Last year, Sandy Irving set the new standard for creating the lifestyle of your dreams. While operating a WineShop at Home consulting business, Sandy and her husband went on the trip-of-a-lifetime: 6 months in Europe!
During that time, not only did Sandy maintain close contact with her team and her customers, but she also continued to lead tastings from across the world and even recruited 6 new consultants.
If you’ve ever dreamed of running a business you can do from anywhere, this is the post for you.
From Sandy:
When my husband retired, we decided to take a 6-month trip to England and Scotland. England has a series of 2,000 miles of interior canals, and although we’d been on 2-week vacations to the canals, our big dream was to spend several months traveling the entire canal system by boat.
It was also good timing that my daughter, who lives in Scotland, turned 30, graduated from medical school and got married during our 6-month journey.
Maintaining the Business from Europe
I knew before we left that I wanted to keep the business running. I definitely didn’t want to neglect the hard-won relationships that I’d built or give up the momentum that my business had gained over the last five years.
The houseboat on which we lived was self-captained and it had a great wireless Internet connection. That connection, combined with my international cell phone plan, made it possible for me to conduct virtual tastings and stay closely connected to my team over the course of the six months.
At first, I was nervous to lead a tasting over Facetime – I’d never done that before! I also knew that it’s impossible to predict exactly how my hosts would put together the end of the tasting, which is the most important part because that’s when the sales are made.
To combat this fear, I initially only set up tastings with hosts I had worked with previously. I called them before I left the country to arrange the tastings, and before I even set foot on the plane I already had three months of solid tastings on my calendar with hosts who were crystal clear about what I expected of them!
Running a Digital WineShop at Home Business
A digital wine tasting is about a two hour time commitment, plus doing the preparation calls with the hostess and follow up after the event. It ended up being about 8 hours of work per tasting each week – that’s almost nothing to keep my business afloat (no pun intended)!
On top of that, I even managed to earn a trip while I was gone, thanks to my full schedule of tastings which led to recruiting 6 people while I was away. I trained them all over the Internet (I think it helped that they had such a clear example of how much freedom the business has to offer).
Around the fifth month is when I started to see my number of bookings decrease. I think that was because of a lack of personal touch; since I wasn’t there in person, it was just harder to communicate with my customers. But because I worked the phones, the Internet and social media so much, I was still able to pull in almost as many sales as I would have normally.
If you’re thinking of taking a big trip and working your business from afar, here are my best tips:
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Schedule your bookings in advance. Talk to your current hosts and find out who would be willing to get on your calendar while you’re out of town.
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Work with your hosts so they’re very clear about what a virtual tasting will be like. Tell them what you need from them in order for the tasting to be possible.
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Check and double check that you’ll have good access to the Internet and a strong international phone connection. That is vital.
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When you’re getting ready to return, hit the ground running by calling people and saying, “I’m about to come back to the States, and I’d love for you to be one of my first hosts!”
Planning ahead was my secret weapon that made this process a success. If you’re thinking of taking a big trip, you can absolutely do it so long as you have the right mindset and preparation!
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Thanks so much, Sandy!
If you’d like to learn more about joining WineShop at Home and crafting a lifestyle that fits you, let’s talk. Click HERE to connect with me directly.