Last month I was lucky enough to meet another person who I’ve been working with for approaching a decade but who I have only known over the phone and via email. This time it was Anne Jordan who has been with ClickNwork for about seven years – you can read a little about her here; more recently she provided some thoughts about her work with us and other companies in a blog entry.

Anne seems to be a poster child for remote working. She could easily bag a high-powered job in London running a global research team or similar (she’s done that sort of thing before, with experience at top companies, including Goldman Sachs, Mitchell Madison Group and Marakon Associate), but she puts more store in managing her own career and time so she can pursue things she’s passionate about.

She has a portfolio approach, juggling a range of projects from a handful of clients that include regular assignments and ad hoc tasks all managed so that she has enough time to focus on something that lights her fire – researching Lady Colin Campbell (1857-1911), who she recently wrote a book about that she is now promoting.

Working remotely means she has more time in her day (no commuting, meetings, office politics…) and since she is a researcher she is able to work as effectively from her home as an office. Anne lives in Devon, close to her family and working at-distance also means she can invest time in this rather than work colleagues.

Our meeting was unfortunately short – I was en route to Cornwall – but it was enjoyable all the same and it surfaced some things we have in common, like an interest in how people are making remote careers work for them; how research provision is changing; why existing newsletters are flawed and so on, and I expect it will lead to longer conversations down the line. These are things that don’t as easily surface in virtual relationships and giving them a chance to surface is a real benefit of actually meeting up.

Oh, and the research on the side? We met at Darts Farm, an award winning organic and local food retailer named ‘Best Local Food Retailer’ in BBC Radio Four’s Food and Farming Awards. Some of the work we do is tracking food trends and seeing great local food retailers is great field research.

We’re on the lookout for an experienced report writer who can help us with our growing work load. Our first port of call for this sort of thing is ClickNwork but that route hasn’t worked this time so we’ve been running ads in a number of places. In case you or someone you know might be interested, here it is:

“Business360 is a New York based company that for over ten years has been delivering a range of professional services to leading Fortune 100 corporations, advisory firms and many smaller companies focused on niche areas.

Our work centers on research, writing, analysis and competitive intelligence generally.

We are not a typical company – we are entirely virtual and everyone works remotely from home. We often have many people working on large projects from many different countries and it can take good management skills to pull things together and deliver a quality product.

We are looking for someone to help manage some of our projects, which will include coordinating work inputs by our researchers/writers/analysts as well as helping to prepare reports for clients. In time we’d expect there to be some client contact and management but no selling (our issue is doing the work we have, not getting more).

We don’t have set requirements for your background but given the research and written skills required in much of our work we’d look positively on people that have a lot of experience in preparing client-ready reports and presentations. Over the years we have had good results working with people that came from consulting companies, from banks as analysts, or from a range of corporate positions as market/consumer insight researchers.

This is not a full-time position but contract work that will start on an ad hoc basis, although if things go well it should grow and could be full-time if you wanted. Also, we do not have a fixed pay rate. Instead it will depend on the project and will range between $40-120/hour, being determined by a number of factors such as complexity, urgency, duration etc. Generally, there will be more work at the lower rates and in time we would hope it rises as you take on more complex and demanding roles.

The range of work varies greatly with the style and format required changing for each client, but typical projects include:

• Reviewing and preparing competitive intelligence reports on companies and about their earnings performance
• Managing and editing a range of competitor profiles on leading companies that bring together financial data as well as market and category insights
• Assembling compelling consumer insight documents about consumer trends from a disparate range of multi-language sources

We’d prefer someone in the US and ideally close to New York but in principle we are open to promising candidates wherever they are.

If you’re interested in this opportunity, please reply to this ad, attaching a recent resume, notes on what experience you have preparing competitive intelligence/analytical/consumer insight material as well as some samples of your work (sanitized if need be). It’s also important for us to understand why you want to work from home and whether you have any other work-from-home income streams.”

(If you read this and want to reply, please reach us via our contact page – thanks)