How to Scale Your Business From Anywhere: 6 Keys

00:00:00 Eric Dingler: Okay. Here we go. So how do you scale your business? So it’s a wealth generator machine all while you travel full time or maybe just a little bit more than you travel now. Well, luckily, you’re in the right place to find out.

My name is Eric Dengler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and four kids. And this is the podcast that I’ve created to help other digital business owners, online entrepreneurs increase their profits, increase their revenues, and increase your location independence.

And I want to dive right into scaling a business while traveling. Now, first off, I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone who travels full time. So we have no home base, we own no property or home. And our passport country, we live out of carry on luggage only. And we have been traveling like this for three years, full time. And during that time I have scaled my digital marketing business, my company In Transit Studios, and I’ve been able to start and begin to scale this little side coaching business that I have. And again, doing all this while traveling full time.

So what does it take? Well, I’ve got six very specific things that I think it takes, and I want to unpack those with you.

Number one: it all starts with your expectations. You have to have realistic expectations doing this. You can’t pretend to be what you can’t afford to be. So a lot of people, they think that right out of the gate, they’re going to be able to travel and have all of these amazing destinations. And it’s going to be picture perfect, just like they see on their favorite influencer Instagram channel or Facebook or YouTube videos or whatever it might be. But in reality, it takes time to build up. Most of your time on the road is probably going to be spent working in some way, shape or form.

Now, the great thing is you have to decide what that way, shape and form looks like, and you get to choose your hours. Are you working from your Airbnb? Are you working from a coffee shop? Are you getting co-working spaces? You get to decide all of that. But you can’t, most likely you can’t start out in the most expensive places there are to travel. You have to have realistic expectations that it still takes a lot of work. There’s no magic bullet in this. There’s no overnight success. You’re not going to build a website and launch it and tomorrow have clients. It just simply doesn’t work like that.

This is hard work. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes effort. But that’s just how anything in life is, isn’t it? I mean, let’s be realistic. It takes work to build things. And we’re trying to build something, not just a little bit of income so we can go play. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about building a business that generates generational wealth, something that you can pass on to your grandchildren through your children.

So number one is you got to have realistic expectations. A lot of people will start with a dream, but they don’t have enough wisdom at the beginning. And when they just jump out and take that dream into the world, they get into trouble. And we see this, this is a principle that has played out, I don’t know how many, literally countless times throughout history. And so you’ve got to make sure that you have very clear expectations. That’s number one.

Number two: got to be careful of following people in different stages of life that you’re in. All right. I am a husband. I have four children. I have employees. I have a lot of responsibility. And I see a lot of digital nomad lifestyle influencers rolling through my Instagram feed who are pictures of themselves working under a canopy, sitting by the beach and, you know, all this stuff. And they, you know, people talking about, you know, making $800 a month to live on like you’re a king when you’re in some of these other countries and things like that. And that just, quite frankly, doesn’t work for families.

When we travel as a family of six, we’re buying six airline tickets. And when you go to rent some place for six people to live it, just immediately there’s a significantly fewer options. And because of the rule of supply and demand, our accommodation prices are just a lot more dramatically higher versus a single person or couple who are traveling. And not only that, we’re not buying food for one person. We’re buying food for six. And three of our four kids are teenagers. And they really like to eat. They eat a lot. We need a lot of groceries. And so you have to be careful that when you’re starting to watch people, when you’re seeing other people live this lifestyle, you’ve got to ask yourself: Are they in the same stage of life that I’m in? Are they further ahead of me, not in lifestyle, but in stage of life?

You’ve just got to be careful. It’s like I’ve learned recently. I’ve been really focused, for the last two and a half months, on my physical health. We’ve joined a gym here in Costa Rica. In fact, all six of us have joined. We go to the gym two times a week as a family and my wife and I go a third time. We go to the gym Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning, and we don’t take the kids on Saturday morning. It’s just my wife and I. But, you know, we’re hitting the gym. Well, you know what? I’m 49 years old. I can’t follow the fitness plans and the routines of the young bucks that are in their twenties. They got all the time in the world to be spending at the gym and doing stuff and they can go every day and things like that. My almost 50 year old body doesn’t respond the same way that a 20 year old’s does when they’re working out. My body responds very differently to working out now than it did when I was a teenager.

And I see the difference in my teenage son. My teenage son makes faster progress at the gym than I do because he’s a walking ball of testosterone. He lifts a 5 pound weight and suddenly his muscles increase significantly. He makes faster progress than I do going three days a week, and he’s only going two. But he’s also 17. I’m 49. Big, big difference right there.

