Lucy Whittington is a woman who confesses to more than a slight obsession with Australia. Despite living in a very beautiful beachside location in the UK, she’s travelled to Australia more than a dozen times since 2002. She tells us how easy frequent global travel was before she and her husband had kids, they lived and worked for their holidays, and each of her children had their first ever holiday in Australia too, at four months and six months respectively.
Lucy has designed her life and her business so that they can travel as a family to Australia as often as they want. Everything is designed to work perfectly in the UK around the school day and the school term. Her husband is the “colouring-in department” in her business and her two virtual helpers live in Cornwall and Hertfordshire, while her Dad – also someone who LOVES to holiday – does her VAT returns poolside, on his iPhone on Xero! He’s our first Laptop Lifestyle Dad and even he was conscripted to join the Aussie party in 2015.
We got Lucy to walk us through the developments in her 11-year old business and how it’s morphed over the years, especially after her children were born. Through Being A Business Celebrity and Find Your Thing, Lucy teaches her clients how to find and market what they are really good at. Her 1-2-1 and retreat clients come to visit her in Dorset and she’s reduced her travelling time to speaking engagements in order not to be away from the family too much.
As much as possible of her delivery to her clients is online and during term time but when people do come to work with her face to face it’s on a boat which is a ten minute walk away from where she lives.
Lucy describes writing a couple of Amazon best-sellers and why with the second one she wanted “a proper publisher”. That’s helped her to find clients all over the world and to create qualified sales conversations as they know all about Lucy’s own thing before they apply to work with her.
She’s a high energy, bubbly person, passionate and very much in love with her business and her life and no plans to change any of it any time soon, and why would she when it works so well? A new Beyond the Laptop Lifestyle conversation we had with Lucy was about how she and her husband have created two big and beautiful offices for themselves which struck me as a very good idea, given how much time we all spend working at home even if we are in our pajamas!
There was much talk of breaking out of the trap of exchanging time for money and also how she’s coming full circle to work with larger clients again after having spent a long time with entrepreneurs. There’s a distinct difference between selling a corporate product compared to a service provided by a real human being and their thing via their own one-man or woman band.
Australian-loving Lucy even persuaded her newsletter list on April Fool’s Day that she and her family weren’t coming home to the UK!
Luxuriate in some of Lucy’s humour and infectious energy at our Virtual Summit on the weekend of 18th and 19th June 2016 and upgrade your summit experience by choosing between our three options:
- Listen free in real time and chat with us live all weekend as the interviews go out. Register Free!
- Enjoy all of the recordings with our Gold package for $197 (or $97 if you buy before the event). Buy Now!
- Enjoy all of the above plus one year’s membership of our “Beyond the Laptop Lifestyle” Private Facebook Community. Network, get hints and tips about living and working abroad from people doing it, or seriously working towards it. Our Platinum package is $297 (or $197 if you buy before the event). Buy Now!(You can even try and win 1 x Platinum first prize worth $297 by entering our Blog Competition or one of the three Gold second prizes on offer, each worth $197)