Freedom Lifestyle

Love Story: Quitting Your Jobs and Reinventing Your Life Together [Maddie and Jordy]

• Sam Laliberte • Season 6 • Episode 89

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 Self-employed freedom enthusiasts who re-designed their lifestyle together.

Maddie and Jordy's journey began when they both quit their corporate jobs to move to Australia for a year of personal exploration and growth. They returned from their trip with successful remote businesses and new lifestyle goals that changed everything.

Maddie is a digital marketing and branding specialist and Jordy is a business coach for owners who want to balance financial success with quality of life.

Key Takeaways:

  • The impact of mindset coaching and proactively managing burnout 
  • Compromises you have to make in the spirit of co-creation
  • Protecting your romantic relationship from the pressures of a co-living and co-working environment 

FREE RESOURCE: DESIGN YOUR YEAR TEMPLATE

Maddie and Jordy didn't just stumble upon success; they forged it through intentional decisions, strategic planning, and a deep understanding of each other's strengths.


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About the show:

Sam Laliberte -  entrepreneur, digital nomad and freedom seeker, hosts the Freedom Lifestyle Podcast to expose people to the many ways you can design your dream life and unlock your own version of the freedom lifestyle. Her guests have empowered themselves through flexible work as a way to “have it all” - financial, location AND schedule freedom.

Speaker 1:

You're listening to a new episode of the Freedom Lifestyle podcast, where I introduce you to relatable stories from everyday people who have leveraged flexible work arrangements to design their dream lives. And today you're not going to meet just one freedom seeker You're actually going to get to meet two. I interviewed my friends Maddie and Jordy, who are a couple who have truly co-created their freedom lifestyles together. Their journey begins when they both quit their corporate jobs and move to Australia for what was meant to be one year of travel, fun and a break from the burnout that they were experiencing in their nine to five corporate lifestyles. Well, they decided to go there in February 2020, which we all know is when COVID was just starting to take off at scale, and Australia was one of the most challenging places you could find yourself during COVID in terms of a lockdown situation, not really being able to leave. And so that year that was meant to be fun, travel, freedom, just a break and a rest. It was that, but it definitely took a turn. They ended up starting their own freedom-based businesses on that journey and came home with a sustainable lifestyle where they never had to go back to those jobs.

Speaker 1:

Maddie is a digital marketer and branding specialist, and Jordy is a business coach for owners who want to balance financial success with quality life. In this episode, we talked a lot about what it's like to really co-create freedom with somebody else, the compromises that you sometimes have to make and some tips on how you can really convince your partner to get on board with, maybe, a vision that you have. We get real about things like work-life balance, creating a business that you're going to love and a life that goes with it. With no further delay, here's Maddie and Jordy. Maddie and Jordy, welcome to the Freedom Lifestyle podcast. How's your day going?

Speaker 2:

today it's been a good day. I took like a two-hour lunch break, so yeah, it's been nice.

Speaker 1:

How did you spend the lunch break for two hours?

Speaker 2:

I actually just met up with another freelancer and what was supposed to just be like a little 30-minute coffee meat and greet found out being like a two-hour long discussion of life, business, balance, work, everything. So it was kind of like a nice unexpected and a day treat.

Speaker 1:

That's freedom right there. Jared and I, we worked this morning and then went to Whistler for opening ski day in the afternoon, and now it's evening and I'm fitting this recording in so that we could still ski and then have this interview. Jordy, did you do anything to feel free today?

Speaker 3:

Honestly, not today. This was a hands down focus day, but I really enjoyed the work I'm doing and I know it's an investment in future freedom.

Speaker 1:

Amazing Love that. So the first question I always ask my guests is where are you taking today's call from? And if you weren't on this podcast interview right now, what would you normally be doing?

Speaker 2:

How specific do you want? We're in our bedroom right now because it's the best water and Aquaticist.

Speaker 1:

So you're on the Sunshine Coast, right? Oh, okay, you want broader than that.

Speaker 2:

Right. So we're on the coast of British Columbia, which is a little 45 minute ferry away from Vancouver, nice, and we're on the same time zone, so it's 5.30 at night.

Speaker 1:

What are you normally doing at this time? Are you still working? Is this pre-dinner vibes?

