How to hire and get the best out of your employees

We used to simultaneously live by and resent the mantra, “If you want something done right, do it yourself” – and whenever we hired employees or contractors, everything seemed to confirm that we really shouldn’t have bothered. All the time we were well aware that we were the problem: we were doing something wrong during the hiring process, or once they actually started working for us, or both. We didn’t really know what to do about it though, so we kind of gave up and accepted that we’d spend a…

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The tactics, tools and rules we use to run multiple businesses while we travel

Working from anywhere...including beer gardens

We often get asked about the tools, software and processes we make use of while running our businesses while travelling – which is brilliant, because we absolutely love to talk about it. We do get asked A LOT though, so we thought it warranted a blog post in its own right. This post explains what’s working for us right now. As you’ll see, our processes are by no means perfect (and we’re rather embarrassed about the number of times “MS Word” gets namechecked), but we’re slowly streamlining everything and finding online, cloud-based solutions…

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Run the winners, kill the losers

Looooser!

Burnout wasn’t far away, and we eventually cut down. Now, if Mish had to explain each of our projects over a separate glass of wine she’d still end up sleeping on the bathroom floor with the room spinning around her, but we wouldn’t have to get her stomach pumped. We took things too far, but working on multiple simultaneous projects does have its advantages – which we’ve written about before. Recently, I’ve come to appreciate another benefit that I hadn’t considered before: you can’t sustain bad ideas beyond their natural…

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Can’t quit your job? Start up a business on the side!

Moonlighting FTW

The story of how we got started in building our own business is so frustratingly irrelevant to other people’s situations that we can’t ever point to it and say: “That. Do that.” We had savings, we had limited responsibilities, and we had naivety on our side. But if you don’t have those things, how on earth do you go from your 9-to-5 to working for yourself and building a business you love? Here’s how: Start up a business on the side Although we didn’t start up any dedicated businesses while…

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Mastering the value equation

Surprisingly for someone who only passed GCSE Maths by copying my friend’s coursework, I like to think about it as an equation: This simplifies the whole “argh how do I make more money?” dilemma into only three possible actions:

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