Founder's Thoughts – Embracing Virtual Reality

MARCH 2018

Dreams don’t work unless you do, and how we’re embracing the virtual reality.

When writing my 2019 goals last year, I promised to myself that this year, I’ll finally make my company fully location independent. Running a location independent business with a global audience has been the vision from the very beginning and something I’ve been working very hard to accomplish over the last 5 years. I don’t remember it, but my partner Orestis has recently reminded me of the day when I came up with my dream.

It was back in July 2014, we were in Greece visiting our friends and also attending his cousins’ wedding. It was a beautiful, hot and sunny day. After spending a few days at our friend’s house in Patra, a small town in Peloponnese, we’ve been driving back to Athens for the wedding. I’ve been gazing through the car window, mesmerised by the most stunning Mediterranean sea views, with blue horizons surrounding me all around, and said:

“I want to create a company that I can take with me anywhere I go so that I don’t ever have to sacrifice beautiful moments like this for having to be at work. I want to be able to visit my family whenever I want, without having to take holidays. I want to be able to spend the summertime in Cyprus, and have more days like this in my life. I want to be able to join you when you travel around the world to your conferences, without having to take time off. I want to create a company that will allow me to fulfill my passion for creativity and entrepreneurship, so that I can wake up every morning feeling excited about spending my day doing what I love, and working with people who inspire me.”

This is when the dream was born.

Ever since, I’ve been relentlessly driving that vision forward.

This is WHY I do what I do.

5 years in the making and over 200 clients later, the vision of leading a remote team and serving clients all around the world is finally coming to fruition. The internet has opened the globe and provided us with unlimited opportunities, which allowed Visuable to operate not only in the UK where we’re based but also across Europe and lately all around the USA too. Our recent expansion across the Atlantic made me rethink our business strategy and the way we operate. We’re currently still seeing some of our local clients in person, but our aim is to transition to purely virtual communications by the end of May 2019. Why?

Few reasons:

I want to make my vision of time and location freedom a reality so that Visuable keeps operating no matter if I happen to be in the UK, Cyprus, Poland or anywhere else.

As a company, we want to fully embrace the remote working culture so that we can find, hire and retain the best talent, no matter where they choose to work from. We want to offer our team time and location flexibility, as those are the key values that Visuable was founded on.

Operating remotely is more convenient and efficient for both us and our clients. Rather than having to travel to and from meetings, we focus on creating fun and engaging experiences whilst serving our clients virtually. Just recently, we’ve switched from in-person design briefing meetings followed by countless emails back and forward to finalise design concept and ideas, to fun and exciting Creation Calls, where our clients can be part of the brand visioning process, contribute their own ideas, choose colours, fonts and ever explore ideas for their logos right at the front of their eyes. This has been a revelation - not only our clients comment that it’s ‘fascinating’ and ‘mesmerising’ to experience and be part of our creative process, but we also reduced the back and forward with design concepts, making our clients happy with our work, faster! Our clients get better outcomes and faster turnarounds without having to even leave their own house or office and as a result, we reduced time needed to produce those designs. This in turn reduced our costs and therefore increased profits, creating a win-win situation for both.

Being able to tap into the new age virtual business models offers unlimited opportunities and allows for ongoing innovation. We’ve now stopped local, in-person networking and are trying out new, more effective methods of meeting globally based customers online and developed digital products that can be sold to anyone, anywhere. This in turn have opened limitless possibilities for us in terms of bringing new products to any markets we wish to be operating within in the future.

As a company, we like to innovate and stay ahead of the curve and we see going virtual as a huge competitive advantage for us this year.

You might be wondering how this new virtual business model translates into our working culture, since me and the team will not operate from the same office. I’ll let you onto a secret - we never did! Inka, one of our designers is based in Finland. She started with us back in May 2018, but after few months in Bristol she returned to her home country. For the last 5 months, she has been serving our client’s from the comfort of her living room (or a co-working space if she prefers). Taking into consideration cold Finish winters, she was more than happy not having to commute to work in the snow! She came to visit us in Bristol in January, and I am flying over to Finland to visit her in May, which makes for a fun way of keeping our working relationship alive whilst exploring new places to work from and also experiencing new destinations. Clients are often surprised when they find out Inka doesn’t live in Bristol and have been serving them all the way from Finland and admit that they’ve not even realised.

When I am in Bristol, I work from a private member’s club called The Square, where is see our clients in-person. Or, on the days when I have lots of overseas calls, I simply work from home. For over a year now, I’ve been taking regular months away and worked form Cyprus. I have a home office there but I also like working from the garden, various hotels and cafes and sometimes even from the beach - because, as long as there is wifi, it really doesn’t matter where I work from. I’ve invested in systems that allow me to run Visuable from my phone (if I want to), and I’ve switched to a phone contract with calls and data package that can be used all around Europe.

So in this new global virtual reality, my typical day usually looks like this:

get-up, coffee, PT session or SPA
homemade breakfast with my partner
reply to emails, check for new enquires and catch-up with the team
prep for today’s consultations
3-4 sales calls and sending proposals
lunch break: audiobook, journaling or team co-working catch-up over Zoom
2 brand consultations and report write-ups or business development activities
Admin, social media and team communications
Dinner, movie, friends, life...

As you can see, this set-up allows for doing all the important things in my life, every day - those are relationships, self-development, fun, fitness and nutrition. Previously, there was no way I would be able to handle 5-6 appointments in a day and still have time for a breakfast with my partner, lunch break, fitness routine and an audiobook. Now, all this is possible. In fact, right now I am working on reducing the amount of appointments so I can focus on driving the vision and growing the company further.

What do you think about the growing trend towards time and location freedom? Is this the culture that you would like your organisation to embrace? Or are you the traditional type who likes to have an office?

Please let me know in the comments below!

MBA Update.

My second MBA module was in full swing in March, with two assignment deadlines hanging over me. Luckily, I am the type of person who prefers to prepare in advance rather than stress out last minute, so I’ve written all my assignment way before deadlines, which helped with keeping the stress at bay throughout submission times.

Are you the type of person who plans in advance or are you the last minute type?

For my systems, structures and operations module, I had to write a global business growth report for a procurement marketplace company. This involved analysing the company competitive advantages and suggesting how they could improve their value proposition in order to become the market leader. It also involved analysing emerging trends in e-commerce and suggesting how the company could leverage them in order to expand outside of Bristol and scale globally.

It was a fascinating module and one that I’ve learned a lot from! It has given me insights into how it’s like to be in charge of running a global organisation and made me much more aware when it comes creating a company vision and choosing KPI’s and how my choices impact the decisions I have to make going forward and activities I should be focusing on.

Have my assignment research influenced me to finally go for it and expand globally? Most likely so. I’ve been reading so much about emerging trends, online business models and running global operations that I must have started implementing what I’ve learned within Visuable.