I run an Olot agency from Thailand and support goes through one inbox

Remote work looks great in photos.

The photo never shows the inbox.

This November I worked from Thailand. Foxnice is still in Olot. On Instagram, that's a laptop, a view and a coffee. In real life, it's six hours of time difference. Clients who start writing just as you're finishing your day. Messages that land while you're asleep.

What made it workable wasn't the location. It was something we'd been building for a while, very unglamorously: one support inbox.

In October we had set up a new ticket platform, connected to a dedicated client mailbox. This month, communication with one of our clubs moved entirely to support. Not to me. Not to Yeray. To the inbox.

It sounds like a tiny change. I think it's the opposite of how small agencies usually work.

Everyone writes to whoever they know

In a small agency, clients write to the person they know. A personal email, a message to your mobile, a reply to some ancient thread nobody remembers.

That can work when everyone is in the same office at the same hours. It breaks the moment one of you is on the other side of the world. A message sent to one person at the wrong hour just sits there. Like a letter in the postbox of a house that's on holiday.

With one inbox, it matters much less who's awake. Whoever is working picks it up. The time difference stops being a delay and starts being coverage.

This month we also started switching to a new telephony provider. Same logic. The company number should reach the company, not depend on one person's phone.

Remote work isn't a place you go. It's a system that works when you're not there.

The hard part is me

What I have to let go of is being the person clients write to directly.

I understand why that feels good. It feels like good service. It feels like being needed.

But I think "needed" is the opposite of free. If every client depends on me personally, I can't be anywhere else. And Foxnice can't grow beyond what I can answer myself, which is a pretty low ceiling for a company.

Letting the inbox take that role means accepting that clients will sometimes get an answer from Yeray, or from the system, not from me. I think that's how it should be. The client cares about the answer, not the name under it.

Working from Thailand isn't the goal. For me it's a test. Does the way we work match what we say we want? Freedom before size.

Foxnice has never had investors. That freedom only means something if the business doesn't need me in a chair in Olot every day. Patient money buys time. Systems decide whether you can actually use it.

I was far away this November.

The goal is that clients don't need to know, because they write to Foxnice, not to me.

P.S. If you're a client and you just found out from this post, it worked.