And business is the same way. You have to be really careful when you’re talking about your business strategy, when you’re talking about what this lifestyle is going to look like and how you working on your business. What you do in your business is going to look very different for the stage of life you’re in.

I don’t want to have a job, so I’m very careful not to build myself a job. I’m building a business that employs others that want a job, and I give them the job. And the job looks like this: they do work and I give them my appreciation in money. And that’s how it works. They want a job. I give them money. And the byproduct is our company has profit and I can live off of that. Now, I’m still having to work to run my business and lead my business, but that’s a stage that I want to be in.

You know, if I was younger, if it was just me or just me and my wife, well, I might be really okay then, you know, hitting the keys every day and writing copy for people as a freelancer, or, you know, building websites for somebody, you know, and, you know, selling something and then building it. But that’s not the stage of life I’m in. To scale a business while you’re traveling to scale a business, you have to think beyond a job. A business that generates wealth is not a job. And those are two very different things.

So you got to be really careful when you’re watching people online that you’re not trying to follow somebody in a different stage that has different goals than you do. Just because they’re able to have a location independent lifestyle, how they’re achieving that may not work for you. So you got to be careful with that.

Number three: you’ve got to create remote friendly systems if you want to travel more while scaling your business. If all of your new business comes from local networking events, well my friend, it’s going to be pretty hard to be a digital nomad full time or part time. Not only that, if you are only comfortable working on two monitors, three monitors, or if you’ve set something up that requires an elaborate setup with cameras and lights and all this stuff that’s not very remote friendly, that’s not very travel friendly.

My entire office fits in my backpack. My entire life fits in my backpack. I’ve got two backlights I travel with and a computer stand and portable keyboard, a separate keyboard. Like, I have to have an ergonomic setup. I have a video of all of this in my remote work success bundle. If you go to DNEPodcast.com, scroll to the bottom of any page and you’ll see my remote work success bundle. If you download that, one of the things I have in there is a video that I give a tour of my portable office that fits in my backpack. That’s my personal carry on. I have a carry on and I have a personal bag. And my entire office and my hobby, I’m a painter, I like to paint when I travel, I like to paint even when I don’t travel, my hobby and my business fit in my backpack and then my clothes and other essentials fit in my carry on bag. And that is everything I have and have had for three years traveling full time.

And so you have to create remote friendly systems. Your office system has to be set up friendly. You’ve got to, you know, so I don’t like the webcam, for example, on my Mac. I really don’t like it. It’s poor quality. And I want to have high quality video. I do a lot of Zoom meetings and so I but I also don’t want to travel with a big bulky camera. I don’t want to have a separate webcam. And so my iPhone is my webcam for Zoom meetings and I have a tripod that I can use for it. And that tripod also holds my painting easel. And so I have one tripod that’s set up to hold my phone when I need it to hold my camera. And I also use that during my hobby time, personal time when I’m working on a painting that holds my painting easel.

And so you have to have a remote friendly setup. Your systems, you don’t want to have you traveling with external hard drives and things that can go bad on you. Like, you really need to invest in your online storage and cloud storage and just really solid tools. Anything you travel with needs to be easily repairable on the road or super high quality, super high quality. And so you’ve got to set that up because if you have a work system that is comfortable for you outside of your home office, is good for you when you’re not traveling, it doesn’t work for you when you’re traveling, you’re not going to be as productive.

I’ve created a setup for me that lets me be just as productive in our Airbnb as it does in a cafe or an airport, a train. I have worked many times on a train. And so you’ve got to have a remote friendly setup and remote friendly systems.

Now, speaking of remote friendly, I want to encourage you to check out a really great resource that I use called Open Phone. It’s called Open Phone. Open Phone is an app that I have that is my business phone number. And it’s, you know, it’s great. I absolutely love it. It gives me a separate phone number just for my business. I put it out there, I can get calls on it. I get text messages on it. I can get, you know, two factor authentication codes for it. Like there’s a lot of really great benefits to having a separate number. I don’t have to give out my personal number. I don’t even really have much of a personal number anymore. We got rid of our cell phone service. We used to have T-Mobile and say, we just got rid of it. We have a Google Voice number now that’s connected to our WhatsApp number. Our WhatsApp number is what we use as our personal line. I’m telling you right now, if you’re outside of the United States, everybody is on WhatsApp. It works everywhere we’ve been and we just use that. And then we get a local SIM card for wherever we’re at for data as we’re out and about. So we get a local SIM. It gives us a local number and data, but then we just use WhatsApp for communicating with everyone.

