more people who we were employing the chance to live and work the way that we did.

Speaker 1: 14:45

And then, of course, that business gave us the chance to choose something completely different and relocate to Spain, having moved from Inland into the suburbs, and we just kept going looking for the kind of family lifestyle that we wanted. We had two daughters by then and again, there weren't the role models. There weren't any influences to follow the people. When I got to Spain I did come across more family businesses, because at this point my husband was also working in the business and they were small businesses but they tended to be. They certainly weren't in the remote sector, they were very much sort of local businesses, face-to-face, and we faced big regulatory problems because we're talking about a time before there were any digital netman visas or employers a record or anything else. We were all Europeans at the time, which should have made things a lot easier and it certainly compared to the hassle of trying to sort out schools and housing and everything like that.

Speaker 1: 15:41

I thought the business would be the most straightforward bit to have continuity on. Once we figured out that the internet was working at the house in Spain, we thought everything would be fine. It was literally weeks before I went that suddenly the lawyers got involved and said what she's moving where and through a spanner in the works that I hadn't even known existed about permanent establishment and corporation tax, and by that time we were committed. We had deposits paid on schools and houses and I think we had just let the house that we owned in the UK we were in. Basically there was no going back.

Speaker 1: 16:19

So I found myself agreeing that within three months of moving to Spain I would set up a limited company in Spain in order to consult to my previous employers. We'd agreed, you know, on a remuneration that would reflect going self-employed and being a consultant. But I hadn't factored in what it would mean to start a limited company there and in my naivety I said yeah, of course, thinking it can't possibly be any more difficult or expensive than starting a new company in the UK, which was 50 quid company sales done. Anybody who has lived in Spain for the last decade or so is probably laughing hopefully sympathetically now at my naivety. But you could completely understand it from the parent company's point of view that they had a huge risk and when, when their um tax lawyer got involved and said so hang on, the managing director of this subsidiary company is moving to another country, there's no way you can do that and she can just be self-employed. We have to create that distance and so we came up with this structure where I would be an employed director for four days a year and return to the UK to have board meetings, and it was a director's fee separate to consulting through a limited company in Spain.

Speaker 1: 17:31

I mean, it was incredibly expensive and cumbersome and horrible. And even years later, when I had to liquidate that company, it was incredibly expensive and cumbersome and horrible and I would never, with a gun to my head, form a Spanish limited company again. But I had no choice at the time. There was no Estonian e-residency, there was no employer of record, none of this infrastructure existed. We just threw the kids and the laptops in a Land Rover and went to Spain. Our passports didn't stop us and we'd found a place with internet. So you know, we only went for a six-month trial each way and obviously that worked out well.

Speaker 1: 18:08

But we went through some difficult years in those early days because as soon as we arrived in Spain, it felt like the financial crisis bit down hard and certainly a lot of those little local businesses, a lot of the expat community, the people who'd had their little bars and things like that some of those just went to the wall overnight. We had sterling Euro parity at one point, which put massive dents in what we thought was the lifestyle that we were going to have, and I think we went through those first few years wondering if we'd done the right thing. Should we stay? Seeing the lifestyle benefits for our young girls, knowing what we loved about the Mediterranean climate, the family atmosphere, the outdoor lifestyle, and really desperately wanting to make it work the outdoor lifestyle, and really desperately wanting to make it work. But the one thing that was steady was the work itself, because I was still working remotely for a UK company and the only sadness was that I couldn't help anybody else do the same. There simply weren't the opportunities. I saw people losing their restaurants and their B&Bs and there was nothing I could do to help them, and rolling forward a whole financial crisis.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Later, the other side of COVID, of course, things were different, and that was when I was able to start. Well, it started with remote work Spain, obviously. Here I am, and this is where I knew people who were looking to work in the same way that we did, people who've maybe had a taste of it. During lockdown, the whole world, zeitgeist and conversation around remote work changed completely then. Anyway, by then I was freelancing full time, mostly tech journalism, focusing around collaboration and borderless business. So it was very much a kind of natural progression on from that to be helping people to work remotely using that stuff by then, even smaller villages in Spain had full Fibra broadband, which was life-changing having been through that revolution twice Because when we first arrived in Spain it was back to dial-up and desperately trying to get Wi-Fi signals from strange locations and doing site surveys and speed tests before we could sign a lease anywhere, but simply getting the cabling done and that's obviously. Spain is now extremely well connected, even the smaller villages all plugged in.

