Working remotely across ANZ. Key challenges and how we manage it.
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billie & co. has always been a remote led startup. When it was first founded, Nikita was living in Australia and Hannah was living in New Zealand. 6 months later, Nikita relocated back to New Zealand and Hannah moved to Australia (we promise we like each other!). Remote work was our normal, but it definitely hasn’t been without its challenges.
We’re both fortunate to work in a global and growing tech company, which has already shown us the pros and cons of working with different locations and time zones. The key difference between our day job and billie & co. is that we have physical assets to sell, and a lot of it! Thankfully we both easily agreed that whoever was in NZ would hold the assets and be responsible for shipping orders. The next big challenge we ran into (and continue to) is creating content. It would be a lot easier to lock in ‘content’ days together, but instead we’ve had to run it solo. We’re a far cry from influencers, but when our aim is for people to know who is behind the brand, we’ve had to inhale the awkwardness and learn to be more comfortable in front of the camera (and try not cringe when we look through the footage, which is still a huuuuge work in progress).
For everything else, we divide and conquer. We 👏 love 👏 a 👏 to-do 👏 list. We itemise everything - no matter how small (which means that the list is never-ending!). Challenge number three is finding the time to work through the list, but that’s a post for another day. We’re comfortable with slow progress because we’re in this for the long haul, and agree that small progress is ✨still ✨ progress (don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise!).
Our sign off on this is with the right tools, strong commitment and flexible working partner, you can overcome the barriers of distance and make an idea a reality in any startup. 🚀
We’re both fortunate to work in a global and growing tech company, which has already shown us the pros and cons of working with different locations and time zones. The key difference between our day job and billie & co. is that we have physical assets to sell, and a lot of it! Thankfully we both easily agreed that whoever was in NZ would hold the assets and be responsible for shipping orders. The next big challenge we ran into (and continue to) is creating content. It would be a lot easier to lock in ‘content’ days together, but instead we’ve had to run it solo. We’re a far cry from influencers, but when our aim is for people to know who is behind the brand, we’ve had to inhale the awkwardness and learn to be more comfortable in front of the camera (and try not cringe when we look through the footage, which is still a huuuuge work in progress).
For everything else, we divide and conquer. We 👏 love 👏 a 👏 to-do 👏 list. We itemise everything - no matter how small (which means that the list is never-ending!). Challenge number three is finding the time to work through the list, but that’s a post for another day. We’re comfortable with slow progress because we’re in this for the long haul, and agree that small progress is ✨still ✨ progress (don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise!).
Our sign off on this is with the right tools, strong commitment and flexible working partner, you can overcome the barriers of distance and make an idea a reality in any startup. 🚀