Why I Gave Up Digital Nomad Life for a Real Office in New Zealand

da hey I got a lot of faith in you I'll sck with you kid that's the bottom line hey I have a lot of fun don't you okay today I want to film a bit of a life recap dear and break down what I've been up to what my team's been up to over the past one or two months since we left everything in Dubai and moved here to New Zealand so a lot has changed basically everything about my life and how we're running the business has been turned on its head and it's been a an interesting 2 months but in this video I want to break down a few key topics firstly what we've been up to for the past 2 months we got a lot of stuff work related and also just lifestyle and living related of what we've actually been doing here as a team and getting settled here back here in Al home New Zealand why we left Dubai I think some of you would be interested to know what led us to leaving what many would say is like perfect place to be for rning one of these businesses to coming back here to New Zealand what our plans are for 2025 we give you a brief rundown of what we're really aiming for next year and some Reflections on this change and the shift in my life and shifting online business and giving up the Digital noad Life to a place it with something like this where after sit in traffic every morning there's important lessons in there and I want to share those with you as well so first things first back in early October packed up everything in Dubai and I flew back home to New Zealand with about 90 kgs of suitcases of luggage brought as much as I could back with me I don't really intend to be back sold my car sold everything getting my cat moved over here as well so I packed up everything for good and moved back to New Zealand myself and some of the team we've got new homes new cars new everything new life here completely and more importantly we've got a new office for morning side AI which is really big update on the work side and with opening an office like this we have to have a completely new routine which is waking up driving into work coming to work going to the gym at some time coming back dodging traffic has been the main thing so all of us are trying our own different styles of routine to try and get around the traffic every morning while still managing to get enough work done while still squeezing in the gyms that adjustment to the new teen's been mainly the focus of the past 2 months also got to see family again as with the rest of the guys here haven't seen family since I left in the first week of January this year so it's been nice to see my mom and dad again and grandparents as well but major thing for us was as soon as we arrived as we signed a lease for this office which was pretty exciting we shopped around for a little bit and we found when we really liked and here we've got in the capacity of 15 people some people aren't in yet already um today but we've also got people being recalled as I'm going to go on to later from the rest of our team who's based all around the world so they have an opportunity to come join us here in person we had to do the whole moving into the office process getting new monitors and Screen set up everyone getting comfortable as well as moving into the new office we also welcome some new team members as well they' have now kind of joined forces and come together to help us set up our own Consulting division here in New Zealand which I'll go on to later which is some really exciting stuff we working on with had James our froner developer come back from Amsterdam and Al New Zealand so he's here in the office with us our sales manager OE has also come back so really assembling the whole team back here and getting some new people on board with as well has been really awesome and one of the main focuses for us over this past two months or so has been this new Consulting division we're sitting up and also business education programs as well which is what we're doing a little bit later in 2025 but we've started our first official Consulting project with a $200 million Steel company here in New Zealand so we're doing a 8we AI audit eight 8 weeks I was shocked when I heard just how long this one was going to be it's 8 weeks the full Consulting process I've been blown away by working out what these are doing behind the scenes on this project

so I'm going to be covering that more in another video how we're doing this Consulting build and the things we're learning along the way cuz we're definitely learning a lot but we've just thrown ourselves in the deep end and we've got excellent people on the team so Consulting is a big part of our strategy for next year and it's definitely been all hands on deck getting this first project done making sure we nail it um so that we can go on to do more in the space within New Zealand as well and outside of work we've also been getting up to a bit of fun as well making sure that we are balancing the lifestyle here it's one of the things we're really focusing on is trying to a bit more of a balanced lifestyle so we've be a couple concerts we had Travis Scott here a few weeks ago we had Cold Play recently we took the team out to W hickey which is a beautiful place just close to Oakland we c a helicopter out there and we doing a lot of uh fun stuff as a group that we' never really got to do when we were working online which as you can probably understand is one of the reasons we have tried to bring it back here so we can build a bit of a team culture and build some connections with our new team members as well we're also making the most of having our own houses now we