Technical Skills for the Nomadic Entrepreneur

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The con­cept and prac­tice of being a nomadic entre­pre­neur has been around for decades under one name or another, mak­ing use of what­ever com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools were avail­able at the time. Granted, the type of careers that a nomadic entre­pre­neur could develop even a few years ago was lim­ited by the vari­ety, flex­i­bil­ity and robust­ness of the avail­able com­mu­ni­ca­tions technologies.

In the 1990’s, dur­ing the time when the Inter­net was just begin­ning to be adopted by con­sumers, the two typ­i­cal careers that made for excel­lent loca­tion inde­pen­dent careers were writ­ing and com­puter pro­gram­ming. Writ­ers of all kinds; busi­ness, fic­tion, non-fiction, copy­writ­ers, grant writ­ers etc., could (and still do) write from any­where in the world and access edi­tors, pub­lish­ers and clients by phone and fax.

Com­puter coders and pro­gram­mers were in high demand and short sup­ply so could often request unusual work­ing con­di­tions. I was liv­ing in New Zealand dur­ing the 1990’s and heard of a com­puter pro­gram­mer who worked for one of the Gov­ern­ment depart­ments. He decided he wanted to become loca­tion inde­pen­dent so arranged a con­tract that allowed him to con­tinue his job with the Gov­ern­ment depart­ment he had been work­ing for while trav­el­ing through Europe. So with his com­puter, his soft­ware, and an Inter­net con­nec­tion, he was free to travel and work.

As the range of tech­nolo­gies grew and the Inter­net improved, the num­ber of poten­tial careers and busi­nesses that could be nomadic exploded. Today, in our mod­ern “Infor­ma­tion Soci­ety”, there are rel­a­tively few busi­nesses or careers that couldn’t be mostly, if not com­pletely, loca­tion independent.

The great thing is about this new world of work is that not every busi­ness or career that can be a nomadic enter­prise, needs to be heav­ily depen­dent on sophis­ti­cated and com­pli­cated tech­nolo­gies. The type of tech­ni­cal skills and the depth of tech­ni­cal lit­er­acy you need to be a suc­cess­ful nomad or mobile entre­pre­neur depends on the type of busi­ness you want to run, the type of clients you want to attract, the services/products you plan to offer, and your tech­ni­cal com­fort zone.

There are still any num­ber of pro­fes­sions that can be run very prof­itably using tele­phone, fax, email, and maybe the occa­sional face-to-face. And there are many other enter­prises where the level of tech­ni­cal wiz­ardry you use runs the gam­bit from min­i­mally tech­ni­cal to highly tech­ni­cal, depend­ing on how tech­ni­cally lit­er­ate you want to get.

A friend of mine works for an eco­nomic con­sult­ing com­pany that has clients from across Canada. The con­sult­ing firm’s offices are located above a horse sta­ble in the rolling hill­sides of south­ern Ontario’s beau­ti­ful and very rural horse coun­try. High­speed Inter­net only arrived in the area a few years ago. They have a web­site, but it is only used as an access por­tal for some of the client’s mate­ri­als (in a pass­word pro­tected space). There is no mar­ket­ing on the web­site. New clients come through refer­rals, by rep­u­ta­tion, and by word of mouth.

The tech­nolo­gies these con­sul­tants use are phone, fax and email. Last year one of the employ­ees did set up a wiki for some col­lab­o­ra­tive work, but that is as tech­no­log­i­cally elab­o­rate as they get. Their ‘literacy’s’ are with the soft­ware (there is not much most of the employ­ees there don’t know about Excel and SPSS), their spe­cial­ized knowl­edge, and their expe­ri­ence. These literacy’s cre­ate a rather unique skill set that is in demand.

For the aver­age mobile enter­prise, basic tech­ni­cal skills needed would involve such things as:

• set­ting up a ‘show­case’ website/blog that can be used for mar­ket­ing and sales;
• an online pay­ment sys­tem, like PayPal;
• busi­ness man­age­ment tools for invoic­ing and scheduling;
• online bank­ing;
• an Internet-based phone, like Skype;
• other com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies, for fax­ing and access­ing the Internet;
• social media tech­nolo­gies, like Twit­ter and LinkedIn for mar­ket­ing and PR; and
• tech­nolo­gies that can auto­mate your business.