Speaker 2:

What do you normally up to, together or separate, I think we would be exercising, especially after a long work day of sitting at my desk, is I'm like I need to move my body from like a run to a yoga. Whatever our bodies are calling for after like a day of sitting at the desk, it's most of the time it's movement around this time 4 or 5 PM is ideal time to do that, and then it really creates that break between work and life.

Speaker 1:

And do you usually do the workout together?

Speaker 3:

Used to I think we do about half together right now. You know I'll go to CrossFit, she'll go to yoga, we'll go for runs together once in a while.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

But we do a lot together yeah.

Speaker 1:

You used to both do CrossFit.

Speaker 2:

That was the used to for me, I don't do CrossFit anymore after I had a like near death experience there. So now I do Pilates and he goes to CrossFit. But we like to run together and we do yoga together multiple days a week. So we still do a lot of it together, but just not CrossFit.

Speaker 1:

I love it. I'm hearing themes on designing your lives, being intentional on how you spend your time, making compromises and what things you do together and what things you do separately, which is exactly what I want to cover today. Maddie and Jordy, you've been in my life for years now, and it's been such a pleasure watching both of you take the leap to build your own freedom, lifestyles and all the adventures that that has taken you on over the last couple of years, and so, of course, I want to get into some of those highlights, but I also want to talk about what that's been like to do that with a partner. I feel like that's a story I haven't spoken enough on the show, and I think it's a really important one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this has definitely been an adventure that we have both been on together, like, from you know, dreaming of freelance to fully executing this dream of ours, and like achieving these goals, and we've basically been together and through it every single step of the way together, so it's been a full journey.

Speaker 3:

It has and, honestly, you and Jared were huge inspiration for us. I remember five, six years ago we were in Penticton on the lake. Both of us were burning out and in jobs. We wanted to leave. And I was just picking Jared's brain. I was like how do you go remote, how do you work from anywhere you want? How do you do this? And looking at what you and him have built has always been inspiring to us too. So it's great to connect and have role models as well. Who do it?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so the first people, I think, where we started to look and go oh oh, they're doing that kind of different. Like I like that, I like what that looks like, that looks good. So you kind of were like the spark, hmm, expanders for you.

Speaker 1:

Do you have other people now, other couples, that are living alternatively like this, that you've brought into your circle since you've gone on this journey too?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I've found some of our closest friends we've made in the last few years and we've really connected fast because we're all living this alternative style where we're all business owners, we all have the freedom to travel and take time off whenever we want, and I think, yes, there are people who just started to think and say they love you because those benefits have allowed us to go deeper faster. We just went to Europe for a few weeks with close friends and every morning all of us were on our laptops, you know, sending emails and doing stuff, but the rest of the day we'd be off at the beach, and that's just not something that all of our friends are capable of at this point in their lives with their businesses or their jobs.

Speaker 1:

Totally, and that's huge. So your journey starts with one epic year-long trip to Australia, so I feel like we should start the interview with that context. Can you paint a picture for our listeners about what was going on in each of your lives during that time when you started to have the idea to go on this adventure together?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, do you want me to start? Should I go first?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you go first, okay, we had been dating for about a year at that point, okay, and we were both experiencing our own like special individual brands of burnout basically. And it's funny because, like I know, you asked us a question in the prep where it was like, oh, was there this really meaningful moment where you found the confidence to go freelance? And I was kind of laughing because I was like I don't think it was about us like finding the confidence to go freelance. I think it was hitting burnout rock bottom, right. It almost was us like getting pushed to this point of being like, oh, things just have to change, because we don't feel good right now. Jordy had been posing the idea to me of like, hey, we could travel, we could quit our jobs and we could do this, but it was sort of more of a dream we would talk about and not something that we really felt serious about actualizing. But then we each had, you know, instead of our profound moment of like confidence to go and take this on, we actually had our profound moment of burnout and we each actually have like a pretty funny story, like origin story, of how that happened.