Speaker 1: 20:28

What people needed was the work and they'd had a taste of it during lockdown. Some of them or they'd seen, they'd seen everything from sitcoms to the news talking about zoom parties and work online and work from home and people in their pajamas and doing their banana bread or whatever people did during lockdown. I don't. For me, it was one of the strangest times of business as usual in so many ways and trying to help people.

Speaker 1: 20:51

But the remote work Spain community came out of that time when people were seeking work and I saw some people asking about working remotely and asking in the wrong places or the wrong way and thinking well, I know these jobs exist now. There are places that are working. Some of them are still fully remote. That may or may not be for keeps. There are jobs, there are opportunities and I wanted to help people find them. And that was how Remote Work Spain came about. And then a year or so ago, we expanded sideways and became Remote Work Europe, because people were joining the Spain community and saying, yeah, okay, but what about the self-employed taxes in wherever they lived? And of course I hadn't got a clue. I didn't want to be giving bad advice and the scene was exploding so rapidly post-pandemic. Even employers of record like remotecom, who claimed the best URL and produced the remote influencers report for the fourth year running now. They certainly weren't a thing when I first moved to Spain and I think they did exist before the pandemic, but they've exploded in popularity and access because people want to work from anywhere, in popularity and access because people want to work from anywhere.

Speaker 1: 22:05

And we have other changes, like digital nomad visas. More than 50% of countries in the world now have some form of visa where you can bring the work with you and go and live there, or in many cases it's up to a year, and there are various. They're all slightly different. They all got different qualifying criteria. You've usually got to have a certain qualifying income and or health insurance and basically things to prove that you have got the work to bring with you and you're not going to be either taking a local job or being any kind of burden on the state. But there are so many choices now. If you have the work that is not tied to a particular location, if it's knowledge work, you can do on a little laptop, no big beige boxes like I had in the new millennium. You can literally take your work and go into so many places all around the world. Whether you want to be a digital nomad, whether you want to be a remote worker who wants to settle, live, invest emotionally and financially and practically in a new culture, a new country. If you want to raise your family as a third culture environment where your kids become natively bilingual in ways that you never dreamed of.

Speaker 1: 23:17

We have that infrastructure now and to be able to talk about it, to be able to write about it, to be able to share it with the world, is an incredible privilege, even the way that I do it. Like when I needed another limited company, I was still living in Spain, but I learned a thing or two and there was no way I was ever going to form Sociedad Limitada again not with a gun to my head, but I needed a limited company. However, by then, this was, let me think, 2017, we had Estonian e-residency and so I was able to become an Estonian e-resident and then form my business trading in euros in the eurozone, completely online, without going anywhere near Estonia, which I've since been to more than once and very much like it. But at the time, I just needed a limited company in a hurry because it was not easy probably easier now, but in 2017 I wanted to work for a US-based startup and they just couldn't figure out how to pay me or write a contract with me as a European freelancer. So, yeah, can you just spin up an entity? It's like, yeah, where you are, maybe that's cheap and easy. For me it's not. But Estonia to the rescue, and I've traded as an Estonian resident with a private limited company in Estonia ever since, and I'm now proud to be an envoy and representative of that scheme and help other people do the same and discuss the benefits of it.

Speaker 1: 24:47

All of this stuff I could never have dreamed of. 25 years ago, it was absolutely unthinkable that you could up sticks and go and live in another country, that you could have your business in a third country, that obviously it was unthinkable that the country of my birth would no longer be part of the EU. That's a whole separate podcast. But the fact that that meant it didn't constrain me, the fact that I haven't even got around to changing my passport, because I have permanent residency in the EU and my business has its identity and residency here and I can trade with people in the US, in Asia, in Europe, in the UK, anywhere all done completely online through digital signatures, thanks to Estonia. So obviously it is the technology which underpins all this and makes it possible and certainly when I looked at unplugging the phone to dial up and get the internet back in the turn of the millennium. Of course the technology is the most visible and obvious change, but that technological change has taken place in a context of societal change, of cultural change, of geopolitical change.

