Ben and Emma: Our journey and why Digital freedom works for us
In November 2015, we left New Zealand with a one way ticket to South America with just one aim, to spend our time travelling and volunteering. We left great jobs, good money and all the commodities that entails, but had no space for anything else and wanted to shift the balance.
We quickly fell in love with our new nomadic lifestyle and so using the knowledge from our previous corporate jobs we created an online business and registered it in NZ. At BE Business we work with clients in New Zealand and all around the world while we get to travel and enjoy experiences over possessions. We are consultants that care about all aspects of our clients online strategy with a focus on customer experience from website development to digital marketing.
We are extremely privileged to have created our business and be able to work online giving us this opportunity, so we made a choice that it should be used for something more than living in a house and buying more things for us.
Using online platforms has been key to finding opportunities for work and to volunteer. Through them we have developed and helped projects within communities throughout Latin America, and have now embarked on the same in Asia. Everything we do is about empowerment and developing projects using the tenants of social enterprise.
We are very aware of not wanting to take away from the local economy but adding our skills to help businesses develop and become more successful. Managing guest houses and hostels, working with an adventure tourism company in Costa Rica, volunteering at wildlife centres, teaching English in Colombia, and setting up a fairtrade chocolate company in Peru are just some of the diverse projects we have been lucky enough to be involved in.
Embracing digital freedom has provided us with the opportunity to work from anywhere, the world is our office as long as we have connectivity! It's easier than you might imagine, even in the remote Amazon Jungle while volunteering at a monkey sanctuary we were still able to work on our business and international client projects. Having a business and travelling don't have to be mutually exclusive.
We are familiar with a plethora of platforms both from the business side and utilising them as digital nomad tools. Gig Exchange really resonates with our values and we are hugely excited to be partnering with them as Gig Workers.
A bit about us in NZ
In New Zealand Ben worked in Process Improvement, Service Delivery, Product Development and Marketing Management, and completed his MBA in 2008. And he also once had a comedy radio show. Seriously.
Emma was an Account Director working in the corporate communications industry focusing on business planning, building sales strategies, creating marketing campaigns and understanding how to generate new business opportunities.