Speaker 2:

For me, it was getting physically locked inside the office building that I was working at. I was working, you know, for a small agency and I was working so long and so late that the janitor, who had like finished cleaning the building and then like security, locked me inside the building, not knowing that I was there. So it was like too much of a metaphor that I was like physically locked inside my office building for the night. I had to crawl my way out of like a cobweb filled dirty basement window, like into a back alley, like crying, pulling myself out of this window to just exit this building so I could get home. And it was like the metaphor was just way too, way too strong. And that was like the night where I walked home crying the whole time and then when I got home, I called Jordy and I said, like book the tickets, let's go, I'm going to hand in my notice tomorrow and let's go and travel Australia for a year.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and mine had happened in a different way but very similar timeline, and I was traveling all over North America for work. I was often away two to three weeks a month, living in hotels, always in airports, and it had taken a huge physical and mental toll on me. I was having insomnia and I was. I was really struggling, honestly. So I was coming back from a East Coast trip. I'd been in you know meetings for 10, 12 hours a day for the whole time and then not sleeping well, and so I'm in an airplane flying home and I remember just feeling like I don't even know if I'm going to make it home.

Speaker 3:

I'm just so battered and I got a napkin out and I started to just try to plot my escape. So I wrote down what does my life cost right now to live? And I was like my rent, my car, my food, what do I spend in a month? And then I figured out okay, well, how much savings do I have right now? And I divided the savings by the cost of living and I figured okay, I could live for over a year without earning any money right now because I've been saving for a long time. So I've earned the freedom to break free of this trap. And I also then got home and said to Maddie, like I don't think I can keep doing this. And the kind of question that broke for both of us was what if we spent the same amount of time and energy we're putting into our jobs, where we're high performing, but we're burning out?

Speaker 2:

And we're doing it for somebody else's business. You know we're making other people successful with all of this time and energy and you know high performance that we're outputting.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And what if we put that into ourselves and our own businesses and our own goals? How much further and faster could we achieve what we want? And so those two experiences plus that question helped us say okay, we picked a day, it was my birthday, so I gave myself a gift of quitting my job on my birthday and we flew to Australia and with no plan, but some money saved and an adventure on the way.

Speaker 1:

Quit your job on your birthday. That's risky, because what if there was some big drama that unfolded? I can't believe you're leaving us, jordy, or any fine print. How did those conversations go with each of your bosses when you told them you're leaving?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, those are hard conversations, because we both liked the people we worked with. We liked the work we were doing. It was just too much. My boss was very understanding. I gave him a good heads up. He was very supportive and then, before I'd even left the room, he'd offered me a contract to do some future work with them. So you know, in quitting I ended up creating my then first customer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, same for me. I think the fact that we were traveling was like the best escape. I think it almost is harder to quit If you're, say, going to a competitor, or you're just quitting to maybe start. If you're working at a digital marketing agency and you're then going to go and be a freelance digital marketer, you're quitting to become the competition, or you're quitting to join the competition or something like that. I think that's a lot harder. I think a lot of people these days, if you're just like, hey, I'm going traveling because I want to live my life, they're like can't argue with it, okay.

Speaker 1:

And your old boss was also your client, your first client, right, Maddie.

Speaker 2:

Yes, exactly I had the same scenario with Jordy, where my first client actually was the agency that I left because they were like we still need some work. You're the best candidate for the job. You know our projects, you know our systems and our workflow and you know our clients right, so they actually ended up being my first freelance clients as well.

Speaker 1:

So I'm guessing you left out of the conversation that you're completely burnt out and have hit rock bottom and that's why you need to quit.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, no, I didn't add that. I didn't add that in no, because I think at the end of the day, you know, like business is business and I think, especially in the marketing industry, a lot of these agencies are small, they have to be really lean and I don't know if that would necessarily have been relevant part of the conversation at that point. You know, it was just I've got to go, I've got to leave, you know, and I'm traveling, and we just left it at that.

Speaker 1:

Nice, yeah, keeping your relationships is a wise thing to do. I think when you're emotionally charged and you feel like you've been wronged by your boss, it's very easy to kind of go and put it all on the table of how this place sucks. And, you know, I wish that I could make a change and I couldn't. And this place is toxic and I've seen people do this, and maybe even I'm talking from my own personal experience. But you just never know when a relationship that you had once could lead to something in the future that you might want. So very wise. Did one of you feel like you were taking the lead or the charge on this vision in terms of Australia? The length of time?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I definitely was Something I had done multiple times in my 20s where I stopped working, I'd saved all my money and then I'd go traveling for four or five months at a time and I had then stopped doing that for four years because of the job and I was just feeling like I need that, I need a little mini retirement to reconnect and reset, and I was pretty much going to get to the place of going without Maddie if I had to, but I needed to wait for her and bring her along if she could come.