threw a bit of a housewarming party Halloween party recently and that was fun to see what the team dress up but yeah it's been nice to be back in our home City Home Country and reconnect with a lot of our friends and family and be able to have this sense of community around us as well and in Just 2 months already it's come a long way that Community feeling and I'm really excited for looking ahead and what in the Years time from now how that feels for us what we've got not only just the morning Side Community around us we've got friends and family we've also got other businesses that we've been meeting here and networking with I'm really excited for that to compound and considering how far it's come in just 2 months so that's a quick recap of what we've been up to here over the past 2 months it's been a lot of settling in a lot of starting new initiatives and really if I'm just finding the Rhythm here and reconnecting with old friends as well but now I want to get into why we decided to leave Dubai in the first place and why of all places we chose New Zealand so a bunch of reasons but the first one being that myself and my team and all my boys and my friends that I work with we've been living this kind of digital Nomad we' be absolutely blessed to live it like don't get me wrong this it was a dream come true and I think everyone should do that for a while but this digital Nomad thing of jumping around and living out of a suitcase I've done it for uh like 3 4 years now basically nonstop yes I have tried to minimize that digital Nomad purely being a Suitcase by getting an apartment in Dubai and having a bit of a base there that I could jump in and out of for about half the year but it still was getting too much for particularly the rest of the team we didn't have a base like that while it is good and travel can be great and you meet new people and experience new things you eventually get sick of feeling like a stranger and feeling lonely in every city you go to like we would go places and it would just be us me and three of my friends or four of us all working together and while that was cool and then it's great to be with your friends sometimes you do miss having a bit of a broader friend group or family around or there's a bit more familiarity with the places that you go and so for us coming back home here or at least just all moving to one city and being based in the same place together was a fairly good antidote for the kind of loneliness and isolation many of us were feeling some of the team was just sitting in Germany for like three months this year just grinding out uh and not really enjoying their life that much they were get a lot of work done and sure it's good for the business but we're at the stage now where we need to start prioritizing a little bit more life in and enjoying the journey a bit more than just purely grinding so being back in the same place is a big part of our strategy to achieve that then on top of that there's also just the difficulty of communication so if I was in Dubai or some of the team was in Thailand and we're all spread around it was so much more difficult for to be on the same page and really Sy up on sure you could take meetings at all times of the day but not being at arms length from your business partner from here in my case is makes it a lot more difficult for those communication channels to be open and to really keep an eye on what's going on in the business and also being out to ideate making sure that you're all in the same room and it's difficult to have brainstorming sessions and ideation sessions over Zoom or over meet for us that's always been a very big part of our strategy is getting in the same room and just balancing ideas and whiteboarding and spending a lot of time together like that and we've just haven't really been able to do that as we've not been living all together in the same place in my experience I see ideation and creation of new like gamechanging ideas with the new business or even new life as well is often the case it's like a chemical reaction where you need to put everyone in the right Beaker in the right environment be at the same room or same office here and you can't predict when it's going to happen you just need to wait until they right Catalyst if you don't understand sort of basic chemistry you can have a sort of inert mixture of of chemicals and a Bea and then when you add a catalyst it is what allows the reaction between those two or multiple different particles or molecules within that mixture and so you never know what that catalyst is going to be it could be someone I having an idea someone watching a video or someone drawing something on a whiteboard and that's the Catalyst that makes these new ideas appear and we weren't able to achieve that um when we're living overseas you just kind of need to be in the same room until the magic happens another big reason for us leaving Dubai was the poor business infrastructure that I've talked about before in my other Dubai video I'll link it up here if you haven't seen

