How to remote work like a boss
My interview with Cherie, Digital Strategist and Blogger
In our Nomads Profiles series we feature interviews with digital nomads and nomads entrepreneurs with interesting profiles, from all over the world. We hope they will inspire you as much as they inspire us!
This week, we talked to Cherie, a digital strategist and tech person by day (sometimes night) for online businesses globally. She is a blogger by night at CherieTan.com, and 24/7 advocate for education equality for the 21st century and beyond. In 2017, Cherie spoke about Education Technology (#edtech) implementation at Frontiers and Innovations in Teaching, in Manila. Her life’s motto is “To Never Stop Learning With An Open Heart and Mind.”
Hi Cherie! Who are you and what do you do?
Hi, my name’s Cherie. I’m a twenty-something closet tech and digital strategist for a variety of small to mid-sized companies based in Toronto, Singapore, Vancouver and Sydney.
Your intro is quite impressive. Can you tell us more about the work you do?
I coordinate with product and designer teams to help develop content strategies and the workflow governance that helps blend front-end content strategy (from customer journeys to content scheduling) and back-end content strategy (guidelines and content models and structuring of the CMS repository so that content can be written in consistent ways).
Besides that, I also help startups and business owners in designing and building their online businesses from scratch — through platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and sometimes Ruby on Rails development. Because of my experiences in building online businesses, I’ve a range of skills that stretches from design (photoshop and illustrator, and Sketch), to web design and development (CSS, Ruby on Rails, Angular JS). This often comes in extremely handy and puts me in a great position when coordinating with developers, designers, product managers and marketers. I feel like I’m in a nice little spot where I act as main communicator between these roles, translating ideas from one side of the team to another in ways that each team understands perfectly.
The most recent project I took on was helping With Ava set up their digital storefront from scratch — from social media pages, Google Analytics, pre-launch digital marketing strategy, and workflow guidelines and system (the team works remotely). I’ve complete ownership and management of the tech side of things, and it has been an interesting experience so far.
I have few pet projects that I’m working on and they revolve around education.
Currently I’m building an edtech product, Weevur, that aims to make online education more human, and volunteering my free time on weekday afternoons to tutor kids and youths in need.
So… you’re basically the real life wonderwoman 🙂 How did you start working on that field and what motivated you?
I started freelancing at the age of 14, where I designed Neopet pet pages using HTML and CSS. I got my first client through DeviantArt, who reached out to me after reviewing some of my work to design pet pages for her Neopets. I got something like fifty bucks for that, which was good money because I loved what I was doing — coding and designing “experiences”, as I would call it. This went on for a bit and soon enough found myself exploring building websites on FreeWebs and the like, dabbling into javascript and eventually ruby on rails.
Working with so many clients globally and having a nicely sized “digital community”, I decided to build a team which consists of digital marketers and developers to help bring solutions to meet the growing demands. My team and I delivered a variety of software and marketing solutions clients and companies of all sizes.
I guess what truly motivated me was the satisfaction of producing beautifully designed and functioning end products for my clients, who were more often than not elated with what they’re paying for.
You started quite young playing with web development, onto building your own business. What was the attitude of your relatives? Were they supportive of you being a young entrepreneur and woman in tech?
Well, no, not exactly, and it’s not their fault — none of them actually had a good idea of what I was doing.
“Something with the computer… I think” would be the answer my family would say when asked.
In my teenage years, I never took the time to properly walk anyone through what I was working on. I skipped classes often, pretending I was ill and unwell and therefore not fit to go to class that day, and spend my time at cafes or home working on my desktop with my grandmother curiously poking her head over my shoulders, peeking at my work. She was probably the most supportive!
As soon as I started university, people started asking me or my friends why I would hardly turn up for lectures. When I told them I was freelancing, everyone kind of assumed I would end up as one of those techie college dropouts. Despite my busy schedule juggling work, studying for exams, and taking trips out to various parts of Asia, I graduated with a second upper-class honours degree in chemical engineering — phew!
Well done, seems like you had the passion in you and nothing could stop you. You are a remote worker, so can you tell us how often you travel?
Because my work is remote as a freelancer, I’m pretty much office-less. This makes it incredibly easy for me to plan my trips. Between 2014 and 2016, I travelled extensively, taking trips to Cambodia, Australia, Europe and America, to name a few. I enjoyed backpacking a lot, meeting people from different parts of the world, sharing our stories, appreciating and embracing cultures of different parts of the world.