Speaker 2:

You gave me the good push, you approached it well. I had basically like Stockholm Syndrome with my own career at that point, where, like it was my whole identity, I just I didn't really see or understand a reality where I wasn't, you know, working and climbing my way up through my career. So it was almost like I couldn't even quite visualize it. And so I think Jordy pushing me and to take that leap was a huge changing moment in my life too.

Speaker 3:

Maddie had actually proposed that we move to London because she has a British passport and I said that I don't think London is the place to go recover from burnout and from too much pressure in your career, but I think that in Australia we could spend a lot of time on the beach drinking beers and exploring and that that would give us the environment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, he was like busy city versus white sand beach, like which one is going to be best for us to actually like change our mindsets and recover and rest. And yeah, so you definitely had the right idea.

Speaker 1:

Were you planning to start businesses? Were you quitting your jobs with no plans Like what was the intention for this trip?

Speaker 3:

We just had savings. So I had savings and Maddie worked really hard and saved up enough that we had like a three or four month runway where we knew we didn't have to work but we got work visas and the plan was let's go do fun random jobs that we haven't done before, Like Maddie wanted to work in a brewery.

Speaker 2:

I just wanted to like. I was so tired of my laptop and being behind a computer screen. I was like I just want to serve IPAs out of brewery to Aussies near a beach. It's all I want to do. Did you end up doing that? No, because it was.

Speaker 3:

COVID so what I was going to say is we. We landed in Australia in February 2020 and by March, lockdowns were rolling across the world and we got emails from Canada saying this is your last chance. You all have to come home. We'll take care of you if you come home now. Otherwise, we don't have any guarantee of what's going to happen.

Speaker 2:

I remember a headline once seeing a headline, and it was like Trudeau calls all Canadians back to like Canada, and I felt like personally, like he was saying you guys have to leave Australia. And we were just like no, we just like uprooted our entire lives. We worked so hard and pushed so hard to get to this place. We were literally like you can't make us.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So we stayed and luckily we had good family friends in Brisbane that that ended up housing us for two months during lockdowns. And at that point we were like we have no idea what's going to happen in our trip, in our year, in our careers. But A couple things just changed. In Queensland, where we were, they eliminated COVID because of their approach to shutting borders and so as of like I think April or May, there was no COVID and we were free to travel and it was this weird bubble that we were in. And then the second thing was remote work exploded right at the time in our lives where we were trying to figure out how do we get remote work, and so it actually kind of conspired to help us and over the next few months we bought a used car, we started traveling Australia camping, and as we were doing it we were getting contacted by previous clients, previous companies we worked for and starting to actually get work, despite not even really having much of an intention of starting that way.

Speaker 1:

They were coming to you. You had them message you and say hey, by any chance, can you pick up some freelance or contract work while you're out traveling?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. It happened like quite organically, I know. For me especially it was just people and that's one of the reasons why I always tell people like, maintain those good relationships throughout your career, because that paid off. In spades I had people who I had worked with previously from like past agencies, clients connected with them who had suggested me to other people, and so people were just coming out of the woodwork just requesting work.

Speaker 1:

Okay, well, that's amazing, that's so serendipitous, and it's clear that that just started to snowball very quickly. And, of course, you come home. You're now full business owners, you have your various revenue streams, you've been free this entire time. But for couples who are now listening to this and might find some similarities in terms of their own story, where maybe one couple has a vision for an adventure that they want to take and maybe even has some experience doing it so if you've done something before, you're, of course, going to feel more confident that it'll work out. Maybe the other person hasn't jumped into this level of unknown or doesn't have confidence and a vision of how it could work out. What do you think you did? Well, jordy, I guess, first of all in getting Maddie on board, and then Maddie, what do you think the lessons and impact was for you that you would pass on?

