Work, Wine and Wanderlust

Ever wondered what it's like to trade the conventional 9-5 job for a life of travel and working on your own terms? Get ready to navigate the exciting, and at times challenging, life of digital nomads with our guests, Charlie and Sam Brown. They've walked the path from traditional employment in sectors like engineering and startups, running their own incredibly successful wine business  to eventually embracing the lifestyle of global trotters. 

Charlie and Sam dive deep into their journey and how they tackled the shift from the security of traditional jobs, the highs and lows of entrepreneurship to the volatile yet liberating freelancing world. They'll share their insightful experiences around founding Vino Vero, and the circumstances that led them to sell their business and break free from their life in the UK. Hear how their unique family backgrounds and Brexit's impact shaped their decisions and why they decided to fully embrace the digital nomad lifestyle.

We’ll also learn how they navigate their relationship, balancing time together and apart in different countries as well as how they discovered and subsequently embraced minimalism. Charlie and Sam will offer their unique perspectives on the financial aspects of being digital nomads and how they've been intentional about their spending to focus on their projects without the need for traditional employment. From managing the complexities of the nomadic lifestyle, the challenges they've faced, to how travel has impacted their relationship, they will offer a fresh perspective on work, life, and the balance between the two. So, buckle up and prepare to embark on an exciting journey of the nomad lifestyle!

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Chapters

• 0:01 From Traditional Employment to Digital Nomad
• 17:30 Building a Successful Wine Business
• 23:20 Selling it All and Transitioning to a New Lifestyle
• 28:18 Becoming Digital Nomads and Embracing Change
• 41:12 Relationship and Working Dynamics in Minimalism
• 46:22 Moving and Adapting After Brexit
• 53:04 Minimalistic Lifestyle and Financial Intentionality
• 1:00:13 The Digital Nomad Lifestyle
• 1:07:57 Digital Nomad Tips, Challenges and Impact on Relationships
• 1:17:49 Mum's Question

Transcript

John Hawker: 0:01

Jobs Worth, season 1, episode 8 Work, wine and Wanderlust. Welcome to episode 8 of Jobs Worth. You actually get two guests for the price of one this time around, as I'm joined by Charlie and Sam Brown. Charlie and Sam seem to have had the very definition of a squiggly career Between them. They've worked in engineering, recruitment charities and tech startups. They've founded a business, built it, made it successful and then sold it Alongside all their worldly possessions, and are now freelance writers and app developers travelling the world as digital nomads.

John Hawker: 0:55

It's a label that is becoming increasingly more common and evokes a whole host of different opinions on what drives people to choose that lifestyle and what it's actually like to live it. Fortunately, we'll be discussing all that and more over the course of this episode. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to make the move away from traditional employment, then this episode is for you. The journey to get there isn't easy, though. As well as the positives of this nomadic lifestyle, we talk about the challenges you may face, but, more importantly, what it takes to overcome them. This is also for any business leaders listening that might be on the fence about introducing a work from anywhere policy, as you'll hear, it's far more common than you think.

John Hawker: 1:35

In conversations I had with friends about this episode, they've all been super excited to hear it and, trust me, it does not disappoint. Without further ado, it's my genuine pleasure to introduce you to two people that I know will force you to think very differently about your relationships with work. Charlie and Sam, thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate you taking the time to do this as well. Thanks for your advice, very welcome. I'm honoured that you could make the time as well. So before I ask the questions that I kind of want to go into straight away and I'm going to have to sort of tone down my excitement because I feel like this conversation could go absolutely anywhere today there is an opening tradition on this podcast and that is to ask you this question when you were at school, what did you want to be when you grew up? So I'm going to ask Charlie first if that's okay, and just throw you straight in at a deep end so what did you want to be when you grew up?

Charlie Brown: 2:28

No, that's quite easy. Actually, I want to be a writer Okay, perfect. So that really worked for me, because I am now a writer, so I'm going to be the whole writer. I thought I'd be a journalist, but when I was 16, I went and worked for the BBC for a few weeks and realised that I probably wasn't cut out for journalism. It wasn't the way I wanted to do it.

John Hawker: 2:50

What age did you have that motivation there, that goal of being a writer?

Charlie Brown: 2:55

I think I mean, if you talk to my parents they'll say it was someone. I was tiny so I knew I had to be in a rightful way at school. So I think my mother was very keen on me learning and then she realised I had an aptitude for it. So maybe like four. I remember my first short story when I was four, something like that Four or five so it's always been that.

Charlie Brown: 3:14

So in a way and like I said, my parents are so happy I'm finally now writing that this is already something to do.

John Hawker: 3:24

That's amazing. That's really lovely as well, that it's now what you're doing for a living, charlie, so that's fantastic. And Sam, what about you?

Sam Brown: 3:30

I think, like the cliche boy of that sort of era that I was, I was really into cars and so I wanted to go work with cars. From like a really young age I was fascinated with Formula One and touring cars and stuff like that, and so that kind of led me to getting my first job when I was 16 was actually working for a racing car team, which I got. So it turned out not to be like the path that I wanted to go down sort of forever. But I think that's the same with a lot of people when it comes to those kind of child's dreams of what you want to do.

John Hawker: 4:07

But I think cars was kind of like that first love and that first love, I think it's brilliant, though, that both of you had those aspirations early on in life and then actually went for at least to do that. Charlie, you're now doing that full time, which is fantastic. And, sam, even sometimes you have to live the reality of those childhood dreams, don't you? To realise that maybe it's not all that it's cut out to be, but even getting to that point working for a racing team is fantastic. So I asked about what you wanted to be when you grew up. Where did you grow up? Because I know you both as being, you know, having a business and running a business in Essex previously, but are you originally from Essex?

Sam Brown: 4:46

I am, yeah, I grew up probably 200 yards from where the shop was, so right in Lyonsay, yeah, in Lyonsay. So that was my hometown. We sort of moved around a lot, you know, between that and sort of I didn't just stay there, as I went to university in Nottingham and lived in Birmingham for a while and then London for a while and various other stuff and then. But then we came back to Essex when we opened the business.

John Hawker: 5:14

Yeah, what about you, charlie? Where are you from?

Charlie Brown: 5:16

I found it really hard question to answer because I come from all over the place. My parents moved to Bauer Lotte so I think I moved about six times before I was 13. So Warwickshire and Harcature and Norfolk and then finally my parents moved to North Wales and my mum's Welsh and that's kind of where I say I'm from, because they've been there 25 years, because we've got the Welsh family connection. I'll always say I'm from Wales and everyone will say, well, you haven't got the accent.

John Hawker: 5:47

It's like no, because I moved, because I only got there when I was 13, but it's just easier where I haven't explained. Yeah, fair enough okay.

Charlie Brown: 5:56

So, yeah, we're brought up in a very almost second-made maddock family, so lots and lots of moving about.

John Hawker: 6:01

Yeah, well, we'll maybe go on to speak about how that inspired what you're doing now as well. Okay, so how did you both meet then? Because you're husband and wife, I should say Not that much as a guest, but how did you meet?

Sam Brown: 6:15

I guess friend to friend is the easiest way of explaining it. My housemate that I was living with at the moment was going out with Charlie's housemate, and so we just kind of went through that.

Charlie Brown: 6:28

really that's not a very interesting story. It's not particularly exciting.

John Hawker: 6:31

It's alright. I mean, it's a very vanilla story, but that's okay. They don't always have to be.

Charlie Brown: 6:36

It was very 2003, I think it was like just in a bar, like it was, there were no dating ups and or anything like that.

John Hawker: 6:43

I was going to say. I don't think you hear about that anymore, do you? A lot of it's dating apps if you're meeting nowadays? But okay, cool, right, so I'm going to take it back now to the question I originally wanted to ask you when I started the call, which is where in the world are you now?

Sam Brown: 6:58

We're in Porto, portugal, at the moment. We have literally just heard that our residency application has been approved, so we will be residents of Portugal for the foreseeable future. Now, congratulations, that's amazing. Thank you, as we may go on to talk about later, we've been doing a lot of travel over the last two or three years, but we're now going to finally have a base. We'd like to continue doing some travel, but we'll now have a base here, and we've made a lot of friends and connections in Portugal already and obviously, as you might know, through the wine business, we did a lot with Portuguese wines and Portuguese winemakers. So I feel like we've always had like a strong connection there and we're going to be here for the foreseeable future as our base here in Porto. That's brilliant.

John Hawker: 7:41

With residency, that basically is open-ended for you guys. There's no time limit on that. You can now be in Portugal for as long as you want to be. Yeah, ultimately, yeah.

Sam Brown: 7:54

Exactly, there's a five-year route to citizenship here. So if we really enjoy it, we'll continue to stay here and then maybe look at going for citizenship in the future. But we can stay as long or as little as you like now I think Awesome, okay.

John Hawker: 8:08

So celebrations today at some point, I'm sure, yeah, okay, fantastic, okay. So, before we carry on and this conversation continues and again I've got millions of questions I want to ask you both Can I have, just from each of you, a very short overview of your careers to the point that you bought your business or started your business in 2013? So, charlie, if I start with you, if you give me a potted history of education up to the point that you founded Vino Vero, it's not particularly interesting, I've got it in a career thing, really.

