Video transcriptThis week sees the end of a glorious three months travelling from the UK to Greece and back in a tiny Fiat 500. We’ve covered over 7000kms, through ten countries but this wasn’t just a holiday. I wanted to know if I could take my business on the road, keep it running and maintain an income while we were travelling and if you want to know if this worked and what the positives and negatives were, keep watching.
I’m Jo Gakonga, I’ve had an online teacher education business at ELT-Training.com for over a decade and it’s been my full time income for more than two years now. I put out a new video and a newsletter every week, run a group Video Creation programme and sell online courses – but could I do all of this on the road and what were the pros and cons?
Let’s start with the positives. That’s pretty easy… I love travel, I love seeing new places, meeting new people and I LOVE the warm clear waters of the Adriatic. Being able to work for part of the day or week and spend the rest of my time visiting ancient sites, interesting places, walking up some amazing mountains and diving into water so clear it’s like swimming in glass. That was incredible.
Going on a road trip that’s totally flexible with just an idea of a direction so that we could stay longer or try different things as we went along. That’s my idea of a life well lived. We didn’t move too fast, either. We usually stayed a few nights or up to about a week in places, so it wasn’t too rushed and travelling days were limited. This was all good.
It wasn’t just about the travel though. There were some great practical things about the business, too. I’m usually based in Sydney so being on the same side of the planet as most of my customers with time zones etc made life much easier, especially for my group Video Creation programme.
The other positive about the business was that although my work-life balance shifted towards LIFE, I’ve had a lot of great ideas while we’ve been away and if anything, this rest has made me really hungry to get down to all sorts of big projects that I’ve been planning – so watch this space!
I guess that I should say at this point that I couldn’t have done this without my partner – it’s lovely to be able to share a trip like this, he made life all very normal for me, and he did all the heavy lifting in looking for fantastic places for us to stay and booking them – and in doing most of the driving. He was also brilliant at making sure that I didn’t do get bogged down in work when there was so much to enjoy. I know I’m lucky that we can do this together.
Any negatives then? Well, a few of course, but they were relatively minor. High on the list - Tech problems.
WiFi was the big one. I knew this might be an issue. I can be really flexible but I can’t work without being connected to the net and although all the places we stayed had Wi-fi, speeds varied quite a bit. Mostly, I could deal with this by connecting to my phone but being out of the EU in Albania was a challenge I just hadn’t thought about. It wasn’t difficult to get a new SIM, but it was a minor hurdle to get over.
Getting power to devices was also a bit tricky. I knew we’d need EU adapters but then Italy has different plugs to everywhere else, so the adapters ended up building up and up like some kind of kids construction toy.
Just when you think you’ve got Wi-Fi AND power sorted, you THEN start getting pop-ups from all your sites asking you to verify who you are as they try to make sense of your movements. Not sure how many times I’ve verified myself to YouTube on this trip, but it’s a LOT!
So that’s the tech… and the other thing I suppose is that although I’ve prided myself on being able be flexible and work anywhere but not having a regular place to film made life a bit more challenging. I’ve adapted and filmed in different places, but I miss my lights and my nice green wall at home and I’m looking forward to recording there again.
So that’s it… except for the Big Question, was it sustainable with the business? Well, yes. And in fact, I had my best quarter ever on the site while we were away, so I’m seriously thinking that we should stay on the road forever! Well, maybe not. I AM looking forward to being back in my own bed – but I’m also hatching plans to buy a campervan when we get back to Australia, so watch this space.
And finally, if you’ve got this far and you’re thinking that you’d like a bit more freedom and passive income in YOUR life, check out my
Video Creation for Educators programme. It’s not a dream- I’m living it. So can you.
