When Josh Zweig started showing up for client calls in a T-shirt and telling people where he was, he found “the responses were amazing.” Before long, he was getting emails saying, “I’m moving to this country — what do you think?”
your work to your lifestyle rather than the other way around.” While the nomadic lifestyle is especially attractive to mil-
lennials, it draws other age groups as well. According to Harvard researcher Beth Altringer, who published the preliminary results of her research on nomads in Forbes last year, a fairly large proportion of nomads is made up of mid-career profes- sionals who have leſt corporate positions they didn’t enjoy to move into entrepreneurship and self-employment. Having already proven themselves, they have parlayed their networks and expertise into mobile careers that can potentially offer them greater flexibility and control. Leighton Prabhu, 48, is one of those professionals. While he
started his career quite traditionally, working at Pricewater- houseCoopers (then Price Waterhouse) in Toronto and later at JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America in Hong Kong and Singapore, he realized he was far better suited to entrepreneur- ship than the corporate world. “It seemed much more appeal- ing to be in complete control of my own schedule and to be held accountable for results rather than putting in time, which is what I saw in big business,” he says. Prabhu is now the cofounder of Interstice Consulting, which
specializes in helping startups and small to mid-sized compa- nies develop their businesses in emerging markets. “I’m not a millennial, but I share a lot of their values,” he says. “I value experiences more than material goods and control over what you do and where you are based.” Prabhu spends most of the year floating between the firm’s two offices in Moscow and Singapore, and the rest travelling to other locations across Asia, Europe and the Americas. In a bid to support other foreign entrepreneurs and companies establishing operations in Asia or expanding their business there, he also helped launch a co- working space called The OutPost in March 2015. Because nomadism has such a large virtual component, most nomads work either as consultants or service providers in sectors such as media, finance, online sales and marketing, or as bloggers and life coaches. The tech industry has been partic- ularly hospitable to nomads: companies such as Automattic (the people behind WordPress) now have entirely virtual work- forces, and elite talent firms such as 10x Management provide full logistical and administrative support for top-tier workers who want to go nomadic. While large accounting firms have yet to adapt their remote
work programs to nomads, some accountants have embraced the lifestyle as sole practitioners or owners of small firms. For example, Josh Zweig, 32, cofounded LiveCA LLP, a full-service vir-
38 | CPA MAGAZINE | MAY 2016
tual accounting firm, with Halifax-based accountant Chad Davis, 33, three years ago. But while Davis, a father of two, splits his time between LiveCA’s two offices in Halifax and Toronto, Zweig has taken his job everywhere from Israel to Scotland, Sweden and Brazil. He’s now in Medellin, Colombia, where he settled in December 2015 for what he anticipates will be a full year — just enough time, he says, to learn salsa and Spanish. Rojean Hatton, 36, an accountant from Calgary, also realized
early in her career that cloud-based technologies could allow her to break out of traditional accounting. Having always wanted to own her own business, and having caught the travel bug on a trip to East Africa in 2012, she launched Paper Mountain Accounting Professional Corp. in 2014, integrating cloud computing into most of her operations. However, a few aggravating experiences with faulty Internet connections set her on a collision course with what Altringer calls “the illusion of location-independence,” a common issue faced by nomads. “I was lucky in that I wasn’t very busy and I was just trying to figure things out,” she says of a test run gone wrong in Argentina. Ultimately, Hatton decided not to become a full-time nomad. She now prefers to remain in Alberta about 10 months of the year and to keep her travel limited to low season. In her eyes, “trying to figure out the logistics is just not worth it.” For Zweig and Davis, however, the logistics are part and parcel
of their daily life. They both put in many hours sourcing new apps, streamlining processes and fixing the inevitable bugs. Over the past three years, they have been able to develop a fully virtual setup that allows them to oversee everything from client accounts to payroll management for themselves and their 13-member team, which is dispersed across Canada. These days, they field client calls on Skype, hold internal meetings with Google Hangouts, and manage tax and systems with apps such as Xero, QuickBooks Online and Kashoo. The tech-
MORE ON DIGITAL NOMADISM
Go to
cpacanada.ca/mag-nomads for tips on: ● how to get started ● logistical questions (visas, etc.) ● co-working spaces around the world ● resources for nomads, and more
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