But I needed a really consistent, reliable solution for my work phone number, and that’s Open Phone. It’s voice over internet, but it never has failed me, whether I’m on Wi-Fi, whether I’m on data. It’s just this really handy little icon. I replaced my phone icon with this icon on the bottom of my phone. It’s blue and I can click it, open it up, go to my contact book, send a text message to a client, get text messages, call clients, get calls, call my banker, get calls from my bank or my accountant or something like that.

I would really encourage you to check out Open Phone. If you go to my website, DNEPodcast.com, scroll or go over to the resources page. And if you scroll down, you’ll see a link for Open Phone. You’ll see a link for Open Phone. And if you click on that link, you’re going to go and you’re going to see a special there from Open Phone because you’re a listener to the Digital Nomad Entrepreneur podcast. And so they’ve set you up with something over there. So go check it out. Get a free trial. Plus, not only that, after your free trial, if you decide to go with it because you’re a digital nomad entrepreneur listener, you’re going to get 10% off your first three months. Super, super wonderful tool. I use it pretty much on a daily basis. And so it’s a great kind of tool. It really lets it be super remote friendly as a traveling business owner.

All right. Number four: What is the fourth tip I have for you on how to scale your online business? Well, first off, it all starts with your expectations. This is going to take time. It’s going to take work. Be careful following people at different stages of life. You’ll go down some pathways. It just won’t work for you. Three: Create remote friendly systems. Number four: choose your lead gen strategy and stick to it. Become a master of it.

You are most likely, if you already own a business, or once you get started as a business owner, you start promoting it out there. You are going to start getting bombarded with Instagram ads and Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads for all kinds of lead gen strategies that promise the moon. You’re going to get, you know, from cold calling to appointment centers working for you, Facebook ad strategies, you know, webinar funnels, video sales ladder pages. Like there, the options are just they just go on and on and on.

And here’s the thing about this: almost every single person that’s selling one of these that says, “Here’s the system that I used and here are the results I’ve got. And I’ve helped other people get the same or similar or better results doing exactly what I did. And now I’m going to teach you that I did it.” I’ll be honest, their system works if they’re telling the truth and there’s ways to check that out. You want to make sure they’re telling the truth, but if they’re telling the truth, then the system works.

What happens is a lot of us, we start implementing a system and we don’t do it exactly the way they tell us to. We start to iterate on their ideas before we’ve executed on their plan exactly. We don’t get the same results and so we give up and go try something else. Or it actually doesn’t turn out to be as easy as they promised. And so we go chasing the next thing that looks like it’s going to be a little easier. There is no easy lead gen strategy. All right, there just isn’t. It takes work. It’s going to cost you money to acquire clients. That’s the price of doing business, and there’s just no way around it.

We spend about $1,500 for every new client we get. It takes about $1,500 for us to acquire them. Pretty standard. And the, you know, web design, digital marketing, SaaS kind of space. Different for e-commerce, different for affiliate marketing, but for the web design, digital marketing, you know, most SaaS model kind of things, that’s what you’re going to be looking at. And so it just takes work.

So if you want to scale your business, stop jumping around from idea to idea. Pick something to master it. Stop dabbling. There are too many times, you know, and I’m guilty of this. I’m guilty of this. You know, we would try to do some YouTube videos, but we would just create something and throw it out there. And then, you know, the next day it would have ten views and I would give up and move on to something else. And then I would try this and I would try that. And it just got to the point we said, “No, we’re not doing that anymore.” And I sat down with my team. We looked at things and we talked about it and we said, “This is the strategy we’re going to use. This is the strategy we’re going to use. These are the tools we’re going to use to do it.” And we began to study the tools. We became experts in the tools. We became authoritatively well versed in the tools we were going to use and the psychology behind why that thing worked. And then that lead gen strategy starts kicking butt for us.

Now, there are some fundamental things you got to get for any lead strategy. You have to have a CRM where you’re bringing leads into. You have to have a pipeline or you’re going to miss out. You need to have a strategy for retention. Like, there are some general things that are true across all lead gen systems. But just pick one. Be have a YouTube first strategy. Have a podcast first strategy. Have a blog first strategy. Have an ads first strategy. Like, whatever you going to do, do it. But don’t half ass it. Just do it. Go all in on it. Become an expert at it. Take the time that it takes to do it. And do it. It’s well stinking worth it. Once you master it, that’s when you get master level results. If you dabble at it, you’re going to get dismal results.