my sort of pros and cons and why I was leaving and all that sort of stuff you would think would be the best place to start online business right a you got all these like Banks and services that are tailored to helping all these new companies sitting up there but we found that I mean relative to how it was here in New Zealand when we were running companies here myself and my business partner separately the business infrastructure and the services available to you are so much worse than Dubai we're using these kind dog banks that we didn't even feel comfortable holding a lot of money in and even when you talk to other people based in Dubai do yeah don't keep more than like a few hundred th000 or over a million dollars in that bank account because uh then you just ask into trouble and that's not really what I want out of my bank if I'm honest so that kind of stuff is just all throughout Dubai at least in our experience and you're having a struggle to find good legal council I think it was extremely difficult for us to find an accountant and when it comes to building a relationship with your bank you're such a small fish even at the level that we are doing with our businesses now and Dubai was still a small fish but if we bring it back to say here in New Zealand the levels of revenues that we see are a lot higher relative to the rest of the companies here we sort of basically get further out the picking order and better access to better services and better personal connections with say Banks or accountants or legal providers Etc so as soon as we touch down here in New Zealand we have access to shim good legal and financial Council we've course stad them with the best banks and now we're getting great deals set up with them so it's like thing welcome back by people who see what we're doing and they want us to be a customer whereas in Dubai you feel like you're just another bit of cattle sitting in the queue to use these different Services which isn't what I want that's been a big factor in US wanting to move back is can we get better access to better services and that's going to allow us to spend a lot more time on what actually matters rather than having to passess around with all of this admin and operational stuff of just getting things set up and working properly another reason to move back here New Zealand particularly is that one we're all most of my in here are from New Zealand we grew up here and we have a bit of a home field advantage here of course and we see that New Zealand is a largely untapped market for AI services and Consulting and education and given the personal brand that I built and the momentum we have there it's sometimes smarter to go and be the big fish in the small pond or try to become the big fish here because if we can capture the majority of the markets here in New Zealand we're going to make a lot of money and this Australia which is a like many times bigger Market just across and we're fairly similar there it's very easy for us to move into that market so for us it didn't make sense to try and play this International thing while we do take International clients on of course but in terms of really trying to build up a home base and work with a lot of larger companies here in New Zealand that's the strategy for us at the moment we see it as a massive opportunity for us to come into the New Zealand Market be well known as a quality service provider for development services Consulting education and really just dominate this Market first and find that base and then shoot to other things to start selling s internationally again on a much larger scale so that's the strap for coming back to New Zealand of all places and it's course just our home we want to be that's nice to be back i' been living overseas for years and never really saw my family and it was a sacrifice but also got to see the world so I mean you got to give something up but it's mostly back here and be a lot closer to my grandparents who are aging and parents Etc so it goes for everyone in the team as well and the final one is uh just the lack of community of life that as I touched on before and du buy particularly I had a small group of friends here and the rest of the team who originally moved there with me ended up leaving so it's just me and a small group of friends I'd made there and while it was good don't get me wrong it can be an incredible place to live I remember stepping on my balcony and being like holy moly this is just an incredible place to live it's the weather was awesome I'd have all these cafes and things around and it's definitely a really good energy and bustle to it if you're in the right stage of your career but I didn't have that kind of community feel necessarily sure i' go out occasionally with my mates and go to a beach club and this sort of thing but here we'll go to the winery or we go out go up drive a few hours and go get a house for the weekend or we'll go to a concert sure you can do those things at du buy but just us PR us being back here we have a much greater sense of community and being able to have a an office of people working together as well you've just always got a bunch of friends on hand hey do you want to grab L go out first we're going out like last Friday we just last minute found it was a gig on and we said sweet let all buy tickets of the company and use it as an example for the whole company to go out and have a good time together so that's really been a key for us and a big reason for us moving back and leaving Dubai is that we wanted to have that feeling and get a bit more of a rich experience out of our entrepreneurial Journey moving forward all right so we'll do that laid out what are our plans here in New Zealand for 2025 so I want to I do want to do a whole video on this out of L dat cuz there's a lot to go through and I want to give you guys a full update on what we're working on and why we're doing it as well because the whole point of this why I make these videos still is to just keep charging into this AI entrepreneurship and AI business opportunity and MTH a way out for you guys showing you just how far we can