Speaker 3:

For me, because I had done it a few times before where I had just like, quit my life, put it on hold, gone, traveling for months at a time. I knew that every time I got back I was happier, a better person and more clear on what I wanted, and that you can jump back in and start making money again. So I knew that if we take this pause, who knows what happens with our careers or our lives? But we're young, we're never going to get this time back and we can always make more money. But we can't be 27 again and have that freedom together. So all of those things were always really clear to me. But going through it together, being aligned, was challenging. We just talked it through constantly of what's the alternative? What if we just stay here, continue to work this way, continue to grind? What path does that put us on? Versus what if we take this shot and go, have an incredible year where a lot can change?

Speaker 1:

And was Maddie receptive and open from the beginning, like when you were talking to her? Could you tell, okay, I feel like I can convince her. I feel like just a few more speeches, a few more stories, a few more nights over dinner where I picture on this vision it could work, or what was the initial reactions? And I guess, how long did it take for you to go from that initial idea to getting her on board?

Speaker 3:

Honestly, I think it was probably almost six months of us having this idea and talking about it and debating. From what I remember, the big barrier at the time was how are we going to make money and how are we going to afford our lifestyle? So we were making like 60K a year at the time, which was enough.

Speaker 2:

I was not.

Speaker 3:

We were close to making 60K a year at the time, which was enough for the lifestyle we had at the time in Vancouver, but not enough for much left over and not enough to get ahead. We had this fear of if we give that up, what else is there and how long can we go. But saving money was a huge key for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean like born and raised Vancouver right here. It is a very expensive city, it is a high cost of living and you really can get trapped in this mentality where you're making a lot of your decisions based on finances and how much money am I making? It's very easy to buy, to be part of the hustle culture, because you have to, even just renting a one bedroom apartment in Vancouver and wanting to have any type of a life or lifestyle, you have to be making a significant amount of money and if you're not making it, you've got to be working hard towards it. So it's very hard to then separate your mindset from you know, for me, to be successful in this city, that means financial success and breaking from that mentality and being like what if? Success means more time, more freedom, more happiness perhaps.

Speaker 2:

Like that was a really big mentality shift for me because I was really on this one track. Like I said, I kind of had Stockholm syndrome with my own career. I was really on this one track mentality of like this is how I have to do this. So it took, yeah, I would say like quite a few months of talking about it, thinking about it and then yeah, ultimately I don't know if I hadn't had that rock bottom moment. I don't even know if it would have happened, but I really did have to hit rock bottom for myself in terms of burnout and have that experience of just realizing like you can't continue this way. So you have to try something different. You have to seek a different lifestyle and new experiences to break your mentality of what you think success and what you think your life and your career has to be.

Speaker 1:

Totally, and it's been three years that you've been on this journey now, since this trip to Australia and the word burnout is interesting because I've heard you use that word since, like when we've been hanging out socially, our businesses can also make us feel burnt out. And so what are those signs and how does burnout show up for you and how are you getting ahead of it now so that you don't have to hit rock bottom, quit your business, go to Australia, leave it all behind? How are you navigating that more sustainably when now you're in the driver's seat with your own businesses?

Speaker 2:

That said, I will quickly digress and say that Jordy and I still always look at each other every once in a while and we say we can always Australia again.

Speaker 2:

And when we say that we mean there is always the chance to pull, shoot, burn your life down and just go and rent a crappy old station wagon in Australia again and live out of a two person tent and be just as happy as we are now. That was kind of something that we identified on that trip, and a promise that we made to each other is that just remember that we can always do this again. So sometimes there are still days where I'm just like should we Australia or what? But for me, I think the biggest difference is that I recognize burnout now in a way that I didn't before, like I didn't understand earlier, like throughout my 20s, like why I was just gradually feeling more and more stress and anxiety and, honestly, like debilitating burnout feeling sometimes. So now I still do feel burnout, but I can recognize it and I actually now have so many more mental tools and also the flexibility and the freedom to then combat it and to know what I need to do for myself, to take space, to take rest, to find balance again.

Speaker 1:

I'm imagining having that schedule. Freedom is huge, because it sounds like you were in a physical office for long periods of time, whereas now you're taking two hour lunch breaks whenever you want or whenever that opportunity comes up. And so is that what the tools mean for you, like just the physical space where, instead of work, I can choose to do something else?

