The New Nomads

Instead of simply working from home, they are running businesses from remote locations across the globe using virtual communities for support

by Karen E. Klein

Do you ever wish you could win the lottery, chuck the rat race, and take off to explore the world? Heck—who hasn't? These days, however, there's a group of independent-minded, techno-savvy entrepreneurs who are turning that dream into a reality. They call themselves New Nomads, and they've transformed work-at-home into work-anywhere-you-damn-well-please.

Whether they take to the road armed with suitcases, laptops, cell phones, and Skype (EBAY) accounts, or settle in at a vacation destination every summer, this band of mobile-preneurs has learned to communicate and support each other with virtual communities like NuNomad.com and LaptopHobo.com. Several of them e-mailed their stories from around the globe to Smart Answers.

Carmen Bolanos, co-founder of NuNomad, is an executive coach based in Texas who travels several months a year with her family. "In 2000, I was a psychotherapist getting started in private practice when I came upon the profession of coaching. I soon figured out that since coaching was traditionally done by telephone, I could close down my brick-and-mortar office and work from home," Bolanos wrote in an e-mail (see BW Online, 03/12/07, "Telecommuting Now and Forever").

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"Since I was born with an incurable wanderlust, it didn't take too many mental leaps to realize that if I didn't need to be in an office, I didn't even need to be in my hometown. We began taking vacations while I continued to work. Those vacations slowly evolved into longer journeys to farther away places. Last year, my three children and I were able to spend two months in Europe (joined by my husband when he could get time) while I continued with my coaching practice."

When Bolanos started blogging about her unusual entrepreneurial lifestyle, she met a kindred spirit, Richard Hamel, who had already started LaptopHobo.com. Hamel is an author and owns a Web design business, dot com Web Works, theoretically based in Santa Ana, Calif. However, he currently resides in Koh Lanta, Thailand.

"Eight years ago, I trained myself as a Web site designer (I service, primarily, nonprofit organizations in California) so I may travel the world and maintain an income. You could say that I'm the original Laptop Hobo," Hamel wrote in his e-mail. Bolanos and Hamel teamed up to found NuNomad.com, which offers tips on travel and technology, product reviews, and forums for wanderlust-indulging entrepreneurs.

Out of the Cubicle

"Getting NuNomad off the ground has opened a world of working travelers to us. We are just getting started building this community and have met amazing people along the way—traveling solo, with families, doing a variety of work. Our culture is seeing the convergence of two dynamics: Communications technology has achieved a level in which immediate audio, written, and video information can be relayed across the world in real time.

"Adults are wanting more to life than a 9 to 5 job where they are strapped to an office desk," Bolanos wrote (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/11/06, "Smashing the Clock"). "As a result, there is a growing number of individuals and families who are adopting traveling lifestyles while they use technology to maintain their incomes from a home base."

One of those individuals is Gregory Moulinet, a 35-year-old logo designer who grew up in France but no longer considers any particular city his "home base." Moulinet got the travel bug as a child, living all over the world while his father worked as a TV reporter and anchor. In his 20s he traveled extensively in Asia. But in 2000, he settled down in New York City, where, he wrote, he experienced the best and the worst of entrepreneurship.

Sofa to Sofa

"It started great [with] some freelance design jobs, such as creating the animation for the TDK logo on the Times Square giant screen," Moulinet wrote.