Speaker 1: 25:54

The world is a very, very different place to what it was before. There are some ways you could say it's less global, that in some ways things are becoming more balkanized and fragmented in different ways politically, and yet we still don't have a way of sending money around the world quickly and easily. This was long before the Bitcoin white paper had even been thought about, and even though that was many years ago. We still don't have any wide adoption of a means of sending value the same way that we can send information and data around the world so instantaneously. So there are still regulatory roadblocks, even though we have so many of the tools in place now.

Speaker 1: 26:33

And when people come to me and say I want to do this, I want to live here, I want to do this sort of business with people over there, and it might be this kind of regulated industry, it might require this kind of license or this kind of physical product logistics, there is always a way through it. I don't have the answers, but I do have some overview and I'm trying to, through Remote Work Europe, develop connections with experts in different areas so I can say all right, you need to talk to these guys about possibly any resident business or business that might be regulated better in this jurisdiction, or you might want to go and look at this visa and try and piece that puzzle together, because we don't yet live in a world where it's truly borderless and people can move around and do whatever they want. But it's getting there and it's so much better than it was and if you do knowledge-based work and if you have the freedom in the sense that you don't have the ties, you have some steady form of income, then you can travel to so much of the world now and live and work there legally. You don't have to pretend you're on holiday and hide your laptop at the border any longer. It's just a thin laptop as well, and you can get your work done and you can see the world. And it is most unbelievable thing that not only have we got this 150 influencers named in this report, they are influencing a continually growing community.

Speaker 1: 28:00

In June I'm heading to the Bansko Nomad Festival, as regular listeners will know from the interview with Uwe a few weeks ago, and I will be speaking there about how the collaboration and communication environment has changed. So all you tech heads who want to hear about what it was like trying to do video conferencing on dial-up or early ADSL you want to come and have a laugh at that? Then I invite you to come on a journey through all the different messenger apps of my life. And of course, the technology is the most visible thing, but it's changed the way we communicate and collaborate, all the things that got funded during the explosion of the pandemic, all the different apps. Somebody asked in the Spain group recently well, what's an alternative to Teams? Is there anything else I can do? Video conferencing on? And 200 comments later. There are just so many of these things and I've had a chance to use and write about an awful lot of them.

Speaker 1: 28:57

It's a fascinating space. It hasn't finished evolving and I certainly never dreamed 25 years ago how central the whole idea of working remotely would become to my life, to my family's life, to the lives of those I cared about, nor that I would actually be able to work helping other people achieve and unlock just that in their own lives. As this space has become not only a subject in its own right, it's become increasingly differentiated. We have remote workers who are self-employed, who are entrepreneurs, who are consultants, who are employees, who are academics, who are researchers, who are working for themselves, working for global organizations, people who are putting portfolio lifestyles together, blending all of the different elements that they truly want and choose. Yeah, it's not always easy. It's better for some people if somebody else comes along and decides all that, but for those who want it, the possibility is there. Now this space has truly come of age. Quarter of a century I've been working this way. I'm so glad to see the opportunities opening up to so many more people and even to see my own millennium baby coming of age, herself laughing hysterically at the idea of her mother being called an influencer of any kind. She and her sister have grown up a long way from the country they were born in and they are truly bilingual young Europeans who have the world at their feet and I'm proud to be part of shaping that future for them.

Speaker 1: 30:31

It's not perfect. There are still barriers to overcome. There are still lots of problems economically, geopolitically, technological to overcome. But remote work is a movement. Remote Work Europe is part of that movement. If you're listening to this, you're part of it too. So thank you, thank you for your time and attention, for your support, for spreading the word.

Speaker 1: 30:50

If you share this podcast with somebody who hasn't heard it, then maybe we can open the doors that little bit wider, shine a bit more of a light into the future, because the future is not just freelance. It's flexible, it's fun, it's remote, it's location independent and it's whatever you make it. You've been listening to the Remote Work Europe podcast brought to you by remoteworkeuropeeu. We bring you community information, training, coaching and more to help you achieve your location-independent lifestyle in Europe and beyond, as an employee, entrepreneur, freelancer or whatever you want to be. If you enjoyed the show, please like, rate and comment and subscribe to our feed wherever you get your podcasts. If you really liked it, we'd appreciate a review as well. Here's to your remote work success in Europe and around the world.