In 2017, work has proven to be a little more hectic and I’ve been traveling far less these months. Aside from speaking in Manila, and taking spontaneous trips to Indonesia and Japan, I’m pretty much based in Singapore for the first half of this year.
And when you travel, what is your favorite place to work from?
I absolutely love working from spacious and bustling cafes with great people, great coffee and reliable wifi.
By being a freelancer, it can be hard sometimes to meet new people and socialize. How do you go about it?
A lot of my connections I’ve made so far started from connecting over Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s often as simple as dropping people a note or a tweet telling them I find their work interesting, and that I’d be in the city from this date to this date, and asking if they’d be around to meet up. If I’m not in the city, we just get on a Skype call.
It’s always inspiring and motivating to meet great people who are doing so many amazing things to add value to this world.
Definitely and that’s why I love traveling too. What would you say are the pros and cons of being a freelancer?
I would say that the pros are flexibility in my schedule and optionality of projects I could potentially take. I love being able to work at my most optimal hours of the day — that’s the wee hours of the morning, between tea and dinner, and after dinner as well. I seem to be most productive at night when the surrounding environment quietens down a little.
The challenges are surprisingly something most people don’t actually talk about with too much emphasis or seriousness — that’s managing emotions from great or awful experiences that come from severe financial strains from time to time, overworking, and time not spent with loved ones. I sweat the details and enjoy working — it doesn’t feel like a chore to me and I admit to feeling anxious if I’m not producing some form of work in a day, but not many people understand this.
Aside from weekly, prearranged Skype calls and in-person meetings, the unpredictability of my schedule restricts time spent with friends and family.
Because most people work the 9–5 schedule, weekends are the times where people have most time off. It’s different for me.
Saturdays and Sundays are just like any other days. I can’t call in sick, and there’s no “public holiday” for me, either.
Oh totally understand what you are saying. The weeks pretty much don’t exist anymore… Now onto the nitty gritty, how do you plan your finances and what’s your monthly budget?
My monthly budget varies and comes from the freelance projects that I work on.
As much as I try to keep the pipeline of projects going as nicely as possible (70% of the time it does), there are unpredictabilities and rainy days that I expect to come at the most unexpected times! I set aside a pool of savings I can turn to which would last me for about 5 months or so.
Yes, it’s important to be tight with money management as a freelancer. For those who’d like to follow your steps, what advice would you give them?
Be prepared for days where you dreadfully wish you could get X amount deposited in your bank at the end of the month, because these feelings are bound to arise. Working remotely can be great but it doesn’t come without shortfalls. Media tends to glamourise this lifestyle a little too much without sharing enough about the shortfalls that comes along with it.
In the end, it boils down to what you prefer most, what is more suitable for you, and your goals and expectations of your life.
If you’re comfortable with a 9–5, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you’re a working mom with young children at home, and working from home offers you a better solution for you and your family, take some time to work on your schedule and business plans, and have your “rainy day savings” in check, before taking the plunge into a different world where your work, connections and time management skills, determine how much bread can be put on the table.
Very sound advice. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns. And last, but not least, what’s on your playlist?
I listen to different playlists depending on my location and mood for the day. Right now, it’s WithAva.co’s SoundCloud playlists. We’re still working on that, but the songs under our “Dizzy Cheerfulness” playlist reflects my mood today as I’m writing this — a bright, sunny Sunday!
Any final words of wisdom?
I’ve reached a point where I know I want to challenge myself further.
It has been amazing, building web solutions for businesses and teams and seeing my efforts to fruition. I receive lovely gifts and handwritten cards from these global businesses from time to time, and it’s so wonderful to hear how much your effort has helped someone else so much. It’s part of life, you know? Once you get comfortable at a certain phase or reached a certain level of achievements, you start feeling uncomfortable being too comfortable — a point in your life where you start asking what else you can do to challenge yourself further and grow.
I’m planning to turn my pet projects in education into a full-time gig by the end of 2017, so that will be a huge shift for me with regards to my work, my schedule, and my life — I’m looking forward to it very much.
And so am I… 🙂
Thank you Cherie for sharing your experience with the DN:m community! If you like the article, spread it by giving a 💓 and subscribe to the DN:m newsletter
All images: credit of Cherie and used with her permission
This article was originally published on digitalnomadsmedia.com on May 9 — Find more about Cherie in the full article.