Speaker 2:

Yep, exactly, if I need to take the space I can, I can also just take a day off, like yesterday I just took the ferry into the city and met up with a friend for brunch and just didn't work all day Just because I decided I needed that space.

Speaker 2:

That's not very often Like. I don't want everybody to start thinking that I'm constantly like taking days off and doing two hour lunch breaks, but I've been working really, really hard the past few weeks and this just kind of hit a point where I was like, okay, you need to now like combat that and take a little bit of time and space for yourself. Another tool that has been massively helpful is that I have had a mindset coach now for three years. She's been with me on this crazy journey and she taught me so many of these tools of how to recognize burnout in myself, how to recognize stress, how to handle it, how to take that space, recognizing what feels good for me, which often is get out of the house, go and move your body, go for a walk, go for a jog, go for a stretch, and so, yeah, definitely I think calling in the cavalry and having a mindset coach to help me through and learn those tools was absolutely key in the growth of my business.

Speaker 1:

Chor, did you wanna add anything about what you've learned, because you now are also? You also have your own business, and are you experiencing burnout, or is that something that Maddie is experiencing more than you?

Speaker 3:

Maddie definitely has a lot more on her plate than I do right now as I'm more in build mode and she's got a full client roster. But for me, burnout's interesting because there's like physical burnout where you're just super tired. There's mental burnout where you're so done you can't focus, you're dragging yourself through, and then there's emotional where you're just kinda giving up. I haven't felt any of those since I left that job four years ago. Amazing, because I've built my whole life to avoid ever going back into that place.

Speaker 3:

So the things that put me into that, which was the business travel, I've said no, I'll never do business travel again. Waking up and jamming an alarm and running into the office at 8 am I don't wake up to an alarm anymore and I start work at 8, 30 or nine or whenever feels right to me on that day, and so just a couple of things like that. I learned what wasn't working for me and then I've really built my life and my business around never having that happen again, because I'm all about, if I'm gonna build a business for the long term, my workload has to be sustainable, my energy has to be sustainable and I wanna wake up and be energized for it every day.

Speaker 1:

I know you two also really support one another in building each other's freedom lifestyles, whether it's direct business, coaching tactics, strategies or the mindset pieces, when you're noticing someone is having a thought pattern or responding to something in a way that's not helpful. Curious, maybe a controversial, question how much do you attribute your own success to the relationship, your business success, your life success, to you two being together? Do you ever think about where you'd be if you weren't dating?

Speaker 2:

Oh man, I would probably still. Honestly, I think I would be doing very successful in a career first like working for someone else. I think I would be so many levels of burnout that the word doesn't even have like meaning anymore. I still think that I would be successful because we're both very driven people. But I think my life would be so different without Jordy and if I didn't have this partner, who was also on the same alignment with me in terms of what we want out of our careers in business. Yeah no, I think my life would look very, very different and it would be a lot more stressful.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean we have very complimentary skill sets. So I'm a business coach, I'm really comfortable with finances and operations. Maddie is a marketer, really comfortable with branding and visual. So we have gaps that the other one fills really naturally. So when Maddie is trying to figure out what's her pricing strategy, we can talk about that and I know how to have the tools to help her with that. And then when I'm creating a new brand or I'm struggling with my message in some marketing, she can come in and just figure it out like instantly.

Speaker 3:

So we do have very complimentary skill sets and I know that that's helped both of us grow and learn faster than if we were doing it alone and the other one had no idea what we were doing. I don't know how that happened, but it kind of happens in the rest of our life as well. You know, I'm hands on and I can fix things and Maddie's got the design and the eye for things. So we're very complimentary and I think that we respect the other's opinion so much more when it's in an area that we don't have that strength.

Speaker 1:

Would you ever go into business together, because that sounds like a great no, go on.

Speaker 3:

We talked about it many times.

Speaker 1:

I'm sure.

Speaker 3:

We thought about doing like a business boot camp where I'm teaching people some of those things I talked about, like business finances and operations, and then Maddie's doing branding and social media and marketing messaging and again, who knows? I think we already, because we both.

Speaker 1:

Maddie seems to know.