So choose your system for lead gen and then master it. Now again, you got to make sure this is remote friendly. And almost all of them are. There’s a lot of strategies out there that are very remote friendly and this is going to help you scale your business and build systems around your marketing and get better and better and better over time. The key isn’t to find the right strategy. The key is to be consistent with the strategy that you’re going to be consistent with. Pick a strategy. Do it. Do it in a day. Give yourself one day. Tomorrow, I’m going to take my lead gen strategy and that’s it. Don’t second guess it for 12 months. Go all in. Refuse to. Like. No. Tell people. Tell somebody. “If I change my mind, shoot me with this rubber band.” Like take this rubber band, lick me with it as hard as you can. Like, if you do this, take away my, you know, online streaming apps, whatever it is. Like, what’s going to hurt you? Then put it on the line and say, “I’m going all in on this. This is what I’m doing, and that’s it.” And I know you may be thinking, “Oh, but what if it doesn’t work? What if I do and it’s not working?” And, you know, they did that. Well, let me tell you something. Are you really any better off right now than you were last year? If you have stuck with a marketing system, a lead generation system for an entire year, you are better off than you were this time last year. But if you have tried two, three, four different things in the last year, you’re no better off than you were last year.

So pick a system, put it in place for a year, and then you will start getting the results. So that’s my fourth tip on how to scale your online business while traveling whenever you want.

Number five: when you are learning from someone else, you have to ask yourself, “But did that work at my stage of business?” This is where this is coming from.

The other day I was talking to one of my one on one coaching clients and he was telling me we were talking about something and he was saying that he was watching another person who coaches people to have a seven figure web design digital marketing agency, just like they do. And they now charge $1,500 for their discovery process. All right, so if you want to work with them, you’re going to start with $1,500 bare minimum just to even see if they can help you, just to even see what a quote might look like. They’re going to make you spend $1,500 to go through a process. And at the end, you get a great report, a nice thing, and all of this kind of stuff. And he’s like, “They’re doing this. And he was on such-and-so’s podcast the other day, and he was saying that if you don’t do this, you’re leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table.”

And I said, “Well, here’s the thing about this: Did they say how long they’ve been doing this?” And he said they said they just started. They just started doing this. Yeah. And they’re already bringing in over, you know, what, $100,000 a month in recurring revenue. Like they have resources coming in that let them, you know, test ideas. It doesn’t hurt them. And not only that, they’re bringing in so many stinking leads now because they’re spending a ridiculous amount of money on ads. Not ridiculous for them, you know, to drop $20,000 on Facebook ads is no big deal for them. But because of that, they’re bringing in so many leads that they can shake those leads down to the few that are willing to spend the $1,500 on discovery. That’s great. But I was talking to the person I was coaching. I was like, “But let’s be honest, you and I can’t do that.”

You know, I’m just now starting to charge a little. We now charge $297 to give someone what we called our digital marketing blueprint. All right, it is a customized digital marketing plan for them. And at the end of the plan is our quote for our services. But they can take that plan. And I tell them, “You can take the plan. You can go get quotes from someone else, take and say, ‘This is what I want you to do. I want you to build me this website. I want these features on it.'” Just you’ve got something to take to someone. It’s built. Give me a quote for this. Take that shopping around. You know, give it to somebody in your team. Tell them to implement it, or you hire us because it’s so specifically detailed and literally is a roadmap for you.

We can’t give it away. All right, because we’re putting way too much time into developing this for you. It’s a significant investment of our time. It’s a very valuable tool for you. We charge $297. Now, one day I may be able to charge $1,500 to give away the exact same thing, but I’m not there yet from a perspective of scale. If I started telling people I was going to charge them $1,500, you know how many sales appointments I would have in a month? Probably none. I would probably go to maybe one, two, or three a quarter. You know, if I was lucky. All right. And I can’t do that. I can’t do that.

And so there’s this coaching kind of mind is, we were talking about this. He was kind of like, “Wow, absolutely right. Like, I never thought I can’t do that.” You know, and so you got to be careful when you’re learning from someone. You have to ask when they tell you what to do. You have to wrestle with the principle behind the practice. You have to ask yourself, “But does this work when you were my size? Would this have worked?”

And I tell people, I tell people, “Just ask them. Say, hey, I have a question for you. When you were my size and you were only bringing in $5,000 a month in recurring revenue, and you are a solopreneur and every single sale opportunity, like, you know, you couldn’t turn down the $800 job, the $1,200 dollar job. Like, you had to get there. You’re still building your profile. Could you have done what you just told me to do then?”

And if they’re honest, they’re gonna say, “Well, no, no, I couldn’t.” Okay, so you got to be careful when you’re listening to folks and ask yourself, “But does what they’re saying, what’s the principle behind the practice? And contextualize it then for your situation.” It’s such an important leadership principle. All right.

Number six: You’ve got to build your support team. You’ve got to build your support team. Now, I see there are kind of three ways to do this.

