Running a company from 10,000 kilometres away

Ten thousand kilometres sounds like a lot.

For a server, it's a rounding error.

That's the first thing you learn running a company from Thailand when its clients are in Catalonia. The websites don't know where you are. The bookings don't know. The club fees go out on the day they're due, wherever I happen to be sitting.

What does know where I am is the clock.

What changes

Thailand is several hours ahead of Spain. That sounds like a detail. It isn't.

When my morning starts, Girona is still asleep. When Girona's afternoon gets busy, my day is ending. So the hours where we overlap are few, and they're precious. I can't spend them on things that could have been an email.

That has changed how I work more than any tool.

Before, if something wasn't clear, I'd just ask. Someone would answer in two minutes. Now a vague question can cost half a day. So I've had to learn to write things properly the first time. Who, what, by when, and what "done" looks like.

It's humbling. I thought I was a clear communicator. Distance showed me I was a nearby communicator.

Distance doesn't create problems in a company. It just stops hiding the ones you already had.

The other thing that changes is what I'm for. When you're in the room, it's easy to become the person everything passes through. I've been that person in my own company for longer than I'd like. From 10,000 kilometres away, being the bottleneck isn't a bad habit. It's a broken company.

So things have to work without me looking at them. Not because I've read a book about it. Because the alternative is answering at the wrong time of day, every day, forever.

What doesn't change

Responsibility.

That's the part people get wrong when they hear "working from Thailand". They picture a laptop on a beach. In practice, a client in Girona doesn't care which country I'm in. They care that the website is up and that somebody answers.

If something breaks, it's still ours. If a promise was made, it's still mine. The distance changes the time zone of the problem, not who owns it.

Yeray doesn't change either. More than twenty years of trusting each other is what makes this possible in the first place. You can't run a company from far away with a partner you need to keep an eye on. You can do it with one you trust to tell you when you're wrong.

And the model doesn't change. Foxnice has always been a small company with no investors, paid for by clients. That's exactly the kind of company that can be run from anywhere. Nobody needs me in a meeting room to justify a valuation.

What I'd tell anyone thinking about it

Don't do it to escape your company. It will come with you. All of it.

Do it if you're ready to write things down, give up being the hero of every fire, and accept that your best hours are often the ones when nobody else is awake.

Ten thousand kilometres is a long way.

It's still shorter than the distance between a company that depends on you and one that doesn't.

P.S. No, I'm not posting a photo of the view. The view is a spreadsheet.