Working On The Road

While living the Nomadic lifestyle, I have been asked two questions over and over. One is “How did you do it?” The second one is “What do you do?” The former pertains to how we went from our 4700 square foot home to our 40 square foot trailer and transitioned into being Nomads. The latter really pertains to Working On The Road…and that is the topic of discussion.

You would think that being asked “what do you do?” would be an easy one to answer. If you are manager of a store, you say “I manage a store.” If you are an architect, you can answer “I work for an architectural firm.” Or if you are a cab driver, you would answer “I drive a cab.”

However, when you are an entrepreneur who specializes in business strategy and tactics, synchronization of resources both domestically and internationally, identifying opportunity and creating favorable junctures of circumstance as well as directly advising business and entertainment professionals, at the end of that description I commonly get the blank stare. The deer in the headlights look. So…you will commonly hear me say “I am a consultant.” Most of the population is happy with that answer.

For my reading audience, I will go a little further. I have ownership in multiple privately held companies. With this ownership, I serve on multiple Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards. I maintain leadership roles and management of people and process. But my main function is to identify opportunity, do the research, develop an implementable strategy to achieve the objective, assemble the team and execute the strategy. I do this for my own organizations and also have an organization that does this for other companies.

Shifting to the Nomadic lifestyle has been a challenge in this area. The office I left behind was around 500 square feet with two desks, books shelves, a recliner, network based color laser printer/copier, a file server I designed and built and my central command center. That is what one business professional called it after seeing it and it just stuck. It was a fairly powerful computer driving 3 high-definition monitors that spanned the width of my desk I used for computers.

I had a semi-complex network setup that was fed by fiber optic cable and all communications were voice over IP-based. Everything was on battery backups and redundancy in communication and computing was all in place.

I had to condense all of that functionality into a single laptop and wireless inkjet printer. It was not easy, but I did it. And all of the tasks above are now executed with the utilization of a solid laptop, my Windows 8.1 Phone, a reliable internet connection at each stop, good mobile phone service at each new place and being within an hour of a regional airport.

It took me about a month to really work out all of the kinks with data redundancy, carrying my voice over IP communications with me, proper utilization of cloud services and, above all, data security. Afterall, I co-developed a patent on data security. It would be counter-intuitive for it not to be a priority. In today’s day and age, it is imperative. Any traveler with sensitive data should have this as a concern. Sufficed to say, should my laptop ever grow legs and walk away, no one could access, much less find, my valuable and sensitive data.

Working On The Road really relies upon efficiency through proper tool utilization, forethought in planning your processes, prioritization of tasks and designing a schedule that can be flexible with your surroundings. If you get your arms wrapped around those items, you will find Working On The Road to be a lot easier.

If any of my fellow travelers are stuck or would like some input or tips on what I’m doing that works, go to our Contact Page and send me a direct message using our contact form.

So…what do I do? I am a consultant with a laptop, a smart phone and a plan. Safe Travels.