Speaker 3:

Well, because I'm going to say that, because we both live and work from home, we already spend all our time together, and so I think that's probably where the note comes from is, we don't need any more time together, and we don't. We also do things differently, we operate differently, yeah.

Speaker 2:

I would say that that is one of. We've obviously talked a lot about all of the positives and how we have supported each other and assisted each other so much in building these amazing freelance careers. But there is another side to it too. We're already practically coworkers and colleagues. We work out of the same house together, just a door away from each other, every single day. We're constantly talking about our businesses and workshopping them with each other, and while that is an amazing superpower that has definitely advanced us through these freelance careers, sometimes it can be too big a part of our relationship. When people say, would you go into business together, I would say no, because I want you to be my colleague and my coworker, but also still my best friend, my partner and my lover, and I think that that compartmentalization and that having those boundaries is really, really important for us as actually a romantic couple, versus two career-oriented roommates.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

Do you each have the same definition of freedom?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'd say it's very, very aligned. We like to work similar hours, we like to travel very frequently, we like to do a lot of the same things when we're not working, so that does make it easy. I know partners who one has a lot of freedom and the other doesn't, and I know how restricting that can feel and how challenging it can be. But we're very aligned and I think because we started the journey together from basically square one, where we had no job, no plan, we were able to build up together, intentionally and in alignment with what was important, and we're constantly dreaming about what comes next, like what else is possible with the things in the baseline that we've built.

Speaker 2:

And sometimes those dreams are different, they're not always the same, and then we'll kind of talk about it. And sometimes we're also offering each other challenges, right, like okay, would you ever want to do this? Or what do you think about if we did that, for example? And so we do. We're not always perfectly yes with each other, but I think our fundamental ideas of what freedom involves is the same for us.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think like communication skills are very strong in your relationship and also there's a lot of respect for one another.

Speaker 2:

Mm-hmm. Definitely, I think that that's what comes from being best friends since we were 15. But we've only been dating for four years, but we've essentially groomed each other from a young age to communicate well and to talk properly to each other.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, it's beautiful to watch. It's been very clear in this interview tonight. So 2024, we have a new year. You mentioned dreaming up, always thinking about the next level. What is the next level for each of you? What are we making happen in our businesses, in our personal lives, in our relationship? However, you want to take this.

Speaker 3:

I think the biggest thing we're debating right now is if we get a dog. It's been something we've talked about for years and we're still trying to debate it and just trying to figure out how it fits in our freedom lifestyle and we get a dog that we can travel with. Where does it go when we go away for a few months at a time? Any time we make a big decision, we just think about what are the repercussions for the control we have over our time and the lifestyle that we've already built.

Speaker 2:

I said to Jordy the other day I was like Sam, send her cat to Toronto while she goes away. We could do that too. Once again, we're kind of using it. So it's interesting because when we kind of hit a place of like oh, like what, how could we get around this? We actually often are looking towards you and Jared and being like OK, well, I mean, the cat goes and stays with grandma when they're in Costa Rica. So maybe we could do something similar right, the cat loves it.

Speaker 1:

The cat's a nomad too. She just turned 10. She's with me and Whistler. Right now I think she's sleeping on the couch behind me, but cats adapt. There's solutions for that. There's the trusted house sitter website I'm using now, where someone takes care of her in our home or we shipper off somewhere and then we can Airbnb. So I think it's just an attitude of all problems are solvable and just thinking about how it can go right, not all the reasons it can't work. So definitely dog. What kind of dog would you get?

Speaker 2:

Are you going to tell her, or am I going to tell her?

Speaker 3:

Go for it.

Speaker 2:

What do we want? Essentially like a miniature poodle.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I figured it would be a small dog.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it needs to be small, like it's got to be 15 pounds or so, so we could maybe bring it on a plane with us. But yeah, we sometimes get judged a little bit because we want like a tiny, small, fluffy dog, which, you know, if you're somebody who loves like huskies or great Danes or mastiffs, you know we sometimes get a bit of side eye for that. But hey, you like what you like, you know.

Speaker 1:

I love all animals. Okay, so you're eating a dog. What else, yeah?

