🕵🏻♀️ #44: A Day in the Life of Brittnee Bond, Founder, Remote Collective
‘I believe all people should have access to remote work, and I intend to make this a reality.’
Thinking big 💡
I wake up, I meditate, I go swimming in the sea. I run, I do yoga, and then I sit down and start work.
I’m doing crypto investing right now and investigating blockchain, specifically to help women gain more financial freedom, so I’ll spend a couple of hours on calls with people and then I do a lot of community building. We build gardens, we help the local Thai people. So, there’s just constantly things happening.
But the first part of my day is like for me. For soul-building, for my creativity and then I do my work. And then I have time to give back to the community.
A day in the life of Brittnee Bond, Founder, Remote Collective — the latest video in Hoxby’s Workstyle Stories Live: a series of real-life stories that showcase the transformative power of workstyle. Brittnee is a remote work consultant and a coach for women entrepreneurs, currently based on Ko Pha Ngan, a tiny island in Thailand.
Pre-remote, she worked as a Paralegal in Intellectual Property law for six years.
An hour on the train each way every day, work for 8–9 hours, and that was my life.
Was it like Suits, the TV show? A stressful work culture with long hours and corporate tension?
Yeah, I would say it’s creepily accurate. My friends loved watching that Suits show, and I’m like, I can’t watch that, that’s my everyday life. Sometimes they would even have places at the office where you could sleep, just so you would keep working. It was really bad.
What was the dealbreaker?
I always wanted to work remotely. Even when I graduated high school and into university. That was my thing. I wanted to help people and make an impact, but I wanted to have my own freedom.
She worked as an internal consultant for three law firms helping them to go paperless and getting the systems in place to work remotely.
She made herself indispensable and kept going, creating opportunities to build the workstyle she wanted.
The third firm let her work remotely and live in Costa Rica — the start of her remote working adventure. It worked perfectly, her KPIs were off the charts and she proved she could do it.
But after six months they wanted her back in the office.
The culture within the legal field, it’s too traditional for me, I can’t handle it. They were willing to let me work remotely because I’d helped them so much, and then the attitude was like, okay, we gave you your six months, and now you need to come back to the office and work for the rest of your life for us. And I was like, I can’t do this.
It was 2014, and this is like, old white men in suits, you know. They didn’t even like the idea of me being seen near the beach when they had to be in the office.
Professional jealousy, maybe?
She quit her job to do other things, first setting up a travel company to help pay her way, and then consulting for large corporates in Asia, based in Kuala Lumpur, flying out to a different country each month, and helping them to run their companies. There weren’t that many people with her business background in Asia at the time, so everyone wanted to work with her, and her workstyle was negotiable.
She could start building her own projects and had a big mindset shift…
I am good. I don’t need to prove to myself anymore that I’m successful. And I also really, really wanted to help women.
So she started consulting companies to go remote.
So many companies are just trying to meet their KPIs and make a profit, and they don’t have the time or emotional energy to transition to remote, so I was like, I can step in and help. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years.
Lots of takeaways here — she quit!! Thinking about where we’re at now — after a year of working at home — employers need to create a situation remotely for their top talent, an environment where they can thrive, so they don’t lose people. The law firms she worked with had an opportunity to think differently and mark themselves out as trailblazers: ‘The first paperless law firm with remote workers’ — that would have been great PR, but they didn’t see it that way — trust was an issue.
People want flexibility, freedom, and autonomy at work — give them that, and they will give you their best. I also love what she has to say about mindset and money after raising capital for her ventures.
There’s so much money out there in the world. I want you to be able to access that money. So if you have questions about how to raise money… how to find the shared audience, please reach out to me because this is the stuff I live for, especially for women entrepreneurs, because I think so many women don’t realise how much money there is out there. We feel like we almost need to be given permission to even go after that money.
I’m giving you all the permission in the world right now that this is your time to shine, and I want to help you do that, if anything, just to root you on.
An inspiring story on evolving your work to enable your travel, escaping the bureaucracy of corporate culture, and creating a life you love.
🙌 The Hoxby Way
I’ve renewed my passport with Hoxby to stay in the community for another year.
They’ve introduced The Hoxby Way, a new way of doing business that will help them collaborate more closely as a community. They are merging their ‘core’ and Business Units into a single organisational structure made up of 10 functions with an MD for each, in response to feedback that things can feel a bit siloed. Good stuff. The goal is to continue to grow the community and create 30% more work for their consultants.
There are lots of questions, comments, and enthusiastic emojis flying around on the Slack channel, so it will be interesting to see how this develops and what new projects come in.
You can join the Workstyle Revolution community on Mighty Networks. It’s open to everyone who believes in what they are trying to achieve including those outside Hoxby.
Our goal is to replace the traditional 9–5 system with workstyle, fitting work around life and not the other way around.
Go deeper 🛠
🚀 Brittnee Bond on the future of remote working, getting into blockchain and launching the Women’s Circle Mastermind (Remote Collective).
👨🏽💻 The Rise of Working From Home (The Economist). The shift to remote working has gone better than expected. People are working longer hours, but they report higher levels of happiness and productivity. On the pros and pitfalls of remote work, the rise in work-from-home technologies, and new laws regulating remote work.
💻 The Nowhere Office (Demos) — The first report from the Chair of the Demos Workshift Commission, Julia Hobsbawm, says that lessons learned from the pandemic should inform an entirely new way to approach work, workplace, working life and productivity. ‘Everyone wants jobs, but they want something else too: meaning. Work-life balance. In other words, a work shift.’
👩💻 After working at Google, I’ll never let myself love a job again. (New York Times). A former software engineer at Google on learning the hard way that no publicly traded company is a family. On the upsides of remote work: ‘I took a role at a firm to which I felt no emotional attachment. I like my colleagues, but I’ve never met them in person.’
📅 Save the date: Hoxby will be chatting to Ali Green on 29 April about remote work, non-traditional career arrangements and building rural economies through location-independent work. You can sign up and join Ali Greene’s live Workstyle Story.
Welcome to my bookshop! 📚
I’ll be sharing books in my bag and recommended reads on Bookshop.org. They pay a 10% commission on every sale and give a matching 10% to local bookstores, an integral part of our culture and communities. I would be very happy if you make the odd purchase here.
🕵🏻♀️ Work with me
Leopard print, always. Worry less and rock a red lip. Remote worker, problem solver, internet person.
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