push it and for us starting these new things like Consulting and other things like business education is really the focus for us next year and stretching how far this AI business thing can go so first thing for us next year is to recall a lot of our team so we've got over 40 people working all around the world for us and we want to recall as many of them here I guess not even recalling them it's just calling them to this new because we've never been here before but bringing as many people from our online sort of remote team here in person so we've sent out a lot of messages saying hey look if you want to come here and try it out for a few months you can get a trial period And if you like it and you could stay if you don't like it then sorry you're going to have to leave us and we're rehire fi position so we're very serious about this being a company that we're building in person and while remote work will still be a part of it I'm sure for certain roles we need the core team here and build a culture and build a team that's actually here on personalness and that all comes back to this whole Community thing we had a great time and built made a lot of money and built businesses doing this digital Nomad thing but we always felt like there was something missing and that we eventually realized was the sense of community and so the big bit here is yes that was great that past life we had is great but can we have a better one that is based here in a real company real setting that is even better than what it was as a digital Nomad thing so that's kind of our gamble with coming back here and thus far the data is poing in and saying that yes we can get it it's already great and I think it's going to get better and better over time and from one inside AI specifically as you guys know we Niche down to uh e-learning and coaching businesses and Building Systems for those so over the past couple of months we've been really building out a super powerful and valuable system for these e-learning businesses and in 2025 we're going to be scaling that offer up so that's one of the focuses for the de team there we also got some new clients that we've signed an NBA team and also a billion dollar publicly traded company in the US that we've just signed recently at mide AI so we are being cheeky and taking on a couple General projects at the same time just CU those deals was way too juicy to to pass up and also under morning side AI we have this new Consulting division which is really the the core of the folks morning side AI in 2025 so we've got e-learning we've got a few of these General projects we're still taking on and then we're also doing the Morningside AI Consulting for businesses and that's folks from morning side AI then we have Morningside education so we've got our school Community our accelerator and all that stuff that's going great then we also are setting up a morning side education for businesses Division and that's one of really the biggest bit for us in 2025 and Beyond is that we see so there's a massive opportunity for education for consumers and for people wanting to transition to AI personally but at the end of the day businesses have got a lot more to spend they think of it as a as an investment and right now company boards are all sitting there looking at the CEO it's like what are you doing about this AI thing are you taking any steps to prepare the company for it and that's where we're trying to try to position ourselves and just car's the money you can spend money on this to just solve that problem for you just to educate yourself to educate your team to up school them more on the right things and we also do Consulting and we also can build stuff for you as well we want to be that service provider with than New Zealand and it all kind of compounds onto each other where if we get a client through business education then we can offer them Consulting Dev Services if we get them through Consulting and we can offer them education programs as well de so it's it all kind of bounces off one another and there's obviously a lot of work we need to do there for these business education programs and at the same time as we're doing all of that we're also looking to start doing inperson workshops and events and stuff to build the morning side AI brand here and warning site generally here in New Zealand so that's going to mean some like some speaking for myself which is a new thing that I'm going to have to pick up and I'll take you guys on the journey as I try to become a public speaker but that's kind of the play for us next year and I want to do a whole video breaking this down in depth probably early in the new year so that you guys get to see what we're doing and again if you want to take any notes from our Playbook and see what we're doing then of course you can that's the point of those videos and making these videos full stop and of course we're just going to keep making high quality content here on YouTube for you teaching entrepreneurs how to get into the space documenting what we're doing it's going to be a lot more documentation content of what we're doing at the office I think we're doing some really cool stuff at least from an inspirational level if you guys are trying to start one of these businesses or you want to get into AI I really want to show what we're doing behind the scenes cuz there's a lot of cool stuff going on and I think my team also deserves a bit of the spotlight too cuz you would seen me on these videos but I would be nothing without the people behind me and all the other people all over the bloody World working for us you know so I'm really excited to show you guys more of what we're doing behind the scenes on a more consistent basis as well finally just some Reflections and lessons on this changed my life and transition this is kind of it's a bit of a weird one cuz this is technically what myself and my business partner and my team have been working for well for me for six years of Entrepreneurship now is being able to come here and live a good life with nice things and have money to enjoy yourself and also be working on incredibly cool stuff with cool people you guys are my whole thing when I got into entrepreneurship was I just want to do cool sh with cool people and basically got to do it wherever I want and have complete freedom of lifestyle and we've

