I am a rabid advocate for remote work. I’ve freelanced and hired freelancers for decades, and I’ve seen first-hand — as have we all — the remote work model keep businesses in business through the pandemic of 2020 and beyond. I’ve exclusively been remote since 1996, leading both tiny and sizable teams distributed worldwide.

The businesses I’ve helped build, I am thrilled to say, mostly survived COVID-19 and its permutations. Including mine, albeit with fast and furious adaptive modifications ongoing. What I’ve learned is that agility and engagement must come hand-in-hand with innovation for vision and mission fruition. Nail that and you’re prosperous.

My passion project, from 2019 through 2021, was a fully e-commerce-ed networking platform for remote job-seekers and distributed team employers. It was my grand exploration of how the new economy effects remote employment. Bottom line: COVID-19 changed remote entirely when everyone was sent home to stay well and safe. What I had built became redundant and useless almost over night. That said, I’m incredibly grateful for going through the process of building a platform that was both elegant and effective gaining 48,000 Facebook followers in less than 30 days.

In the beginning…

The company addressed a niche market of people who traveled full-time and worked, or wanted to work, remotely and the employers with tremendous experience with and commitment to remote work-forces: itravelft.com. When COVID-19 hit, the last thing employers wanted were candidates who were more of a moving target than all those they had to, without notice, transition to work-from-home. We re-tooled to iremoteft.com entirely in just a few weeks. This video is an example of how we marketed the original itravelft.com.

Next steps

After owning my own marketing agency for 26 years and launching and de-launching iremoteft.com, I now almost exclusively do government contracting consulting and top-three proposal creation for my clients. I did hundreds of proposals for my clients and my marketing company over those two-plus decades, and I always loved it. I still create graphics, web sites and publication designs periodically, but my passion now is helping businesses become successful and recession-proof government contractors. Find me quickly for engagement here: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0149d2a6385bec2a52?viewMode=1.