Most of these tech­nolo­gies offer a vari­ety of options that can be used (for exam­ple, Skype offers either just audio, or audio and video, and can even let you record your con­ver­sa­tion so could be used to record inter­views, sem­i­nars, etc.), are gen­er­ally free or low cost, and rel­a­tively easy to use (at least at the basic level).

Along with these basic online tech­nol­ogy skills, mobile enter­prises should also be fairly soft­ware and hard­ware lit­er­ate. By this I mean that mobile entre­pre­neurs should be com­fort­able using and trou­bleshoot­ing both the soft­ware and the hard­ware they need to use in order to run their busi­ness – includ­ing updat­ing the pro­grams, fix­ing any glitches that arise in using the pro­grams, cor­rect­ing any prob­lems that might develop with the hard­ware, etc.

Being a mobile entre­pre­neur doesn’t always pro­vide you with access to the sup­port sys­tems that are some­times needed to cor­rect tech­no­log­i­cal prob­lems. Try telling some­one in a lan­guage you don’t speak a word of that you can no longer access your mem­ory, or at least your computer’s memory.

Every mobile entre­pre­neur, tele-worker, remote worker, etc, should also develop the tech­no­log­i­cal skill that pro­vides them with the abil­ity to pre­serve the safety and secu­rity of their busi­ness infor­ma­tion, and of their client’s project information.

The more you run your busi­ness from your com­puter, the more vul­ner­a­ble you are to dev­as­tat­ing losses should your com­puter crash or get stolen. There are online sites that you can use to gen­er­ate and main­tain back­ups of your busi­ness that will also allow you to do file shar­ing of large files. Mozy and Drop­box are two online sites that pro­vide these ser­vices. These and other sites are well worth exploring.

If you use an Apple com­puter, their “Time Cap­sule” stor­age unit will allow you to store and retrieve your infor­ma­tion remotely.

Of course, this doesn’t pro­tect you if your com­puter gets stolen with all of your client’s project infor­ma­tion and your busi­ness infor­ma­tion on it. A sys­tem that pro­tects the con­tents of your com­puter, with­out lim­it­ing or restrict­ing your access to it, is worth devel­op­ing right from the very start.

Remem­ber to include at least the fol­low­ing in any backup sys­tem you create:

• a backup of invoices sent, paid and outstanding;
• busi­ness contacts;
• projects that have been com­pleted, that are cur­rently being worked on, and projects that are wait­ing to be started;
• income and other tax information;
• travel infor­ma­tion;
• mar­ket­ing materials;
• your web­site or blog;
• any con­tracts you have signed, and
• any other mate­r­ial that is cru­cial to recre­at­ing your busi­ness, should a dis­as­ter happen.

Other tech­nolo­gies that might be worth becom­ing famil­iar with or at least con­sider expand­ing into at some point in the future, include:

• col­lab­o­ra­tive tech­nolo­gies, like Wiki, that allow pro­fes­sion­als to work together on spe­cific projects,
• community-building tech­nolo­gies, like Ning.com, so that you can cre­ate a com­mu­nity of clients, sup­port­ers, poten­tial vir­tual employees,
• mul­ti­me­dia tech­nolo­gies, so you can tap into the grow­ing pref­er­ence for access­ing infor­ma­tion through audio record­ings, pho­tos, videos, pod­casts, etc.,
• vir­tual real­ity tech­nolo­gies, like Sec­ond Life. Uni­ver­si­ties and other large insti­tu­tions are begin­ning to exper­i­ment with vir­tual real­ity com­mu­ni­ties and environments.

Infor­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies, the tech­no­log­i­cal back­bone or struc­ture of all loca­tion inde­pen­dent and nomadic enter­prises, are con­stantly chang­ing. Old tech­nolo­gies are con­tin­u­ally being updated. New tech­nolo­gies are con­tin­u­ally enter­ing the mar­ket. Keep­ing up with these devel­op­ments is one of the nec­es­sary tasks of nomadic and loca­tion inde­pen­dent entrep