One, and a great way to do it, is to have a peer group. Have a mastermind. Okay, not one you pay to be into. Just find some people that are doing this with you and get together once a week and talk. Don’t even have to get together at the same time. Use an app like Marco Polo. I’ve got a guy that we’re in two completely different types of businesses, but we’re both trying to grow our digital businesses and we both do a lot of the same kinds of things. And we have talked for years now via Marco Polo. We’ve never met in person. We’ve had like maybe three Zoom conversations. But the vast majority of our conversations have been asynchronously through an app called Marco Polo.

So you’ve got to build a support team. Start with a peer group or mastermind. The second thing you need is I think you need two coaches. You need two coaches. And you might be thinking, “Two? What do you mean two coaches?” There are a lot of different kinds of coaches out there. You’ve got executive coaches, leadership coaches, performance coaches, startup coaches, sales coaches, marketing coaches, financial coaches, career coaches, productivity coaches, innovation coaches, conflict resolution coaches, life coaches, health and fitness coaches, nutrition coaches. The list goes on and on and on.

But for us as business owners, I think there are two types of coaches we almost always should have, and then cycle through these others. The first is you need a business growth coach. This is someone that talks to you specifically just about the elements that grow your business. There are five processes you need to have in place to grow your business. First one being leadership. Second, lead generation. Third, conversion. Fourth, collecting and managing money. Fifth, project management. I don’t care what you’re selling. I don’t care what you’re doing. You need those five processes. And a good business growth coach is going to help you with those regardless of your industry.

Then you need an industry specific how-to coach. If you want to build websites, you need to be following Josh Hall. You need Josh Hall as your coach. Plain and simple. No questions about it. You need Josh Hall. If you want to build a digital marketing agency, you need to go talk to Mike and AJ at Agency Coach. That’s just what you got to do. If you want to build a SaaS service using High Level, you need to go talk to Mike Coach over at Leverage Services. Leverage services that scale. Like, whatever you do, you want to do copywriting, you need to know Donnie Bryant. Like, there are industry specific masters at their thing, at their craft. And if you want that to be your thing and your craft, you need to talk to them.

But then you also need a business growth coach that’s talking to you about every aspect of your business. That’s the kind of coaching I provide. I help online business owners increase revenues, profit, and location independence by walking them through working on those five business processes. We work on your leadership, your lead gen, lead conversion, collecting and managing money, and project management because that’s what I love. I just love to help business owners grow their businesses. I don’t care what industry you’re in, so I don’t do industry specific coaching. I don’t do that. I know plenty of people that do.

And so you need those two kinds of coaches for sure. All right.

Now, before I wrap up with this week’s leadership tip of the week, I just want to say thank you so much for listening to the podcast today. Stick around. I got this week’s leadership tip of the week, but I want to invite you to leave a rating, leave a review, subscribe, share this podcast. Like it would be, it would mean so much to me. I’d be so appreciative of it and I really enjoy seeing it. I appreciate the feedback.

Getting emails, the other day I got an email from Derek after last week’s episode, you know, talking to me about last week’s episode. Derek, thank you for that. I really, really appreciate it. And for you listening, seriously, it would help me so much. It helps, you know, it’s just my plea to have you help me with the algorithms. The leverage, rating, leave a review, a thumbs up, a subscribe. Whatever platform you’re engaging with this content on, do the things of that platform and I’d really appreciate it. All right.

So now for this week’s leadership tip of the week.

Leaders are communicators. Leaders are communicators. If you want to be a leader that has influence over anybody, a team of two, a team of 50, a team of 500, you’re going to have to learn to communicate. Even leading yourself. Communication to yourself, self-talk. You do it every day. You do it all day. Learn to do it better. Learn to do it right. And lead yourself to being, to lead yourself to bigger and better places. So leaders are communicators. Study communication.

Recently I just did a study on someone that is an amazing communicator and leader, and I noticed three things in their very influential speech. One, she made sure that the audience had all of their basic physical needs met. They were fed, they were comfortable, everything was good. Then they connected with their audience at the personal level, at the heart and soul level. Then, excuse me, then they painted a picture of a preferred future. This is casting vision. And that then led to the inspiration of our audience and was absolutely phenomenal. Great study on some leadership study and some communication learning about it.

If you want to read it for yourself, if you want to see this in action, you can check out this master communicator by reading about her. Her name is Abigail, and you can read Abigail’s plea to King David in First Samuel, chapter 25 in the Old Testament of the Bible. Absolutely a fantastic example of a master communicator.

Well, thanks for listening. I look forward to reading your review or email soon. Like I just like I got to read Derek’s email after the last episode. So until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.

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