Charlie Brown: 8:45

So I went to university in Birmingham and I got into British from Vino and then I did what a lot of people do when they go to university and just had to find a job any job. So I started with recruitment, because that's what sound is. He was a little bit older than me so I was like, oh okay, this makes sense and connections to be able to help me find a job. £12,000 a year job at the time, yep.

Charlie Brown: 9:10

I absolutely hated it. This was 2006 and I think I appreciate there's a lot of now very good recruitment, but then it was like that sort of typical salesy lots of KPIs and quite a lot of unethical stuff was going on.

John Hawker: 9:31

Don't feel compelled to be noise about recruitment.

Charlie Brown: 9:37

Charlie, I'm here to create the next reasons. I hated it so I left. It's been me working then. We went travelling for about three months, then moved to London when I fell into charity work and I worked for my friends at House of Townships for about four years Amazing, it's a good charity, a really good charity. But I got stuck on that sort of lower level. So I was in an administrative system and I could never seem to make my way up the ladder. It was very frustrating because when you're 25, 26, you want to be improving and going up on it. For some reason I just couldn't do it. Eventually I just said no, I don't want to do this anymore.

Sam Brown: 10:18

I don't want to live in London anymore.

Charlie Brown: 10:20

I want to work for myself. So I started a blog, and Sam will say his bit, but he got the same. So we decided that we were going to open a wine shop. I don't even remember, sam, you might know why we chose that and we started to very, very start, we liked wine. I think it was as simple as that.

Sam Brown: 10:40

I've been getting into it a little bit more. I started a little blog where I was writing about wines a bit and we were definitely getting into it a bit more. But I think it was just one of the things. We wanted to do our own thing. We thought of doing a quicker, more efficient way. We wanted to do it in London. We knew liked it there.

Charlie Brown: 10:59

we visited a lot because it sounds family. We thought we saw the potential there. So, yeah, I went from being a administrative assistant one day to being CEO at a wine shop, the next literally thing and jumped, jumped. It was a really interesting thing. You jumped from nothing to everything straight away. Most people were, like Facebook, a bit more of a ladder. I did not, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

John Hawker: 11:23

Yeah, I think you're not bogged down with the way that things should be and you come in with fresh ideas and original ideas. And I know, as a client of Vino Vero and you guys did some amazing work from my side and a lot of the people that might be listening to this may be placements of mine that were very happy to drink the wine that I sent via you guys as well. But I think, just from the branding, the events that you used to put on as well, it was really just fresh and unique and original as well. So I think that probably did you some, some favours, charlie.

Charlie Brown: 11:55

I think the biggest thing for me was I just I've always I just felt like I had absolutely nothing to do with that. So what am I leaving? I'm not leaving a career, I'm just leaving a job that I didn't even like very much. You know, I'd need to leave. The only thing we had to leave was we put a certain amount of money into the business at the beginning, and it was a very small amount of money to start with, because we didn't know whether it was going to work or not, and I was like that's, I'm prepared to lose that, and then that made it so much easier and every time I was like oh, I don't know, it's right.

Charlie Brown: 12:27

at the very beginning, my mum was always like what would you rather be doing this, or would you rather be doing what you were doing?

John Hawker: 12:32

It's a really good question to ask. It's a really good question to pose for anyone who finds themselves in a similar mindset as well. What are you really losing out on by making that decision? Are you going to be happier sticking out or at least taking the risk and jumping into something new? Sam, if you can cover, give me a potted history of your side, if that's okay.

Sam Brown: 12:52

Yeah, okay, sure. So we briefly touched on my first job, which was the racing of our team. So I did that from when I was 16. I slightly lied and said to them that I could drive a car, which on my first day, when I was asked to drive a racing car, out of the garage and stalled it a few times and almost crashed into the wall of the garage. It turned out that that lie was quite quickly discovered. But they took me under their wing and taught me a lot about how cars work and I really enjoyed the sort of getting in hands dirty, literally like working on cars and seeing when your drivers won and stuff was incredible. So I did that all through university, whenever I had holidays or whenever I could get out and go to race meetings and that kind of thing.

Sam Brown: 13:41

After graduating I kind of flailed for a little bit and didn't really know what to do by the time I was doing engineering at university. But I think by the time I'd reached the end of the course I'd realized that I didn't actually want to have a career in that field anymore. I think I sort of spent three years learning all the bits that just put me off actually doing something like that and it liked a lot of things. The reality of it was a lot less exciting than 16 year old me had thought that sort of career path might be. It's like, oh yeah, today we're going to be selecting which wheel bearings to use in this thing, in this catalog, and it's like, yeah, I kind of have more dreams of designing Formula One cars or something naive like that. So I think then I just kind of ended up like a lot of people falling into recruitment because it was just one of those jobs that, if you didn't really know what you wanted to do, it was a career path that you could quickly start earning some good money and it was just quite an easy route to follow. So I did that for about four and a half years and then, as Charlie mentioned, we left to go traveling for a summer and I kind of sort of hope that that would be an opportunity to sort of change direction a little bit.

Sam Brown: 14:58

When we came back, unfortunately, we'd kind of spent like all the money on that travel trips and sort of didn't really have any sort of any cushion left when we came back, so had to sort of find a job pretty quickly. You know this. Only so long you can sort of crash at your parents before you kind of start to feel slightly mad and say like no, we need out of here like ASAP. So I went back into recruitment, working in London, this time Again covering the tech industry.

Sam Brown: 15:28

But after a few years decided I really did need to break out of it and I spoke to one of my clients who I really like what they're doing and talked to them about whether there'd be an opportunity for me to work there either are doing in-house recruitment or doing something else. They were setting up an office in the West Coast of America at that time and I wondered whether I could go do something over there and an opportunity came up in. Well, the role was operations manager, but it was basically a tech startup. So if you weren't writing code or trying to sell the product, it was kind of my job. So I did finance, I did hiring, I did you know it's legal stuff contract and any kind of a few hats.

Sam Brown: 16:10

I mean, I was completely out of my depth the whole time basically, but it was an amazing experience to learn so much and have such a varied job. And then that got acquired by Apple in 2013, right around the time that we were opening Vino Vero. It was quite. It was really nice. Timing actually kind of dovetailed really perfectly. So I worked two jobs for a while while we were kind of getting up and running because they kept me on to help with the transition period. Yeah, it was all a bit nuts trying to juggle two jobs and all that, but I guess a lot of you know people when they're starting out business, you do have to make those sort of sacrifices a little bit to sort of, you know, make sure that because I was still earning, so that you know there was less pressure on Vino Vero to make money from day one, which I think really helped because it meant that we could be a little bit more principled about what we were doing, because we could stick to our guns a little bit.

John Hawker: 17:04

Yeah, I guess. I guess for a lot of people when they're trying to segue into starting up a new venture, you know finances and that a pot of money being there is one of the biggest stresses that are going to come into your head at any point. And, as you say, it's nice to have some more earnings coming in, because then you're not driven to make decisions purely for the finances. You're sticking to other elements that are important to you as well. So when I said squiggly career, I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. I think it's really good to have a squiggly career. There's a lot of people that use that label now and that are much more experienced than me and talk about the benefits of that as well.

John Hawker: 17:42

But so, as well as having quite squiggly career paths before Vino Vero, in terms of the different roles and things that you've both done, what inspired you to set up, charlie? You touched upon this already. But what inspired you to set up beyond wine, I guess what makes you come from fairly sort of stable career paths and appreciate progression maybe, charlie, wasn't happening within the charity you're working for as well, but to break away from traditional forms of employment, which is working for someone else and set up your own thing. What was the catalyst and how did that even come about? Who instigated the conversation to say let's do it?

Charlie Brown: 18:22

I think it was probably me. I think I don't know. I have a feeling it would have been me, because I'm always the one that's not happy. I realised really quickly into my career that I did not enjoy working in offices and I didn't see working in them and I interviewed terribly. I don't think I got a single job after any interview I'd ever done. I still am. I was like this isn't going to work. My parents had their own business, so I grew up in an entrepreneurial life. My mum was an artist and my dad sold her a house, so that's how I grew up, so I'm working for them as well.

Charlie Brown: 19:09

So for me it was really, I think, it was always going to be that I was going to do my own thing and I tried to do my own thing before thinking about different ways of doing it. And eventually, once Sam was like, yeah, I'm on board with this team, I think the two of us going ahead with it meant that it actually started to actually happen. And there is a picture somewhere I think we still have it of a handshake you do at about two o'clock in the morning after a lot of wine. We're like we are going to do this, we are going to open a shop in New York City, and that was January and I could be open about 18 months later. We thought it would take a lot longer.

Charlie Brown: 19:42

We were still in London. We were new, we had to move, we had to find the premises. So we expected it to be maybe two or three years, but no, once we decided it.