Speaker 2:

For me. I think more remote, longer stretches of remote work and travel is really important for me. Like I said, like I do see what you and Jared are doing going down to Costa Rica and that is very appealing for me. We actually are members of trusted house sitters and Jordy and I have done house sitting in Australia, down in the States. It's an amazing way to have remote travel and to go and stay and work from somewhere for free and look after a cute little pet as a little bonus.

Speaker 2:

So I think exploring more opportunities like that is really important for me this next year as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I mean I love any chance we can get to work in a different environment, explore a new environment. I always find that shifts the energy and the way we live. Outside of that I'm just. I'm really heads down trying to build my business up this year, get more clients, build out new programs and new ways to help business owners, and I'm having a lot of fun with that. So next year I just see a lot of opportunity to keep developing what I'm working on while also being away going. You know we're going back to Europe later in the year and different things like that.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, I think, flexing that freedom muscle a little bit more, jordy and I, each in our business, have sort of these things that we call non-negotiables, right, and those are sort of like baseline values for the type of business we want to be running, the type of lifestyle that that business is then going to create for us.

Speaker 2:

And, honestly, for me, one of my really big non-negotiables was I don't like to have client meetings all the time and I don't like to be talking to clients on. I don't like to have zoom calls, things like that, where it's like super time zone dependent. So for me, one of the ways that I actually keep myself nimble and being able to be flexible and travel is just being very, very clear with my clients that I communicate primarily through email. So I don't have to be worrying about setting up zoom calls and on a European time zone versus a Canadian time zone, and that has always been kind of like a fundamental non-negotiable for me in my business, so that I don't have to be worrying about where I'm working from and I can just do it from wherever, amazing, okay.

Speaker 1:

And if people want to follow along, potentially work with you, where should we point them to?

Speaker 2:

I have my business account, which is bomb creative. I have a grand total of like 500 followers there. But you know, I think I'm a tried and true example of how you actually don't have to be an influencer in order to have a successful freelance business. So I'm like almost a little proud of my small following compared to my actual success in my business. And, jordy, you have your personal account. Jordy's all about LinkedIn, so he's not so much Instagram.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn because that's where I find the most success and connection and I like the way people interact on there. But you can find me as Jordan Tate on LinkedIn, or my website for my business is wwwtheintentionalbusinesscom.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. Okay, well, we'll put links in the show notes if anyone wants to check out your businesses and learn more about how they can work with you and what that's all about. So thanks for including that and thanks for coming on the show and giving us more of a personal look at what it's like to be in this relationship and co-create your freedom together.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thanks, sam, and thank you so much for having us on. This is so meaningful for us and like your friendship, and also not only that, but like your mentorship even in some of the early days of my freelance business, I was conference calling you from Australia, being like how do I do this? So you've been a really influential part of our journey as well, and so this is just a really nice moment for us to get to be on the podcast and just talk to you about this stuff and, yeah, shoot the shit.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it really is. And to any of your listeners if they want to chat to us about making that leap, figuring out their first steps, how to overcome whatever they're working on. We love talking about this stuff. It's like our favorite conversation, so just reach out and we'd be happy to chat.

Speaker 1:

It's true, when we have weekends together, it's kind of hard to turn us off. We'll just be, in a corner just jamming on these topics and if someone's not interested in this, it's like oh, I'm so glad we invited them. Yeah, whoops, sorry, not sorry, amazing, okay, thank you so much. Bye, all right, bye, sam, thanks.

Speaker 3:

Sam.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for tuning into another episode If this one inspired you to take action, but you could use some help on your plan, or perhaps you've got too many ideas bouncing around in that beautiful brain of yours. You'd love some clarity on your strategy, what you should pursue first and why. Well, I am now offering one-on-one freedom coaching sessions. You can book these at buymeacoffeecom. Slash what's your free. This is our opportunity to have a virtual coffee together. Spend an hour getting clarity on how you can unlock more freedom and flexibility in your life. On these calls, you can ask me anything, but here are some things that I'm an expert in creating a location, independent lifestyle, building service-based and freelance businesses, leveraging the gig economy and platforms like Fiverr, utilizing podcasts to build your personal brand and developing passive income streams. So book your freedom coaching session with me at buymeacoffeecom. Slash what's your free. I would love to have a virtual coffee with you.

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Sam Laliberte

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