On the Business Road with Colin Wright
Photo by Photo by Cris Dobbins
Article published on 06/07/2010
Some people, after graduating college, take time to travel the world.
Others start their own business.
Colin Wright did both.
Wright (25) runs his own branding/design agency. His office is a laptop, in his hostel, in whichever country he happens to be in.
His location-independent studio operates with a simple premise: Every four months he hits the road, traveling to a country he has never been to. Not knowing anyone, he has no choice but leave his comfort zone and actively build his social network, which he maintains through a blog, Twitter and Facebook. Through his network of global connections he builds his personal brand and finds a steady stream of business opportunities. As each four-month visit nears its end (he’s currently in New Zealand) he lets his blog readers decide where he travels next.
He’s one-half Jack Kerouac, one-half Richard Branson.
I convinced Wright to take time away from networking, design and writing (he’s written three e-books, you can get them here) to share his story.
James: You started your business in Missouri. What made you decide to hit the road?
Colin: It was a combination of things, really. My studio business was growing at breakneck speed and there were only so many hours in the day. My live-in girlfriend and I were starting to realize that we wanted different things out of life. I was offered a job that would pay a ridiculous amount of money but would involve an obscene hourly workload.
Essentially, I was able to look a few years into the future and know where I was going to be. This terrified me.
At the end of the day, though, why I started traveling rather than, I don’t know…horseback riding or something…is because I felt so horribly ignorant about the world.
Sure, I read a whole lot, and I make it a point to mingle with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, but this is nowhere near the same thing as actually going to another country and experiencing another culture on the ground.
I realized this and decided it was time to fill in that enormous gap in my education.
James: How have you been able to maintain a sustainable business while living out of a suitcase?
Colin: It’s a common misconception that you need an office, a desk, some employees, a handful of workstation computers, post-it notes, etc. to run a business. My idea was to the break this mold and go completely overhead-free. And it worked!
This isn’t a new idea by any means. Freelancers have been doing this forever: Bootstrapping what they need when they need it, but investing very little in their practice otherwise. But I wanted to try combining this concept with what’s called geo-arbitrage.
Geo-arbitrage essentially means that you get paid in a high-valued currency (like Euros or US Dollars) and then spend in a lower-valued currency (like Argentine Pesos or New Zealand Dollars) so that you benefit from the conversion rate.
Living this way has allowed me to get a lot more bang for my buck, and has given me the freedom to invest more time in myself and learning more about the world around me.
James: How has social media (blogs, Twitter, etc.) influenced your business practices?
Colin: Immensely! I’ve met so many people through blogs and Twitter and Facebook and the like that it’s hard to remember sometimes how business could have operated before I started to focus on making connections online.
I can honestly say that 90% of the most important connections I’ve made in the past three years have been due to networking I’ve done online, rather than in real life.
Changing my focus online has also allowed me to further reduce my overhead, as most of what goes on there is free or remarkably cheap, whereas networking opportunities in real life tend to have a higher price tag (to pay for food, drinks, brick-and-mortar locations, etc).
Technology just keeps on changing things, and though this can be scary if you’ve always run your business one way, it’s a huge opportunity for those who are willing to embrace that change and make it work for them.
James McCrae is a creative strategist, culture addict and writer broadcasting from Minneapolis. 