John Hawker: 19:50

Yeah, that is absolutely incredible. I think and maybe you've found this as well from speaking to other people that have gone on to more, let's say that entrepreneurial lifestyle as well. My brother and my mum are on I say entrepreneurs, but they work for themselves and are self-employed. They're creatives as well, so my mum and brother are actually artists, but I think being around people that also work in that way, you can't fail to be inspired by that as well. Sam, what were your parents doing? Did you have that around you? I know through Charlie, by extension.

Sam Brown: 20:27

I think my parents were kind of the opposite of Charlie's family in that regard. My dad was from Leonsea and we grew up in this area. They had very stable jobs working for the civil service. They worked there from the age of, I think, less than 30 right through to retirement. So they had that really very long-term, stable career. So I think they were much more happy when I was okay.

Sam Brown: 20:57

Maybe happy is unfair, but they kind of understood a lot more when I was working in an office job, for example in recruitment or whatever. I think when we first broached the idea of us opening a wine business, they were kind of a little bit skeptical and a little bit unsure because I think it was kind of quite out of their zone of what they were familiar with and what careers looked like. And from their point of view I'd had this quite sort of steady career, almost in sort of recruitment and then into the startup world and stuff like that, and I think they kind of felt like a little bit this is a little bit of a departure from that. So they were a little bit unsure to begin with. So I can't say that I kind of grew up with an entrepreneurial family or anything like that.

John Hawker: 21:39

So is this why Charlie is the instigator of these ideas, Sort of putting the hand out and going?

Charlie Brown: 21:46

Sam, we're doing this. You were still very keen, I just had to be noticed.

Sam Brown: 21:51

It's just, I'm louder.

John Hawker: 21:56

Yeah, I think it is really interesting how much like your parents, or the people around you, do inspire that different mindset, though, as well. I would assume, charlie, based on what you've said already, that your parents were like all in and patting me on the back about setting up the business.

Charlie Brown: 22:12

Yeah, they were my brother's a wedding photographer as well, so they're very used to just us just doing our own thing. And yeah they were, they were fine. I think they found it harder when we transitioned again into traveling, but I think that I think outside of it they were still great about it actually. But, like I think when you move from bricks and mortar the student that's very successful into something that looks completely unknown, I think the boys get harder.

Charlie Brown: 22:39

But yeah, my parents have been supported the whole way through. I think they're fortunate with that.

John Hawker: 22:44

Well, we could speak about Vino Vero for a large portion of this conversation and, I think, as a chapter of your lives. You must be incredibly proud because you would. You run that business for seven years, as you say. It was successful. It was as, as shop fronts go, so recognizable and it was like a long standing, held a long standing position in Lee Road, which, if you can do that, it's a thing in itself, isn't it? There's quite a high turnover in Lee Road even higher now but to have had that shop and business it was more than a shop. I appreciate that for such a long time. What a success. So I think that's a great chapter of your lives.

John Hawker: 23:20

What the hell inspires you, then, to start that? That next chapter, which, as you say, was this transition to sell it all and not just the business, everything else to then embark upon the lifestyle that you live now. So this is going to be a different one because you I'm sure you're both going to have very clear stories about this as well. So maybe, sam, if I, if I start with you, you know just just what happened. What was the genesis if this idea to sell the business when it's when it's successful, it's 2020. So I think for a lot of people, that was the year that, if you weren't already thinking about what the hell am I doing, 2020 probably sparked a few more ideas about that. So tell, tell me what happened, yeah.

Sam Brown: 24:03

I definitely think that's the case. I think the the first time I really remember thinking about selling a business was a couple of years earlier than that, around 2018. That was the year that I went to work harvest in Bojale for the first time, and Charlie did as well and I think we had different ideas about like what life after Vino Verre would look like. But I think I definitely at that stage remember I can't remember we might have even been talking to like an agent or something about selling the business already at that point, I think. But I think we just kind of felt like the business would continue going and continue growing, but it wasn't necessarily exciting us anymore.

Sam Brown: 24:45

I think we also, I think, had itchy feet, because you know, we've always enjoyed travel and you kind of feel like, oh, we've got this business in wine. You can travel as much as you want, and you can to an extent, but you're always going to have that tie. You're always going to have. You know it was just one of those things, isn't it? You go away for one day, and that's the day when deliveries don't turn up on time and something cancels, something gets lost in the shipping or whatever like that, and so you can never really focus on the actual travel. You're always being dragged back to the business because, as you alluded to, it wasn't just sharp, it was also we did importing, we did distribution, we did online, we did corporate gifts, we did loads of other things. So there was a lot of balls in the air and I think it was just one of those things where, whenever you try and get away, there's always something that's sort of snagging you and so I think you know the combination of itchy feet.

Sam Brown: 25:38

I think we're feeling like we've kind of done what we wanted to do with it. I think at that time I was kind of envisaging that I'd personally like to get more involved in actually making wine. You know, did harvest. We both did why making courses and that kind of thing, and subsequently it didn't pan out that way. But I don't regret that. But yeah, I felt like it was just a growing need to sort of, yeah, move beyond and try and get a bit more travel involved. And it wasn't going to work with that.

John Hawker: 26:07

So when people say itchy feet and they want to change, that could mean like selling up the business and understand that. But it doesn't necessarily mean selling everything. So was there a time where it was just about selling the business, or was it all in? When you knew you were going to sell the business, did you also know that you were going to literally sell everything? So did you own a house at the time?

John Hawker: 26:28

Yeah or were you renting, yeah, so you owned a house, so I'm assuming a car or whatever it was. So you chose. You chose so from itchy feet and realizing that maybe the engagement, the satisfaction, the passion which is a bit of a cliche word running the business had started to dissipate. You've gone right, we're going to sell everything. Is there a part of that where it was just the business or just the house, or try and mix things up a bit? You just dived straight in and went we're going for it.

Charlie Brown: 26:58

I think what I remember I'm just going back now we did toy with just selling the business and keeping the house, renting it out, the sort of thing and we realized that we just wanted that clean break and we were never going to get it if we had ties in the UK. So when Brexite happened the day that Brexite happened in 2016, the day that both of us we always wanted to live abroad we've never felt too comfortable in the UK and we said that's what. That was the day that we said we are doing this. At some point we are going to meet the UK. We are not going to come back.

Charlie Brown: 27:32

That took a long time to happen, but when we realized that we were going to sell the business and then we had the right person to buy it, if I may, would absolutely be the right person to buy it and we just decided that was the time to go all in and do what we promised that we were going to do for the last four years. Because something I really am here on is if I said to everybody oh, we're going to move abroad, we're going to move abroad, and I don't like to be that person that's talking about this stuff and never actually done this.

Charlie Brown: 27:59

So we decided the best thing to do is just be to sell it to them and completely change the way that we do our finances as well, and it would be no longer happening. We have investments and we don't have any like assets, like physical assets, and we just we wanted that freedom actually.

John Hawker: 28:17

I think it has to be. The draw Was digital nomads a label that you were familiar with before you made that decision? Is it something you were aware of?

Charlie Brown: 28:26

Yes and no. I mean, we never saw ourselves like that at all, even when we left we didn't. We spent six months in Spain and we spent. We lived in Rioja, which is like the least digital nomad type place you could ever imagine. We were there because we love it and we love the wine there and that sort of thing. We only really started to understand about the label when we moved to Croatia and I got during this is 21, and I got. I won a competition to become a digital nomad for a month with 10 other people in Dubrovnik as a guest of Dubrovnik's city, tam Hall.

John Hawker: 29:05

I've been seeing this at the time on LinkedIn, charlie, as well.

Charlie Brown: 29:08

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was when we really started to understand what digital nomad meant and that we were digital nomads, even though we've never really seen ourselves like that, but I guess we were.

John Hawker: 29:21

The impetus to set up wasn't to become digital nomads. I guess it's just a label that is best described people that are working with the sort of lifestyle and freedom and flexibility that you guys have.

Charlie Brown: 29:32

Yeah, and we had no idea what we were gonna do when we left Dubrovnik, but, honestly, our brain capacity had completely been depleted by like, first of all, at the beginning of 2020, I took two months of work because I basically had a breakdown, which was not so much fun, but it was just too much work, it was just too much and then COVID hit and then we sold the business. So we just we had no idea what we were gonna do. And then there was a issue of Brexit as well, because, as Sam said, we were looking to make wine and once Brexit hit, we were not legally allowed to work in.

Charlie Brown: 30:06

Europe anymore like for a company. So, for a winery or anything like that. The only thing you could do was become a digital nomad if you wanted to continue to live in Europe. So that sort of that meant the.

Charlie Brown: 30:19

It was a bit of a convoluted route and it definitely wasn't a we are gonna become digital nomads in a minute that we finished the shop it was. There was so much uncertainty. We had no idea where we were gonna be able to live, whether we were evil, we were allowed outside at that point because this was October 2020. And you know, whether Brexit was really gonna happen or not, I think even towards the very end of it, we wondered if it might or not, or whether it might fall through. And we could still continue, we could still work For wineries, but once that happened, then we became fully fledged digital nomads.

John Hawker: 30:50

Digital nomads. Yeah, sam, you mentioned you are someone that sort of just that dives into something you know, sees an opportunity and embraces it and goes full into that as well. That sounds like a perfect example of that happening.

Sam Brown: 31:04

Yeah, I think so. I think when I was sort of thinking about my career, like in terms of preparing for this talk today, I was thinking that at every stage I and we together have just kind of jumped into things. So, you know, when I was 16, I wrote because that's what you did when you were 16, you couldn't email or anything like that I literally wrote a letter to this racing team and said, can I come work for you? And they were like sure, and so that's how I got that one. And then, you know, we started our own business. We just kind of jumped into it. And then the same with, you know, the app development which I'm doing now. I just kind of jumped into that and I'm just sort of doing that. So I think there's definitely a common thread of like, I think, just kind of just jumping in, because I think we kind of.

Sam Brown: 31:50

I think a lot of the time it's easy to worry about what you know, what could go wrong. Sometimes, you know, you feel like your confidence might be not sometimes sort of financial issues, but I think you know doing whatever you can to mitigate those issues. So, for example, when we started Vino Verro, we, as Charlie mentioned, we put aside a certain amount of money that we felt, yeah, if we just burn through that and the business fails, so be it. We're prepared to risk that amount of money. It wasn't vast sums, it wasn't gonna, you know, cripple us for life.

Sam Brown: 32:21

But you know, we just had that sort of pot that we mentally put aside and I think it's important to not sort of you know, not be reckless with things, but I think it's important to jump in because I think, as you alluded to earlier, you learn so much when you just kind of go in and do it and you know you learn a whole bunch of stuff that you would never be exposed to. If you sort of slowly progress your way up or you might have different, you know ideas about the way things should be done. Sure, there's definitely, you know, you do need to, you know, learn some things the right way. But I think you can also just skip straight to go and jump in with some of these things and, yeah, I think you can be surprised at you know what the outcome can be.

John Hawker: 33:03

I think immersing yourself in something is the best way to learn, isn't it half the time? And maybe we'll talk about this, maybe later as well. It's the same if you're trying to learn a language. You know I hear this from so many people that have learned a language. I'm not one of those people, but you know, immersing yourself in the country or with a load of people that only speak that language is sometimes the best way to do it. So, yeah, not waiting until you know everything to just get out and learn, I think is it's a way that my brain is wired. It's not the way everyone's brain is wired, but I am completely with you on that. You've given three examples there, sam, I think, of you know, right into the racing team and that worked out sort of diving into that, being a Vero, diving into that, doing the coding, diving into that and they've all worked out really well. Has there ever been a time where you've dived into something and thought, shit, this is backfired completely? If the answer's no, then great, but yeah, thought I'd ask.

Sam Brown: 33:59

I don't necessarily think specifically. I think after leaving Vino Verra there was definitely a stage where I didn't really know what I wanted to do and you know, just kind of, yeah, sort of tried a few different things. I mean, I was writing on medium and that was going quite well, but I just kind of lost the. I didn't have the unlike Charlie, who's got this burning desire to write and you know she gets up in the morning and you know just instantly just wants to write and get those ideas down.

Sam Brown: 34:26

I always found that more of a torturous process. Like it took me a long time to kind of get the thoughts out onto the page and I was constantly writing and then editing and then starting again and stuff. So I'd definitely say the blogging on medium and stuff like that was harder for me. Definitely. I don't feel like it necessarily came super natural. So yeah, I would say I wouldn't necessarily count it as a failure at all, but I would say that you know it was something that I definitely sort of it turned out not to be the right path and I found it a lot more difficult than I thought maybe I would have.

John Hawker: 35:04

Understood, understood. Okay, I'm going to go back one step here and just because I think this is saying people be really interested in if they are inspired to kind of follow the same route as you guys have done as well. The practicality is, charlie, of selling everything, business aside, because I appreciate that's going to be very nuanced and specific to what you were trying to sell, but, you know, going to the point where you just want to sell. I'm imagining a massive boot sale.

John Hawker: 35:29

Yeah you're not far off. What did you do? What was the process? Obviously, yeah, take me through that.

Charlie Brown: 35:35

We found for one of a better word. I know there's a lot of stigma around this world, but we've found minimalism about the time we opened the shop. I always tell the story about the fact that once Sam finished his job and we were fully reliant on being a baron, we were living on 300 pounds a month. And that was after we paid for our rent and bills. Everything else had to come out 300 pounds a month. And I read this thing that was like Incredible.

Charlie Brown: 35:57

The best way to give yourself pay rises, to spend less. And I was like, well, I definitely need to do that right now. So we kind of delved into it and that meant that and we got quite into it and we so we never had a lot of stuff.

Charlie Brown: 36:11

So basically, once we decided that minimalism was the way we wanted, to go we never had a lot of things to get rid of, so by the time we sold the house we did have stuff. Of course we had a fair bit of stuff, but like we didn't have, it wasn't the, I think, the average. The average in America is 300,000 items in every household and there is absolutely no way that we had anything like that.

John Hawker: 36:35

That to me screams of like clip, to me it's that, that's. That doesn't sound right. But yeah, I can imagine.

Charlie Brown: 36:41

I think the average in Europe is about 10,000.

Charlie Brown: 36:44

So is America's you know a completely different beast. But so, so really, we looked around the house and we said, well, what have we got here? And we thought, well, we've got some IKEA furniture that we bought years ago. We've got there was basically falling apart anyway. We've got a few keepsakes, but not much. And once you kind of realize that a lot of the stuff you have in your house is not, it just wasn't anything, you know, it was just stuff, it was just furniture, it was just, you know.

John Hawker: 37:13

There was no sentimentality behind it, no sort of deeper connection with IKEA furniture.

Charlie Brown: 37:19

No, not really. I mean, we did some stuff, but we've kept very little and we now have in my parents' home at home in their loft I think we have and they've got free boxes where stuff's and things like that and the biggest thing that we miss is our kitchen stuff.

Charlie Brown: 37:35

So I've still got like one of the Creasey pots that we got for our wedding, things like that, but everything else, oh, and our nice wine glasses, but that was but even the wine. We have 300 bottles of wine and we said, well, what do we do with this? We don't plan to come back to the UK. So we're like, well, we'll drink it. So we did, we dragged the whole collection and I think we've got like three or four bottles left at home. And I'm pleased we did that, because I think if we'd kept it it would have. It would have a lot of it would have been ruined by now anyway.

John Hawker: 38:01

So Well, it's better to enjoy it, isn't it?

Charlie Brown: 38:03

Yeah, once we had a sort of transient nature of life. In fact, when we first met we had nothing. We met as two-set adults at 19 and 21,. We didn't know anything and you know, I agree, we accumulated some stuff throughout our time and then we've gone back to zero again and it really, and once that mentality really helped, I think, that sort of minimalistic mentality that we've been living for years with very little stuff, which was great because then we have more money to spend on.

Charlie Brown: 38:32

You know, we had hardly any mortgage, hardly any well not too much anyway and hardly any stuff we could spend our money on what we really truly love, because travel, wine, food and this sort of thing, and that's why we did it in the first place.

Charlie Brown: 38:46

So it wasn't that difficult and I get asked a lot like what do you regret giving up? And it's really hard to think of anything really that I don't need back here, say for my life. And then once you start renting airbues, you realise how much stuff in life you rent. You don't necessarily need to own, so we rent our stuff.

Charlie Brown: 39:10

Now we rent our beds and our so-called rent out and all of our crockery and that sort of thing. We carry a chef's knife around with us because that is something that we definitely do love because of cooking, and that's what we do love.

John Hawker: 39:23

I was going to say thank you for clarifying it was for cooking. I was just wondering if this was going to go very dark.

Sam Brown: 39:28

All of a sudden.

John Hawker: 39:32

But no, I think so really that process of even the mindset shift to sell things had already happened because of this commitment that you've made to minimalism as well and I know you write a lot about minimalism and that minimalistic lifestyle as well, charlie and on the back of this I'll post some links to your writing and I'm not too familiar with the platform as you guys use. I subscribe to Substack and some elements of it, but I definitely share that because I think people would find that really inspiring as well. So it wasn't like this hot to cold, we've got all this stuff, we need to sell it or you'd already kind of got into that mindset that minimalism is the way it was working for you.

Charlie Brown: 40:12

We've been quite a pretty much everything that was superfluous. Really it wasn't too hard. It was practically annoying because you had to sell a lot of stuff and, interestingly, at that point we couldn't tell anybody that we were selling that shop because it was all under NDAs and all that sort of thing. And people would come around the house that were our customers because they found our stuff on Facebook marketplace and were like, oh, you're selling all your stuff. We're like, oh, yeah, well, you know, we're just moving in with our parents. And even the time that the women came around to evaluate the house when we put the house on the market, she was like, oh, you're selling a pair of them. That's so, leoncy.

John Hawker: 40:52

That is so, Leoncy. I was like why are you selling my house?

Charlie Brown: 40:58

Oh, you know, Cobra, if you have to move them and our parents, it's so funny. Oh no, that's very Leoncy. Oh, it was good, but still.

John Hawker: 41:05

Yeah, same same.

Charlie Brown: 41:06

Yeah, wow.

John Hawker: 41:12

So, sam, you know, with all this happening, I'm going to ask a question I don't know it's going to. It is a relationship question. Have you always been sort of on the same wavelength with most of these decisions? You know the minimalism piece it sounds like the. You know the travel has always been a huge thing for you and each chapter of your life you seem to have been on the same page. But when it comes to selling all your stuff and minimalism as well, so let's go back to the minimalistic lifestyle, minimalism, god, it's very hard to say that quickly, really hard.

John Hawker: 41:55

Yeah, are you both sort of simpatico when it comes to that?

Sam Brown: 41:58

Yeah, I think one of the strongest things that we've had, and one of the reasons why we've been together so long, is, I think we're very much on the same page and even if we're not always 100% because you know you're never going to exactly have the same thoughts on everything I think we're very good at. I guess the word you'd use is compromise, but not in the way that, like you know, one person doesn't get what the other one wants, but more. If one of us says I want to do this, then the other one thinks, well, okay, how are we going to make that happen? We're not going to put our barriers, say, oh, I want to say the way it is, whatever. So I think we've always been good at that. I think I've never really been particularly material person. Anyway, I never had like before we got into the. You know the actual idea of minimalism. It's not like we had tons and tons of stuff anyway. So I think that was yeah.

Sam Brown: 42:49

I think when I think, throughout the relationship, there's a lot of times where, like, for example, I've gone to Charlie with an idea or she's come to me with an idea, and I think we both listened to that. So she said, oh, I've heard about this thing, let's give it a go. And you know I was instantly like, yeah, great, it wasn't like, oh well, you need to convince me, or. Or I'm going to be really, you know, stuck in my ways about this sort of thing. I think we kind of instantly were on the same page with that and I think through the whole time selling Vinivera and you know beyond, I think we've kind of been on the same page and I think we've kind of been very good at listening to what each other want and, you know, accepting that and finding ways to make it work, rather than, you know, sticking our word in and saying, oh, I don't want that.

John Hawker: 43:36

And it is. It is without blind smoke up your arse, guys. It is an amazing achievement to have gone through those seismic shifts in your life as well and and to have backed each other and supported each other in the way that you have as well, and it obviously helps that you've got a very similar mindset. But to go through, you know, starting a business, selling a business, selling your house, moving into the lifestyle that you've decided upon as well, I think is is, yeah, it's commendable and inspiring again for a lot of people, I think.

Sam Brown: 44:06

I think it was a funny one because I think a lot of the time people say, oh, I feel like working together, that must be really difficult. We got that arse, that like every day when we, when we started a business and it was the absolutely easiest thing, like I found working with Charlie just so easy we could just say exactly what we needed to say. There was no politics around all. Well, you know this person's, you know my boss or my colleague in this way or whatever you know, because we were a couple, you know you can talk openly and honestly and say we need to do this or we need to do that or what do you think about that, what do you think about this?

Sam Brown: 44:41

And I think we just worked together really well and I think it was a really easy partnership. And actually the hardest thing for me in a lot of ways has been after being a barrow, like forging our own careers, and not working together has been much weirder than working together because we did it for, you know, seven or eight years, like it was a long time, and I think there was a big adjustment for me in not having you know this partner, like doing, you know, working towards the same goals as I was like finding my own path again was quite difficult. So yeah, it's definitely been a journey on that.

John Hawker: 45:16

Do you think the same kind of feeling might have applied regardless of whether you were a couple or just working with someone towards a common goal, sam? So it could have been a business partner, say, as well. Do you feel like working? Do you feel like the sort of digital nomad lifestyle on the way of working? You've got the moment being quite insular and working alone. Do you think that would have probably applied if it was a business partner as well? No offense, charlie, but you know you can see the strength of the relationship that you've got, but do you find working on your own and that transition difficult, regardless? Do you think, sam?

Sam Brown: 45:49

It's a difficult one to isolate really. I suppose I think it. I think, because you know we're a couple as well as, like business partners I think it was a deeper more, a stronger connection and a stronger goal. I think we were kind of more entwined in the business and it would be if it was just a couple of business partners working on the same thing. But but yeah, having not been in that situation so much, it's a bit hard to say, but I think it would have still been a difficult change, but I think maybe just slightly different.

John Hawker: 46:20

Yeah, okay. So when you decided that you obviously you sold all your stuff and you decided to move out of the UK, did you have a country in mind that you actually wanted to land in at that stage?

Charlie Brown: 46:32

Yeah, it was Spain to start with, it was Spain right.

Charlie Brown: 46:35

Yeah, spain, I think, has always been sort of one of our favourite places. So but we, as I said before, we had Brexit in the mix as well, so we knew that it was a lot harder than just saying, oh, we're just going to move to Spain. At that point that we they said, if you're going to move to Spain, become resident in Spain. If you do that before the end of the year, you can stay. So we said, great, we'll do that. So we tried to get residents in Spain. But it turned out, once you delve a little bit more into Spanish tax laws and citizenship the, for instance, they make you give up your British citizenship and you become a citizen this sort of thing we realised it wasn't. Unfortunately it wasn't going to be the place that we could stay.

Charlie Brown: 47:16

They were also quite heavily taxed on freelancers. So Spain has a thing where the minimum you can, they have an autonomy. It's like a social security, like national insurance. It's at least 350 euros per person per month, whether you work or not.

Charlie Brown: 47:33

And we decided that we were just going to cripple us a little bit whilst we were establishing our businesses. So it wasn't Spain in the end, and that was fine, because we always just wanted to travel. The only reason we were thinking about stopping was because of Brexit, because we needed that European residency. So it kind of forced us. Actually, once that happened and once we had to leave Spain, it forced us to travel because we could have just stayed one place, but we wanted to travel it was a bit of a strange thing.

Charlie Brown: 48:06

So we started to travel more and I think I'm really pleased and aware that it forced us to do that otherwise. And it forced us into places. Brexit forced us into places that we might not have come before Because we might have just wanted to hang out in. We originally wanted to hang out in France, say, portugal, italy, these are all the wine countries, these are all the countries that we love the most, but we can't do that.

Sam Brown: 48:28

I was just going to say, yeah, as a result, we had some incredible experiences that we would have never, you know, never had if it hadn't been for that. So, for example, the Croatia trip that we took and then Charlie, getting the digital nomad thing we met so many people. I've met a business partner through that, in fact, two business partners that I'm starting up all businesses with. There's just so many amazing connections and people that we met as a result of that one sort of on a whim trip to go there, and our whole life could have been really different if we'd just not been forced into making that step and if we'd just ended up staying in Spain, for example. It could have been quite different.

Sam Brown: 49:06

I mean, even though we were planning to use Spain as a base rather than just never leave there, but still I think we you know, being forced out of that comfort zone, a little bit like gave us some amazing experiences.

John Hawker: 49:17

Yeah, definitely. It kind of really kicked off that digital nomad pathway for you, didn't it as well? Okay, that's really. It's just really interesting as well how versatile you both seem. Like there's a hurdle and you're like, okay, we'll just flow around there. Do you think that's an innate character traits that you've got, which is quite, you know, just this ability to kind of go with the flow? That's the best way I can describe it. But is that? Do you feel like you've both got that about you? I think so.

Sam Brown: 49:43

I think we enjoy learning a lot Like I think we're both quite curious people.

Charlie Brown: 49:48

I was going to say I think we're quite big picture people, so I'll often look at things from a really high, like up in the sky kind of thing, and trying to think well, this is the end goal. However you do that, it doesn't really matter. There are like a million ways you can end up doing that.

Charlie Brown: 50:05

Or the end goal might change, but it's like all about looking at like the bigger picture. I think really, really helps, because I think sometimes if you get a bit bogged down with detail, you'll never do anything, whereas I'm very much more like ah well, give it a go.

Charlie Brown: 50:18

I mean, let's just try it, like kind of things. So yeah, detail is not my forte at all and I think sometimes that can be a good thing. I found it a good thing in Peter Verra as well. That meant that you wouldn't get bogged down a lot of things that maybe didn't really matter you know, trying to keep what really matters in mind.

John Hawker: 50:37

Again, that might resonate with a few people as well, Like the journey that you take, not getting bogged down in that detail and looking at the bigger picture. As you say, the journey you take to get there could be squiggly as anything. Again, that kind of resonates with the goes back to the squiggly career piece as well. But yeah, it's getting from A to B and that can look like anything kind of that route that you take as well. Did you already have an idea of how you're going to make money once you'd sold up and moved on?

Sam Brown: 51:04

I think we had a few different ideas about what we wanted to do, but I think I kind of wanted to keep it quite open. I mean, I think at that stage I think Charlie was quite keen to take a bit of a break away from working in wine. I think I was still keen to get involved, do some work in wineries and things like that. But after December 2020, after the Brexit deal was signed, that became impossible. So that kind of put that idea to rest. I think we talked about doing some consulting for other entrepreneurs wanting to start up businesses, either in wine or in other things like that.

Charlie Brown: 51:40

You did a little bit of work with wineries to help get their wine in terms of the markets as well.

Sam Brown: 51:46

Yeah, I didn't do a great thing about that you tried, time you tried.

Charlie Brown: 51:51

No, I think. Yeah, I definitely wanted to break, I definitely needed that. I didn't really touch wine for about 18 months. I didn't just have my hand glass in the evening. I didn't want to learn or anything like that, it was just a, as I said, I had a bit of a breakdown in 2020 and that was part of that. So Sam was a bit more keen to come in with wine.

Charlie Brown: 52:11

It came back actually, so that was really good. It came back about 18 months ago, so I'm now fully back into it. I'm fully back into writing about it.

John Hawker: 52:20

That's great. So how then did you get on that path of how important was it to you to come up with like a steady I guess a steady way of making money, because I'm assuming in selling up you had some money there as a bit of security, which meant maybe jumping straight in and trying to earn money wasn't at the forefront of your mind. But how did it come about? What was the evolution from now getting a steady income? Have you got a steady income?

Charlie Brown: 52:47

No, no, not steady. Yeah, money comes in, but that's fine, are you content?

Sam Brown: 52:56

Oh, I can take this one, seeing as though I'm the one that has very, very low, steady income.

John Hawker: 53:04

Well, I think it's just an interesting aspect of, again, the lifestyle that you're leading, because some people might think, right, well, I need to, because there are companies that offer remote work from anywhere, policies. You don't have to be a freelancer to live the life that you're living. I guess. But as a freelancer and I guess having that minimalistic lifestyle as well that you've got, maybe that just doesn't have to be so much of an impetus and a driver for you.

Charlie Brown: 53:28

That definitely makes you want to have big outgoings. The most important thing as soon as you do that, everything gets so much easier, yeah.

John Hawker: 53:38

Because I can imagine you can lead to. Sorry, sandy, the only point I was going to say that I can imagine what you could do by selling every foot and then just getting into this mindset where you need to make money is that you're just taking all the stress that you might have felt living in the UK and having all the things that you had, putting yourself in an environment that's a bit more alien to you, where actually that stress is probably going to be compounded even more by the fact you need to make money.

Charlie Brown: 54:03

Yeah, you definitely see that with some digital men out there, they want that. It is stressful living in other countries. There's always issues and then if you add the fact that you have to work five days a week, nine to five, on top of that, that can get very difficult for people and a lot of people end up having to decide am I going to travel or am I going to work? And lots and lots of digital nomads stop the digital, the nomad bit, because it's hard to try and debate. But I think for us, we always wanted, we never wanted to have to work all hours of all days again.

Charlie Brown: 54:44

We did that every now and then and it was exhausting and we didn't want to make a lot, we wanted to make a life where we didn't necessarily have to do that, and a big part of that, as I say, was to make sure our outcomes were not too big. And then there was a lot of structuring finances. We're both quite yeah, that was right Focus when it comes to finances. I mean need to have ever like debt. We're very careful not necessarily through, but careful and we make sure that we only spend in areas that we care about, which is largely travel through wine, friends kind of it. So anything else we don't spend on at all, and I think it's stuff like that that really helps be able to work out.

Charlie Brown: 55:27

If you get your finances in order, then you work becomes less stressful. I mean, you don't have a salient can be not who's scared, and you can do that in lots of different ways. Some people have saved like savings parts. Some people have past income or investments it depends on the situation. So can you do that? But for us there was always like this is what we again if this is the end goal to not have to work all hours a day how do we make that happen? What are the different ways that we can do that? But it's again another big picture sort of I think.

John Hawker: 55:53

Yeah, brilliant, God Sam, did you? Did you want to interject anything there?

Sam Brown: 55:58

No, I think that's kind of a pretty good summation of where we're at, I think, by keeping our outgoings as low as possible and by really being really intentional with how we spend any money. It means that we've had incredible experiences. We've met great people, we've been to great places, but it's also given us a bit of breathing space to learn and develop and to see what works and what doesn't. For example, with the coding I started around Christmas 21,. I took my first sort of coding courses and then I've been kind of building up Kava, which is my coffee app, which I launched towards the end of last year, and then I've been working on another couple of projects. But neither of these are kind of really sort of bringing in any money yet.

Sam Brown: 56:47

But it's given by having our finances in place. Where we are in a situation where we have low costs of living we have Charlie is now earning enough money with that and we can lean on our investments when we need to and things like that to sort of supplement our income. It means that I've got the opportunity to focus on developing those projects rather than having to just go out and get a 9-5 job, for example, I think, after having run our own thing for so long. I think the idea of going back to sort of starting an entry-level developer position, working steady hours the whole time, I think I'd find quite difficult these days. So I think it's worked out perfectly for both of us in terms of our personality types, how we like working. We've fallen into this kind of nice sort of routine and rhythm that I think fits us very well.

John Hawker: 57:43

Yeah, brilliant. I think you mentioned there being intentional with your finances or being intentional just with your plans in general. You can kind of reverse engineer everything else, can't you? If you, charlie, you reference those four things that you want to spend your money on, if they're your four pillars, just reverse engineer everything from there and understand how much money you need to focus on those priorities. And a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people just get sucked into whatever their earnings kind of dictate their lifestyle, and it doesn't need to be like that. I'm guilty of it as well, of saying it. I'm not preaching to anyone. You guys are doing it far, far better than I am. But yeah, I think if you can just be intentional about what you're spending, what you're spending it on, and it just takes a hell of a lot of pressure off, doesn't it?

Charlie Brown: 58:26

All right. When viral about this, I called it like the five pillars rule and it was basically the idea that you think the five most important things in your life and that's where you spend your money.

Sam Brown: 58:36

So I think it was. What was it?

Charlie Brown: 58:37

Writing travel, family and friends. Writing travel, family and friends. Coffee, food and wine. I think that was. You can really put it at the three for us, but and that's where we spend our money.

Charlie Brown: 58:47

Yeah, and I think that resonated with a lot of people, because a lot of people need that focus. You know to think, wow, am I really truly happy spending money and where am I not? And as soon as you do that, suddenly you have endless money to spend on this stuff. But you have more than you think because you're not siding it off into something that you don't really care about. Like, for instance, I don't know shoes. I don't know. I don't know, I don't think it's for me shoes, but for somebody else something else. For somebody else, shoes might be one of their pillars and that's cool. But then you have to. You know, nobody has an infinite amount of money. You've got to decide where you want to spend it.

John Hawker: 59:22

So, with technology, then, and how it supports the way that you guys are working, the infrastructure in the countries that you that you do work in, I guess, has to be a consideration for you, doesn't it? I mean, it doesn't sound like you'd be necessarily traveling to many countries where they're not going to have readily available internet, but how much does technology steer you into where you have been traveling over the last few years?

Charlie Brown: 59:45

So I don't know if we really consider that to be much actually.

Sam Brown: 59:51

Yeah, I think. I mean, although I'm working in tech now and Charlie writes online, I think our requirements in social technology are pretty simple really. I mean we just need fairly reliable Wi-Fi connection and somewhere to you know to work from, be it a apartment or be a coffee shop or occasional co-working this kind of thing. So I think, everywhere that we've been to, we've mainly traveled around Europe. So we've spent time in Spain, portugal, croatia. We went to Georgia, turkey, romania, albania, various other countries, but all around Europe, and so we've never really had a problem anywhere with not having good enough Wi-Fi or anything like that. It's always been fine.

Sam Brown: 1:00:38

So I'd say that from a technology point of view, everything is so ubiquitous now in terms of what we need. I mean this lifestyle wouldn't have been possible, you know, even probably five years ago it would have been difficult and certainly 10 years ago it would have been very, very difficult. But now suddenly everything is so easily accessible. You know, the technology is there Pretty much everywhere to make this kind of lifestyle possible. If you were on loads and loads of, you know, video calls all day, then maybe your bandwidth requirements would be more difficult. But with both of us working for ourselves, it's kind of, you know that's not really so much a priority for us. So it really means that you know we can travel pretty much anywhere without having to worry about it.

John Hawker: 1:01:21

And I guess because of the countries you've been traveling around. Time difference as well hasn't been an issue for you. I mean, I guess the catalyst behind me asking that question. I'm hoping that maybe businesses listening to this might be inspired to think you know what there is. I know we're talking to two freelancers now, but more businesses might be inspired to think okay, well, what's? How can I support people that are working for me if they wanted to choose to live this lifestyle for a set period of time or open-ended? So what can you put in place? So I guess, yeah, the reason I asked that question is just to see what the infrastructure is like for people that want to work like this in the countries that you've experienced. But from what you're saying, you know Wi-Fi connectivity is what you need, isn't it? And again, for bigger corporates that might require their teams to be on teams or Zoom calls, you'd expect some sort of stable connection.

Sam Brown: 1:02:14

But I'm just trying to take the there's so many co-workings that you go to everywhere. So you know we because you know I have occasional calls with, like, my business partner and stuff like that for one of my projects. But you know that's fine to just do, you know, throw them a coffee shop or whatever. But if you need to be on more professional calls, there's loads of co-working spaces that have, you know quiet booths where you can go and make a long-term call on good internet. You know you're not going to get disturbed or anything like that. And so we see people all the time that work for big corporates and do this lifestyle without anything else whatsoever. And I think, as you alluded to, like Time Zone can be an issue for some people and if you're on the other side of the world that could make things very difficult. But I think you know my, you know, if it's as long as it's not West Coast USA to, you know Georgia, right, like the country of Georgia, not the state of Georgia.

Sam Brown: 1:03:08

You know that kind of massive time difference could make things very difficult, but you know anywhere within Europe where you've only got I mean, here in Portugal we're on the same time as the UK, so you know there's never any issue from that point of view. So I think there are very few barriers and I think we find that we work very efficiently and effectively and I think we can be very focused about, you know, getting work done. So I think any companies that worry that if their staff are off, you know, digital nomadding around Europe, they're not going to get any work done, I'd see the exact opposite, like in all the people that we see that do this lifestyle, they're very driven, determined, focused people and I would warrant that they get a lot more work done, focusing. You know, working independently rather than being in office and getting distracted all the time.

Sam Brown: 1:03:54

And I mean, john, you work from home and you know you must see that. You know, obviously I know you've got family and stuff like that, which maybe sometimes gets in the way, but you can juggle it around it. You know you can fit, you know, your outside work commitments around your work and I find that you know I can't speak for you, but I find that both of us are incredibly, you know, focused when we work and get stuff done, and I don't think companies need to worry about the fact that you know if someone's off digital nomadding, they're not going to work.

Charlie Brown: 1:04:19

And even the time. The time differences. I, you know. I know people who say it's a massive hack because if you're working ahead of your company, you can get a lot done before that company even opens and you've got all that focused time, and for me I mean for, as a writer, I write for publications that are in America, so I can get my work every two to maybe nine, and it's there on their doors, on the, you know when they get in and I am so there's.

Charlie Brown: 1:04:43

there's sometimes you can look at it a completely different way Things like an issue around time, the time, time stuff, and it actually can be a really good thing.

John Hawker: 1:04:54

Yeah, I completely agree, and I'm banging the drum for as much flexibility to be offered by employers as humanly possible.

John Hawker: 1:05:02

So it's great to hear that you're also as well as, I guess, as well as still being able to be productive yourselves as freelancers, but you're also, you know, bumping into people, meeting people that work for big corporates, that are equally as productive and and are still doing really good jobs for their people.

John Hawker: 1:05:18

Because for me, a lot of it boils down to trust and you know this, this archaic thing about micromanagement and being able to see people or having a bit more control over where people are.

John Hawker: 1:05:29

I mean, as long as people are getting work done, what you know, if they're getting from A to B and getting the work completed when it needs to be completed, why does it matter? We've got all the infrastructure and technology now to say let's open up everything universally and just you know why can't that happen? So I think if we can break the barriers to that, especially, you know, getting rid I won't bog you down with too much recruitery speak at the moment, but, like with talent shortages and skill shortages as well one open the talent pools and break down these sort of geographical barriers, which started to happen during the pandemic a lot more, but there's this narrative now creeping back in that people need to be back in the office or back in country. All the remote working policies are shifting quite a lot to make sure people are limited to how much they can be out of country now, which I think is a real shame.

Sam Brown: 1:06:19

I think you're just with your shrinking your talent pool when you do that.

Charlie Brown: 1:06:26

No, I was going to say you're right. I mean it's a real shame and you know, you think the pandemic I mean all the stats in the pandemic said that this works, that remote working works, home working works, and I don't know why companies decided to go back. I think it's just a return to status quo is not always good and we all thought it was going to be a new normal and then it's not so and it's a shame.

John Hawker: 1:06:49

Exactly. No one uses the phrase normal anymore yeah because I mean it's like, well, no, because it's now gone back to the way it was. So new normal was being bandied around. So much wasn't it at that time. This is, this is the next kind of wave, the evolution of the way of working, and yeah, it's. It's a shame that a lot of companies as well I mean I'm sure you've seen that Zoom have requested that they're all of their, a lot more of their employees go back to the office which is the biggest?

John Hawker: 1:07:16

ironing out there. Absolutely crazy and all right, this is going to be a hard question to answer for you guys, but I really appreciate the insight you've given to your kind of journey and experiences of becoming digital nomads. I've got to label you as that, sorry for marketing.

John Hawker: 1:07:33

For marketing purposes, it helps as well. But for becoming digital nomads, what would your primary piece of advice be if you could only give one piece of advice to anyone that's sitting on the fence and wants to become a digital nomad? Charlie, I'll start with you. What's your one piece of advice? Sorry that you would give someone that's maybe on the fence and thinking about adopting this lifestyle or embracing this lifestyle.

Charlie Brown: 1:07:57

I would say to start. If you're nervous about it, start smaller than you think. You do not have to go to the craziest country you can possibly think of in order to become a digital nomad. You don't have to go to Thailand. If it's miles away, you can go to, I don't know, France, for instance, you know like, or you can go somewhere that you've been before, on holiday, for instance, because I think sometimes people just start too much too soon and it gets nerve-wracking and there's too many variables, like time zones, like trying to deal with completely different cultures to your own whilst also trying to work.

Sam Brown: 1:08:38

So just don't do that.

Charlie Brown: 1:08:39

Just start smaller and work the way up. And this is advice I've had from lots of Susan nomads. Just, you know, start in Europe. If Europe is a safe place for you, then go to say, somewhere a little bit more. It would be a little bit different, like, say, turkey, and then go to somewhere else like I don't know. China, like you can work your way up, you know, yeah, that would be mine.

John Hawker: 1:09:02

Okay, fantastic Sam. What about you?

Sam Brown: 1:09:04

I think to first of all like understand why you want that lifestyle and what it is you want out of it. Do you want to go discover new cultures? Do you just want to change? Do you want to meet new people? Do you just what factors are driving that and then use that to influence where you go and how you work?

Sam Brown: 1:09:24

I think you know people see these cliche pictures of digital nomads right with their laptop on some tropical beach and think, oh, that would be nice and it's like okay, but would that lifestyle actually work for you? Would you enjoy living in that culture? Would you enjoy? You know everything about that. So really think about how you enjoy traveling and working and finding places where you're going to Fit with that. So do you, because there's lots people that actually do enjoy, essentially, an office environment. It's just they don't want that office environment to always be the same place or to be, you know, surrounded by their colleagues.

Sam Brown: 1:09:59

Some people enjoy working in a co-working in another country where you know they just get to sort of, you know, have their office vibe, but in a different place.

Sam Brown: 1:10:06

So I think, really thinking about how you enjoy traveling, why you want that lifestyle, what things would make it as easy and as comfortable for you as possible, and using that to really inform what you do and don't just book a first you know a ticket out to Thailand and, you know, say you're off, but really think about where you would want to go and how you would want to do it, and and just forget about whatever anyone else thinks about what a digital nomad should look like.

Sam Brown: 1:10:35

And you know there's. We meet all sorts of people on the road, from families to, you know, to 21 year olds to people in their 60s, to every sort of amazing. Every sort of person can find a way to make this lifestyle work if they want it to and if they have a good motivation behind it. So, yeah, don't be put off by any cliche ideas about what it should look like. Work out what you want and what you would like to get out of it, and I guess it's like it goes back to your point about all the words you used earlier, which is Intentional.

John Hawker: 1:11:06

Isn't it being intentional about it? And if you've got, if you, in moments where maybe the the reasons for why you're doing something Start to you start to forget or maybe aren't as focused on them, it's just always bringing yourself back to the why of the decision you've made and and exactly what you've done it for. Because I can imagine as well some people might start this path as digital nomads and maybe, in Working the way they work, they find that they're slipping into what is more, that sort of traditional Form of employment. So, okay, well, I want to work as a freelancer, but now I've got an opportunity and I'm finding so much freelance work that I'm working five days a week. Okay, there's some good money coming in now as well, but then you're bogged down by exactly the same restraints that you were Before in traditional employment. So if you start to say to you, of why am I doing this? Was it because I wanted more flexibility, freedom, you know, the ability to travel and and do it in the way that I want, that might make you think I've got to start saying no or I've got to start drawing back from that as well. So I think both are really really key points for people to consider.

John Hawker: 1:12:11

So thank you for putting those sort of hats on and and sharing some advice about it and and I'm sure in a lot of your writing as well, charlie, both about minimalism and also your journey, I'm sure there's some.

John Hawker: 1:12:24

There's some other golden nuggets like that in in your writing on on sub stack and medium as well. So I'll share, as I said, I'll share the links to those on the when we put this episode out, and I'm gonna go back to something you said which Resonates with me, because LinkedIn, which I spend my, you know, nearly every hour of my waking life on, unfortunately, and is filled with pictures of digital nomads sitting on beaches, sitting in coffee shops in different countries with laptops on on their laps and and they do kind of. There are some some people on LinkedIn that give various of warts and all overviews or insights into that life. We've talked about the sort of positives of it. What have been and I will ask this to both of you, but maybe, sam, I'll start with you what have been the biggest challenges, you would say, from being digital nomads and adopting that lifestyle?

Sam Brown: 1:13:13

I think something that we've thought about quite a bit is the and Charlie's written about this very much more eloquently than I'll convey now. But there's an illusion of freedom when it comes to travel, a little bit, I think. I think sometimes you you know you'd have this idea that you can go anywhere and do whatever you want, but there's actually a lot of constraints around this. So, for example, visas. So you know, croatia, until first of January, was not in the Schengen area, which meant that any time that we spent there didn't count towards a time in the rest of the Schengen area. But now it does.

Sam Brown: 1:13:45

So we now have more of a Difficult time juggling how we spend that time without staying anywhere.

Sam Brown: 1:13:51

You know, you have the difficulty of sometimes two places that you think should be really well connected are really not well connected, and you think how the hell we're gonna get from here to there and you've already booked the accommodation in that other place and it turns out to be really difficult. So I think the sort of visas and Like just the logistics of travel can be really time-consuming. There are times when we spent days trying to find the right Apartment or the right flights and it really eats into your time, either your work time or your leisure time and it can be very Distracting. You know, knowing our god, this apartment finishes in a week's time. We haven't got anything lined up afterwards and we don't know where we're gonna go. It can that sort of thing can be quite, it can really weigh on your mind and it can be a real Really suck the time out of your day. So just the really yeah, those of logistical, legal sides of things I think can be, can be a lot of it difficult.

John Hawker: 1:14:45

Yeah, okay, charlie, what about you? Would you, would you? I guess you'd echo a lot of what.

Charlie Brown: 1:14:53

Yeah, and, as Sam said, the freak that there's an illusion of freedom. We're very difficult and it's something that was. We've had these really unusual situations, unique to when we start to travel.

Charlie Brown: 1:15:04

For instance, covid meant that there's so much uncertainty about whether you could travel or not, and but everything was cheap, which was good, and then kind of finished and everything got horrifically expensive. So so this year in particular has been awful to try and find anything that we can afford, from flights to Accommodation flights. I mean, we have to go back to the UK now to pick up our visa. It's gonna cost us nearly a thousand euro to do that, just the two flights and a couple of nights in the Manchester hotel and.

Charlie Brown: 1:15:35

It's even worse than it used to be. So I think there's all these sort of constraints and they can get quite. Quite difficult and that's sort of uncertainty, but I don't mind uncertainty, to a certain extent, when it's completely out of your control and and you are, you know, trying to get somewhere and all the apartments are full.

Sam Brown: 1:15:54

Why is it so?

Charlie Brown: 1:15:55

expensive for hotels turns out. There's a big festival on that weekend that you happen to be in this place, or you turn up and it's Bank holiday that you didn't know about, because, because the Europeans have so many bank holiday, it's.

Charlie Brown: 1:16:10

It's just those. It's very boring for those logistics, that logistics stuff and but thankfully, this stuff that we we haven't had problems with that. A lot of people have like loneliness, but a lot of digital nomads worry about loneliness. We have not had so much of that issue, but sometimes we do. I remember sitting in Albania in January this year and we booked up for a month and we didn't know anybody in Albania and we thought that would be fine, but we were starting to get lonely and and we left 10 days early because we needed to just go see people that we knew.

John Hawker: 1:16:41

So sometimes it could.

Charlie Brown: 1:16:42

I can see how that can be a big problem for people.

John Hawker: 1:16:44

Yeah, that might. That might be. Might sound a little counterintuitive because you're trapped, because you're together, but but you're, you're your own. I guess there's a couple. You still look. You know, a big part of life, isn't it about interacting with other people outside your, your unit as well, which is obviously works incredibly well, but loneliness can still impact you. Even if you're traveling with someone else, you still need those other touch points with friends and we still need those interactions and those friends.

Sam Brown: 1:17:14

You know you can't just, you know you can't just have just the two of us and never speak to another human being for like a month on end.

Charlie Brown: 1:17:30

I need you to leave now, yeah.

John Hawker: 1:17:34

That's it. It's all part of a healthy relationship, isn't it? Time apart and having your own endeavors and doing your own stuff as well. So, okay, right, well, thank you for that, and I, I, I think we're. We're gonna wrap up now, so I just want to say thank you so much for your time. There is one closing tradition. You might have listened to a fairly well-known podcast. The host of that podcast gets a previous guest to ask the current guest a question that they've already written down. I don't do that on my podcast. I actually get my mum to ask the question, so I don't, but the thing is I don't listen to the question beforehand. So mum has asked the question. She knows that I'm speaking to you. She doesn't know you personally, but she knows the gist of the conversation and I've asked her to do a question. I play it down the mic. Let me know if you can't hear it. Here we go.

Charlie Brown: 1:18:23

Hi Charlie and Sam. Could you tell me how the traveling you've done has affected your relationship, either positively or negatively? Thanks very much.

John Hawker: 1:18:34

That's my mum and that's that's Lisa, if you wanted to address that question. We kind of touched upon that a little bit earlier from a relationship perspective. But how has it? I mean, I would, I would say, is it affected your relationship more positively than negatively? Oh, wow, thanks, mum, is it?

Sam Brown: 1:18:52

really interesting. I think, like any endeavor, there's been times when it's been really good for us, sometimes when it's been bad, and I think it's forced us to change the way we Talk to each other sometimes and I think sometimes when you you're in stressful situations, in travel a lot, we're often put into very unfamiliar territory. You can easily get lost, get ripped off, whatever like that. And I think giving each other a little bit of An easier time when it comes to that sort of thing and just reminding yourself you know that we're in a really tough situation and that we need to be on the same team. We often say that, like you know we need to. You know we need to be on the same team when it comes to the same and you know, work together.

Sam Brown: 1:19:37

But yeah, just reminding us of that, you know this lifestyle gives us the opportunity to spend time together and gives us, you know, the opportunity in the afternoon to go for a beautiful walk by the beach or something like that and to spend time Outside of just business and work and all the other sort of things. So I think overall it's made us really I don't know stronger, but I think our relationship has changed since leaving Vinovera and, like we've Found a little bit more. We've both spent more time together but also, you know, been doing slightly different things. So I think overall is I think it has been a big benefit for it, but I think it's you know, it's definitely been some challenges along the way as well.

Charlie Brown: 1:20:17

Yeah, I would think that I Things that things that have big things that happen in life's, like travel is never good or bad. It's never that binary, it's always something and it ebbs and flows and some days, you know, we, we don't want to be anywhere near each other.

Sam Brown: 1:20:32

Sometimes it's not like that at all.

Charlie Brown: 1:20:35

It's just, it's just life, I guess it's just it's the same as any life, I think, and it's the same as just being at home and having two office jobs and going along with like that, like that that ebbs and flows is to it. So I always think that's that sort of an everything. I do have very good tip from friends around traveling with your partner. Everybody can use which is to have. I think we're on travel days, because travel days are always the most stressful.

Charlie Brown: 1:21:04

They always like I don't even know why, like all you Be going to an airport from Porto to the UK and going home, it's still the most stressful thing. You shower each other and and I had some advice once which was just basically always, always, always forgive, but what gets said on the travel day at the end of the day, don't hold it. Whatever I got said on a travel day at the end of the day, go. That was it, that was the travel day.

John Hawker: 1:21:27

Let's just leave that there and Don't hold any grudges around what you say you're when you're about to get on the plane.

John Hawker: 1:21:33

I. I think that is a really great rule for anyone that's traveling it anywhere, and especially, you know, given we're recording this during August and it's the summer holidays, and maybe people that are traveling with kids as well. They're gonna go through all sorts of different stress, so that might actually resonate with a lot of people. But, guys, thank you so much. Your time today it's been. I know the conversation would inspire so many people.

John Hawker: 1:21:57

It may just Answered unanswered questions that people have in their head about the lifestyle that you've, that you've been brave enough to, because I do Think there's a hell of a lot of bravery about, you know, turning you back on something that is really what established in the business and then making this leap, and I was inspired when I heard you were doing it. I was gutted that you were leaving, lee, because I really loved working with you guys as well, so it's been lovely to catch up. But, yeah, there's no doubt this is going to inspire people that may be on the fence about About taking or making these kind of decisions as well. Hopefully it's convinced some businesses out there to give their people some more flexibility as well. So, thank you so much. Thanks for listening to jobs worth.

John Hawker: 1:22:38

If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to like and subscribe. You can stay connected by following me on LinkedIn for more insights on the world of work behind the scenes, content and updates on upcoming episodes. We're really thinking about guests for season two, so if there is a particular topic you'd like us to discuss, then please send in your suggestions to hello at jobsworthcom.