been able to achieve that and enjoy that for a few years and now we've kind of thrown away that part and say look that's been fun but I think there's more value for us and more life to be had if we can base ourselves out of one place so this move back has been a bit of a full circle moment as you can imagine the question for us was could we have done this without leaving New Zealand did we need to go out there and do the divy thing did we need to live like a nomad for so long could we have just stayed here the whole time and got something to this point and I think the answer is no I think all of you if you're in your hometown or your home country I mean if you're in big countries like the US just moving cities is probably going to be good enough but if you're in a smaller City or smaller country like New Zealand we had to get out to develop as people to develop our skills because more often than not when you continue to stay in one area the people around you and that you've grown up with they will always try to pull you back to the person that you were or the person they want you to be which is the same as always basically or whatever version of you is best for them you need to get out of that environment so that you can forge a new version of yourself and really solidify that character and all the values you have before you eventually come back cuz in that time 2 3 4 years you break ties with all of the people who would have ever held you back and you form new ties with new people who take you to different places then only once you've solidified your character and found a base for yourself in your career then would you even consider coming back to your Homeland or home country or home City so that you can't be pulled back to that old version of your myself while I do love being home I don't think I could have gotten to this point just by sticking around and that that's fairly common logic and common knowledge right you need to get out and experience new things and become a new person I would throw in there as well that you should consider coming back to home depending on your city or depending on your location you're from there is a lot of comfort and the familiarity of being home sure you can go to a new city like go to Madrid or you can go to like Miami or wherever you want to go and make that your home but it's to a certain degree not going to have the same sense of familiarity and so for me and my team that was definitely necessary but now I am enjoying the fruits of a bit of a more normal life stuff like consistency in my eating and gyming when you're traveling all the time it's very difficult to stay consistent in the gym even if you are in like throwing dist in stone star of gym you get different equipment in the gym and it's hard to continue to compound in those different exercises when you know there's so many little things that you give up when you're traveling all the time and you have a less stable lifestyle so for me having a home that I can really invest in making it very home lead instead of being in abbs all the time and having a consistent eating schedule with eating good food so I can make my body healthier there's all sorts of things that come with it which just having a stable base and so if you've been living a digital noad thing for a while and you're feeling a bit burnt out I get it I felt that too there are other ways to do it and hopefully what we do here in New Zealand is going to be uh a glimpse of what you guys can do with your companies eventually as well so I think that's all for this video it's been a lot to cover um we've been up to a lot and hope that you guys get to see some clips thr in here of the uh the life of the building here and I think if you guys are interested any of you are developers or you think you've got some talent that would be put to good use here at morning side I'm going to start putting the link to apply to our morning side roles in the description of all my videos so if you want to apply and you think you'd want us to come out here and start a new life in beautiful New Zealand then that's something that we're open to discussing with anyone he's got the talent and got the motivation to come here and put in some good work for us so that's all for the video I'm going to leave you now with a cute little Montage of some of the clips I haven't already put in yet and look forward to in the next two weeks or so another video that's more behind the scenes of actually not just me sitting here talking but actually the discussion is going on behind closed doors here when we're planning strategy you're seeing the Consulting team working on their projects you're seeing uh what we're building for the business education programs I want to really show you guys behind the scenes on a more regular basis so those videos are coming very soon that is all for the video guys thank you so much for watching signing out from here and all New Zealand I will see you in the 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