By: Frayed Passport
Building a remote business gives you the freedom to work from wherever you like. It’s perfect if you’re looking for flexibility to travel the world and do things you love without being tethered to a physical workplace.
Many of our readers are freelancers and contractors, which is a perfect setup for combining work with travel—but what if you want to go bigger? This article is for our readers who wish to build a company beyond what they can handle alone but that will still give them the freedom to explore our beautiful planet. Whether you hire employees, bring on contractors, or even outsource small tasks, hiring a team to work remotely is a great way to grow your business while on the road.
Let’s look at the core team you might find the most helpful as your company grows. Of course, your business model might call for different skills, but let this guide serve as a quick starting point!
Receptionist or Customer Service Provider
If you’re planning to travel outside of your primary customer base’s timezone, or if you’re country-hopping and traveling across multiple timezones, you’ll probably find it helpful to hire an additional person to answer questions and respond to feedback during peak hours. Even if your main contact method is email, which gives you a bit of leeway in time management, it still can get overwhelming—especially if your business takes off! An easy way to scale here is to find a virtual receptionist or customer service representative. You can hire someone outright or even work with a specialized company that will tailor their call response to your needs.
General Administrative Assistant
Any business involves a certain amount of administration—and there’s a lot that you can hand off to an administrative assistant that will free up your time and energy for other projects. A few examples:
- Recording receipts and business expenses
- Answering basic inquiries or reading and forwarding messages to the proper person on your team
- Managing your calendar and setting up meetings
- Performing research and compiling information about upcoming meetings, events, conferences, and more
There are lots of options for hiring a virtual assistant to help with your administrative tasks—and as with customer service personnel, you can hire someone outright, find an independent contractor, or even work with a company that will match you with an assistant.
Accountant
Staying on top of your finances can be challenging, especially if your business is flourishing! If you want to travel the world while running a growing company, you might find it even more annoying to stay on top of what’s happening with your money.
An accountant is particularly beneficial to have on hand when tax season arrives—but they can also support you throughout the rest of the year. Your business and personal finances can become more complicated if you’re a digital nomad or if you’re running a business in another country. An accountant can help you navigate tax resident questions and much more to ensure your bases are covered.
Related: Read our digital nomad tax guide!
Marketer
Marketing your company is a must if you want it to grow. While you might be able to handle the promotional work yourself at first, you’ll find that it can become a full-time job much more quickly than even customer service or accounting. If you don’t have the time or bandwidth to focus on marketing, you will stagnate…or fail outright.
Finding a marketer, even to assist with basic tasks, can be a major asset for your business. Marketers handle so much more than just posting on social media—they can help develop your communications and outreach strategy, stay on top of trends and news to help your company succeed, find areas of opportunity in untapped or underserved markets, and of course, create a distinctive and consistent voice and brand for your products and services.
Payroll Specialist
If you hire permanent employees, you must of course guarantee that they get paid on time! Not only that, but you’ll also need to make sure the necessary taxes are withheld—and if you’re paying people in different countries, this all can get complicated quickly.
A payroll specialist can help, ensuring you remain compliant and get everyone paid when and how much they should. For a newly growing company with only a few team members, you may only need a payroll specialist on an as-needed basis rather than worrying about bringing one on full-time.
HR Manager
Going beyond a payroll specialist, you might find it more beneficial to work with an HR manager to handle all of your human resources needs. You might think this is only necessary for larger businesses, but having someone manage the HR work even for a small company can be worthwhile. Their job is to protect your business and protect your employees—they’ll make sure you stay compliant with relevant employment laws, handle interpersonal issues and liaise between management and employees, help hire and train new team members, and much more.
Now, you might find that your company has totally different needs—like developers and IT specialists—but we hope that this can be a good jumping-off point to growing your remote team. Happy travels and best of luck!
Featured image by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash