Juggling Business and Travel: Insights from Digital Nomad Chris Stroud

Hey Nomads, welcome to Digital Nomad Stories, the podcast. My name is Anne Claessen and, together with my co-host, kendra Hasse, we interview digital nomads. Why? Because we want to share stories of how they did it. We talk about remote work, online business, location and dependency, freelancing, travel and, of course, the digital nomad lifestyle. Do you want to know more about us and access all previous episodes? Visit digitalnomadsdoriesco. Alright, let's go into today's episode.

Welcome to Digital Nomad Stories, the podcast. My name is Kendra and I'm your host today. Today, I'm joined by Chris Stroud, the business owner of Strouding, and Chris has spent the last 15 years consulting on hundreds of brands, growing the largest e-commerce brands worldwide, and what I'm particularly excited about is that he did so while he travels the world with his wife and five kids, or still is traveling. So, chris, welcome, I'm super excited to have you today here and here a little bit about your stories.

Thank you, I'm glad to be here.

Nice, so maybe we directly jump into the topic. So when did you start traveling, like, how did you become a? Would you consider yourself a nomad?

Wow. So now I definitely would. You know I had never intended to become a nomad or a digital nomad. My wife and I started our company in 2009 at the request of a number of clients and companies that I was working with, and around 2016, 2017, I began to feel very restless. I enjoy growth. I enjoy the ability to continually you know progress personally, as well as with my family. At the time, my wife and I had four children. We were about to expect, we were pregnant and expecting our fifth child, and I started to realize I can work from anywhere. I was working most of the time in my home anyways, and I had clients all over all over the United States, some in Israel, some in Europe, canada, in Asia and I just said this is ridiculous. We can. We can do more. So we made the decision then to prepare ourselves to travel when our youngest daughter. We now have five children, so when our youngest daughter turned one, we were going to leave, and that's what we did. So we prepared prior and then we left in May of 2018. And this is the life we've lived ever since now, having been to more than 48 countries with my wife and I and our five kids.

Well, that sounds amazing. And how long do you usually stay at one place?

So there are two types of routines that we typically follow, and with a big family and while you're working. I typically, by the way and I'll touch on this a bit later, but I migrated to working a three day week, so I typically will work Monday, tuesday and Thursday, but while traveling on a constant basis, we will typically stay in a singular location around three to five weeks. There are so many advantages to this. It's amazing, but that's normally when we're out on the road, what we call kind of full time traveling all the time when we're doing. We now live in Portugal a few months out of the year. The kids have learned Portuguese, so while we're in Portugal, if we decide to travel, we'll typically do six to eight weeks straight and we'll stay about a week to two weeks in each country or location that we visit. So it's one of those two routines. We're either going hard and fast for around six to eight weeks or, if we're going for anything longer than three months, we're staying typically around three to five weeks in the same area.

Great. So here you already learned your routines. So maybe we go back to the beginning because I'm curious. So you took the decision. Your girl was one year old. How did it feel in the beginning when you started with it? Like really making this?

It was terrifying. It was a lot of work. There were so many questions. We had two of our children who were still in diapers, because our children at the time were nine, six, four and just like two and then one, so it was really close together and two of our children were in diapers at the time. So there was just so much stuff and we initially started by just going to a few different states in the US. So like, we went to Portland, oregon, we then went to California in two different places, we then ended up going out to Kauai and then after that we jumped over into Asia. So in the first three to five months it was really difficult. We hadn't intended to become this digital nomads. So there were so many lessons. We had to learn how to pack what equipment to take, how to scout a place for where the best places were to work, how to make sure that at house we were getting to have fast enough internet ahead of time, how to adjust to the time schedule, what to do if I was sleeping and my wife was awake with the kids, because they needed to be homeschooled, they needed to be taught from home. So there was a lot of routines in the first three to five months that were really hard, but once we kind of cracked the code on those routines it's now just become life and it's actually, I think, in many ways far easier than the old kind of the normal life is the non-digital nomad life. We find this lifestyle to be much easier.

Yeah, because, as I can imagine, that in the beginning there's there are also challenges coming up we haven't thought about before. Right, when we start our normal life there's coming, like, for example, the internet. It was always there and then from one point you realize, oh, I might not have it so well. So, it's correct, right, so all this? Yeah, you said you learned your lessons, and so was that like in the beginning, like a moment where you said, no, we just will stop doing it. Or when you all the time like dedicated and motivating and seeing, okay, we will make it happen, some in some way.

You know, I think in the beginning, between my wife and I, there was always one of us that was having a little bit of a hard time. Never a situation where it was like I want to quit, but there were times where, in the beginning, he might be lonely. Mr Friends, you know we had to become used to not just interacting with a bunch of friends and co-workers and colleagues, but now we were spending, you know, 24 hours a day not just with each other but obviously with our children, you know, all day, every day, for the whole week, and you didn't have the same friend inputs, you didn't have the gym, you didn't have just being as that you were used to. So in that situation, yeah, there would be days that were hard, but as a couple we have a very strong marriage and that marriage and that strength has allowed if she's having a hard day, I can help her, you know to feel better and more positive, and then vice versa. So together, and because we both wanted this, we wanted to create these memories we were able to push through some of those difficult days. But you know we don't really run into that difficulty any longer, but we did in the beginning, for sure.

Yeah, great, and you were, you were. You were touching on the point of loneliness and social connections. How do you feel is it also like for your children? Because we, as I feel, as an adult, I can deal with it, but maybe your, your kids who are not, who are homeschooled so they don't interact with so many friends, I guess, or meeting new friends. So how do you think is it for kids to become roommates?

We definitely take some planning to put them in a place where they can be healthy and enjoy the company of others. Now we have an advantage because we have five children, and so our oldest is a girl, and then we have three boys, one, two, three in a row, and then our last one is a girl. So there is always something or someone for them to play with, right, they could play in the backyard, they could run around the park, they could, we could go hiking. So the size of our family helped with some of that loneliness. But along the way we learned that there were other families like us that, of course, were traveling, had kids. We didn't run into any that had as many children as us, but we did, you know, come across quite a few that had two or three children, sometimes four or even just one child, right, and in those situations we would often choose to do activities together for a period of time, not every day, but we had one particular family that traveled with us for nearly three months straight, where we were in Bangkok together. We then went to Taiwan together, we then went to Hong Kong together and we went to. You know, some days we would go do activities together and other days we wouldn't. But our children and their children were near the same age, so it gave them some additional outlets for friendship, and over time we built a number of these types of family relationships all over the world. You know, we had a New Year's Eve party with one family in Bali, and the next year we met the same family for New Year's Eve in France, and it wasn't even intentional, we just knew they were in the area and we reached out and discovered we'd be near the same town around that same period of time and so we were able to hang out and create that memory.

Yeah, that's amazing and I think it's something. Just if you are not in this lifestyle, you don't know about it, but for sure there's like a community of family nomads, you know, or family travelers you can reach out. So now, like talking about the sparkling of it when you wake up every morning, what is it, what amazes you so much about this lifestyle now, you and your family? What is it where you get the, where you're at?

Yeah, we get really excited by just the wonder, the magic of discovering these new places. We especially love the beauty that we can find in the earth, right like in the world, and so as a family, we loved, for example, iceland. We went to Iceland right after Brazil, and when we were going through Iceland, we had chosen to go there because one of the volcanoes was erupting about two years ago and while the volcano was erupting, we wanted our kids to see it. So, you know, seeing Diamond Beach and some of the glacier bays and hiking up the mountain to see the volcano that was erupting and these experiences have created such a passion for our family that we were constantly hungry to see the next thing. Right, we're planning Mount Kilimanjaro, we're planning to hike Mount Fuji again, we're planning to go to Patagonia and to Machu Picchu and to take different cruises. So, but what's helped us along the way and this is a really cool trick is there's a lot of travelers out there that will go out there and they'll film and they might post a few things to YouTube, or they'll take a few photographs and they'll post them to Instagram. But I found it was important for us to create those memories for our children. So we've now created more than 400 videos and we stick them on YouTube, but they're not really for YouTube. They're more for our family and friends, for business people that we know, and really just for our children. And so our kids get on and they rewatch all of these videos that are not created for YouTube in the sense of like seven ways to travel the world. Right, that's not really what it's for. I wanted the children to remember. I should say my wife and I wanted the children to remember these experiences. So every every week you know when there's a quiet moment or they're bored will say hey, you can go watch seven wayfinders and they'll watch past memories of Halloween, for example, which they watched two years ago. You know, two years ago, halloween, and you know they'll watch different things and they remember that and that makes them excited. So they come to us and they're like, hey, when can we go here, when can we travel to this place? And that really kind of builds a fire. So it's important for you and your children or your family to see these adventures, not just in the moment but after the fact, in a way that's easily consumable, so that they can remember what's you know so amazing about it.

Yeah, and I feel it's beautiful because also, like for your younger child, one year she will not remember, but then having all these videos, it's beautiful. It's beautiful memory. I love this idea Also for us as adults. We forgot so many of our amazing normed stories. It's just so easy to forget it is. And yeah, so I really like. The idea Do you maybe have if we are talking about this. Videos is now like one memory popping into your mind. That was like a beautiful experience you just could live with your family thanks to this lifestyle.

Oh, you know, absolutely, like I'd say really, there were two that just stick out to me. So one of those was we were in New Zealand and we were meeting up with some friends that we've made through Instagram. They were doing some traveling. We were doing some traveling, but they were in the New Zealand area and we decided to go to Hot Water Beach, and so we went to Hot Water Beach. And if you don't know Hot Water Beach in New Zealand, there is volcanic water underneath the ground that boils up to the surface in the sand, like on the beach, and it's scalding hot, like extremely hot. It'll burn you unless it, unless you have the right mix, and what you do is you let the water from the ocean wash in and it mixes with this scalding hot volcanic water and you dig in the sand. This sand, you know hot tub, so you dig the sand, you know, pit the sand hot tub and the sun is coming up, you know, you know. So you go early, before the sun's come up, and you dig the sand pit and the hot water boils up and the ocean water mixes in and you're sitting in the sand hot tub and the sun is coming up and the waves are crashing and it is just so gorgeous. And I have this in my mind, this picture and this vision of all of my children sitting in the little hot tub, flashing around, playing with the sand, while the sun is coming up and casting its rays over the water. So that was definitely a super magical experience. And then the other one was you know, we got to the volcano that was erupting and it was just fully erupting. It was just so beautiful. And we got there at 12, 30 at night, and all of our children, even our youngest, who at the time she's not six, but at the time she was four, you know she's like, you know she's so excited and they're watching the volcano go off and we're just all seven of us sitting there just watching this magical experience that most likely they'll never be able to replicate in the rest of their life. Right, and that's what we call a core memory. That's one of those memories that they cherish, they talk about when they see pictures of it. They can all remember. They all said to me we don't want to leave. We sat up there on the top of this volcanic mountain, as it were, for probably about two hours before we decided to go. And yeah, pretty amazing.

Yeah, I can picture it. Thanks for taking us on this memory. It sounds super beautiful. So, you know, there came just this thought up, like a lot of listeners should think also people in general wow, to make this decision was five children. It's super brave. You need to go out of your comfort zone. So what would you say, like before we start talking about business? But what would you say is really like this mindset, you need to be able to really take this decision and realize it. Like what would you say, maybe on your own personal growth journey, but in our work is needed for being able to do so.

Yeah. So for me and you know I had to have more motivation than just going to a city or going to a tourist location For me I had to personally feel like I was going to progress right and I had always wanted to be more artistic. I'm not naturally an artist, I'm not really a good, you know, designer or you know, sketch artist or anything like that, but I decided that I was going to pick up photography and we were going to start filming and really taking that on. So one of the things that Tim Ferriss in his book the Four Hour Workweek and I don't love everything Tim says in that book, but there's a lot of really awesome points there and one of the things he says is you can't just like think that by you know, quitting your work or like stopping what you're doing at work, it's all. You're all of a sudden going to have this extra time because by nature we're very, you know, we're very, not lazy, but we're habitual in that we keep repeating the same habits over and over again, the same patterns over and over again. So if we are used to working long hours and are used to working five days a week, then we're going to keep doing that. So when, when? What he says is, if you want to change your life, you've got to fill it with something else that you're passionate about. So for me, to go from five days a week to three days a week of work, I had to have a passion, and it needed to be more than just going to places. Right, so to really get ourselves to that place of motivation, we started creating a dream board of places we wanted to go to and things that we wanted to do, and for me, one of those things was photography and video and learning how to fly drones while also going to these places. So when I combined those two, it gave me the motivation to say, hey, it's time to change my habits. I had to change how I did, how many calls I did per day, what hours I worked, what sort of systems we had internal to our business, and so that it would allow me to to break out of that five day a week work cycle where I was working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And the crazy thing is is that, by doing that and then traveling, when I started telling my clients about my travels, they loved it, they were excited, they were motivated, they were inspired and our business grew by 300 percent within the first six months of us traveling, simply because I had put into place the systems that made the business more efficient. And then I was telling people about the traveling in one call not to ramble here, but in one call. I was on the phone with a potential business partner and I happened to see a whale in the San Francisco Bay. It was near Pacifica. I saw a whale breach the surface and I said that on the call. I was like, oh my gosh, I just saw a whale, and the guy was so shocked by the experience he ended up setting up a meeting with several of his brothers who also owned the business and we ended up doing a partnership together for a few years that made us millions of dollars. Because of that experience, the number one thing clients say to me whenever I get on a phone call and I do many phone calls is always hey, chris, where are you in the world? They're ecstatic. They love the idea. So as long as I could make time for my own personal passions, I found the discipline needed in order to make changes, and those changes allowed me to affect my family and my business in much better ways.

Great. Maybe, like you already started like talking about the business and you said you made personal changes, maybe we could, you could, share this with us. So we like maybe some listeners. They are in the same situation. You know they would love to travel more, but then there's this 60 hour work week. So what are they are really like some changes you really did, like some tangible examples and recommendations.

Perfect, I love this. So on the business side, I created a list of every single thing I do in a week, every task, every item, every work type. I created this list and I had to say this was part of what. This is what I did. I said I'm going to go through this list and I either have to love it or I have to hate it. There's nothing in the middle. I either love doing that work or I hate doing that work. So I went through and I started doing that and when I went all the way down, I realized that I only really loved like 20% of what I did. Everything else I completely hated. So once I completed that list and the list was long, it's like you know, 3040, 50 things right. Once I completed that list, I then said, okay, I now need to figure out how to get rid of everything I don't love, and that was that's what we did. So I built the whole business around that. So one of the things I didn't love is I didn't love sitting in front of my email inbox all day. So I created a system and that system allowed me to have someone else in my inbox and handled a good portion about 95% of my emails and the rest they put into what we call my start box, and so that was an example of one thing, and there were many, I know. I didn't like to do scheduling, so I figured out a system and got someone to help me do scheduling. I didn't like to take notes, so what I did is I started recording all of my phone calls and when clients would say, hey, can you send me the notes, I would say no, but I will send you the call recording and you can have those notes. And then zoom started doing transcriptions, which I thought, hey, that's fantastic. So then I started sending the recording with the transcriptions instead of sending notes, and I didn't have to do scheduling anymore, because that wasn't something I love to do. Then clients said, hey, will you project manage this for me? And I said, no, I'm not going to do that, but I will send you a bullet point list of your responsibilities and I'll remind you halfway through the week. So that I got someone from overseas to listen to my call recordings. Initially I started in the US and then later moved it overseas, but I got someone from overseas to listen to my call recordings and then what they would do is they would sign all the to-dos and they would send it to the client. So I used to have to do a phone call, get off the phone call, send a follow up email and then, after sending the follow up email, I would also have to follow up on the client to see if they did their tasks. I hated all of that. So now today, I do a phone call with a client and on the call if I need something, I say my team, I need you to go and schedule this appointment, my team, please send a follow up item of notes to this person. My team, please make this introduction. And I can get off that phone call and I don't have to do anything. I can go from that phone call straight to another. Now, that was my system, but the point is I didn't get there accidentally. I went through and made an inventory of everything I loved and everything I hated and of the stuff I hated. I had to get rid of it all, and that's how I designed the business, and I gave myself a year to get the entire business moved from what it was to what it is, and that was a key element that people can do. The next one is I had to inventory my time. So I literally went through everything, not just what I do in work, but also what I do at home, how much time I'm spending in the car, how much time I'm spending at the store, how much time I'm spending at the gym, how much time I'm spending watching TV. And when I saw all of that and I also saw what I was doing in my business I realized, hey, I can get rid of that. I can get rid of all of that now. So our consultancy today generates millions of dollars, literally millions of dollars, in consulting fees, and I typically will do three days of work Monday, tuesday and Thursday and on each one of these days I'll do between seven to nine phone calls back to back to back to back, and then I'm done. I don't have anything else I have to do. So the vision, I think, isn't that you go out and start a consultancy, like me, or say you could if you wish, but more or less that you begin with an inventory. You know that you want to have more freedom, which is time, and you know that you want to focus on only doing those things you're best at, because that's where you're going to make the most money, and if you can inventory the stuff you love versus hate in your work environment, and then you can inventory where you're spending your time, you then begin to design your perfect balance, and that's where the real change starts. That's when you can start looking for solutions and that's when you can start testing.

I love it. It's amazing. Now, like just one thing what if we have this amazing inventory list and we know, okay, I need to get rid of this task because I hate them I'm also not so good in them and they consume just too much time but we are just starting our business and we don't have the financial background to outsource it. What do we do then?

Well, so in many cases there's already financial sorry, there's already software services available. Okay, but let's suppose that you can't afford software help. You can't afford, you know, even inexpensive assistance, right? You can't afford assistance from overseas or state side. You can't afford like early assistance. You really kind of. You can barely afford to just like live your normal life, right? The first thing I would do is I would go through your budget. Most of the people I talk to they say, oh, chris, I can't afford to travel like you do. And I'll say I don't think you're right. I think you probably can Show me your budget and I've had a few friends that will show me their budget and in the same months that they'll say that they couldn't afford to travel, they might have spent a thousand dollars on a cell phone. They might have spent $200 on, you know, $300 on eating out. They might have spent any number of things. So as you go through and assess what they're doing, in many cases what it is is you're spending the money and you don't have that money left over. That's different than not having enough money. Now, let's suppose that truly, in fact, you don't have enough money. Then the odds are you haven't yet found what you're good at Now. I had a boss who really mentored me in the very beginning and when I was really really young, before I decided to do this, and he told me this story, his amazing story he said. He said I was super intelligent all through high school and college. I graduated summa kunlun in my college and the university. I went through On the ACT in the United States. I got a 36 out of 30, no, 35 out of 36. He said I was pretty much used to always being the most intelligent person in the room. And then I graduated from my MBA and I went to a consulting company in London and it's my very first week and I'm in the cafeteria and in this cafeteria there are three or four guys eating lunch and one guy says to another guy hey, could you pass me the chair? So this guy takes a chair and the chair is on wheels and he rolls it. He rolls the chair over to him and the chair spins because it have a spinning seat right. So the chair spins and it goes in an arc like a rainbow and these guys get really excited and they jump up from the table and they run over to a whiteboard and they begin to write out the mathematical equation for the arc that was made by the chair. And he said in that moment I realized I was no longer the smartest guy in the room and for me to succeed I was going to have to be the most effective guy in the room. And to be the most effective I had to get rid of everything in my life that I wasn't effective at and focus on only the things I was best at. And then I had to learn to beat that drum every day. And he said he became the fastest junior partner in the company in history because he would push aside everything else that he wasn't best at and he would focus on that. And that is good advice to anyone in a career. If you haven't found that thing that makes you successful yet, if you haven't really been able to explode into that, or if you found it but you're just not doing it enough, odds are you haven't focused enough on that and filtered down the other stuff. So what I would recommend to anyone who's financially in a place where they're not making enough money, the first thing to do is take a step back. Make a list of the things that you do inside of your work environment, maybe your personal life, and articulate those things that for you, you're going to be phenomenal at, those things You're going to be better than most, you're going to be better than most, and then find a way to get rid of everything else. Now I know it sounds really easy and really simple, but when you do that, you'll be left with most of your work being what you're best at, and when you produce that kind of activity over and over again, people will pay you more and more and more money for it, in such a way where you'll easily be making in a few hours far more than you would have normally made. It like a full-time job. It sounds overly simple, but I've applied that since I was making $8.50 an hour when I was 21 years old. At 25 years old, I was making $120,000 a year. At 25, applying that same practice, by the time I was 30, I was making more than 300 to 400,000 a year, and now I make seven figures plus all doing the same thing. It's funny because the work I do today is very similar to the work I did then. The only difference is I now have 13 years under my belt and I'm still just focused on what I do best, and that's really the lesson you got to learn.

Yeah, and because I feel, if we do what we are best in, we are also vibrating another energy. So then it's also like like then we can be our best and then we also can come back better our science.

Exactly.

It really makes sense for me Because, yeah, thank you so much. I feel it was. I made a lot of notes for myself. I will, after our episode, I will start with my inventory list. So really nice. I thank you. So, and before we close this episode, do you have anything? I should have asked? Anything you feel and needs to be part of this episode you still want to share?

Yeah, I think there is, and I'll just leave this. There are a lot of people who want to become digital nomads because they envision what they could earn or what they could make. Like you get a lot of influencers who are like I'm an influencer and look at me and I'm going to be a YouTube influencer. I'm going to do this. In reality, I seem to just go out and travel and be an influencer. It's not going to typically make you the money you need and and in reality it's just not that it's not as fulfilling as people might think. Now we get sponsorships. It doesn't like pay for our travel by any means. We do get a lot of companies who will sponsor us, but and those are fun little freebies, but those aren't what drive us. And so what you really need to do harness is the magical experiences that you will enjoy, and if those things are important to you, if that's what you want to experience, that needs to be your core you need to breathe deep, enjoy the moment and not focus on trying to get out there. So the trick is to learn to love the travel, learn to love the adventure, and whatever you do outside of that is great, right. Create these magical moments, but definitely don't do it because you think it's going to be like your claim to fame or where you're going to make your money. People that do that often get out there and they burn out really fast, and I've seen it. I've seen guys get in, travel hard for like three, four months and they quit to go home. It's too hard, they're not having enough fun, they're not succeeding, whatever that might be in reality. Learn to enjoy and love the travel first, and the experiences and the moments and the freedom, and just appreciate it. Take deep breaths. Don't set too many rules for yourself. Just flow, kind of you know. Go with the flow and allow yourself to get into your own rhythm, your own motion. Follow your own patterns. If you do that and you're good to the people around you, then you'll find your own pattern of being a digital combatant. Learn from others, but don't necessarily try to, you know. Follow just a one play right, a single playbook, as it were. Anyways, that would be it. The only other thing I would say is please, please, please, if you're in and around us or want to reach out and contact seven way finders, we all always love meeting up with other travel families or families aspiring to be travel families Feel free to give us a shout.

Perfect. Thank you, chris, and I like just to your last note. I loved it and I would summarize it and, yeah, be brave enough to live every day of our vision board. And you know, really feel every day we are already living our dream as an omate and not trying to achieve something that might come if you're not already enjoying it today. That was what inspired me your last, your last recommendation for cool. So thank you so much for for, for all your inspiring input. I'm sure many people will reach out to you and thanks for sharing so openly your story with us.

Thank you. Thank you very much for the time. Bye, bye, bye.

And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate it very, very much. I would appreciate it even more if you could leave a review on Apple podcast for me. That way, more people can find this podcast, more people can hear the inspiring stories that we're sharing, and the more people we can impact for the better. So, thank you so much If you are going to leave a review. I really appreciate you and I will see you in the next episode.