I Built a Remote Practice So I Could Work From Anywhere. Then I Rented an Office.
A special edition of The Loophole on growth, risk, and proximity
When I was called to the bar in January 2025, I was in New Zealand.
My husband and I had planned the trip as a combination of things: celebrating the end of my articling (and turning down a job offer to stay), visiting our son and daughter-in-law, who were living there at the time, and helping Rick with content and research for his birding work.
And in the middle of Middle-earth, standing on the other side of the world with my law degree and no desk to report to, I made a decision about what kind of lawyer I wanted to be.
The kind whose practice revolves around her life, not the other way around.
Business law made sense for that. Transactional work, contracts, entertainment and IP for creators, influencers and artists. The kind of files where you can be sitting in a café in Costa Rica or a cabin in Montana and still serve your clients well, with no court appearances and no single city tying you down.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve worked across more U.S. states than I can count, a handful of provinces, and parts of Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean.
If working on planes, trains, automobiles, and a boat counts as remote work, then that’s the way I define it.
It has been, genuinely, wonderful.
And then a few weeks ago, I signed a lease.
Enjoying the last moments in my little home office.
The office is a corner unit in Picton with six southeast-facing windows, soundproof walls, a cozy kitchenette, and some of my favourite local businesses right outside the door.
The practice is still fully virtual, and nothing about how I work with clients has changed. For local clients, the office is open by appointment, with the lease starting May 1st.
Around the same time, I brought on my first full-time employee, because as the practice expanded, my capacity to work on the business rather than just in it started to shrink, and the timing of both felt less like a coincidence and more like the moment I’d been building toward without quite realizing it.
Learning to trust my No
Getting to this office was not a fast process.
Once I decided to look for a space, I pressed my face up against windows, zoomed in on countless photos on Realtor.ca, sneaked around my town at odd hours, and made appointments with landlords I was pretty sure I’d disappoint.
I’d walk into office spaces, look around, and walk out feeling nothing, no spark, no sense of “I could work here.” I did that probably half a dozen times before I walked into one and knew as soon as the light from the windows hit my face.
Six southeast-facing windows, blinding natural light, quiet, a kitchenette, and good neighbours right outside.
I didn’t need a list or a pros-and-cons breakdown. I just knew.
I think that’s a skill you build over time in business: learning to trust the no as much as the yes, and learning that if something isn’t right, the right answer is just to walk away.
That goes for most decisions: a hire, a client, a contract, and apparently, a lease.
Taking risks builds trust.
Signing a lease and bringing on an employee in the same season are commitments that put real things at stake, my finances, my reputation, my relationships. It’s terribly risky, honestly.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I think risk and trust are more connected than we think. The only way I can become someone my clients trust, that my team trusts, that my community trusts, is to put myself on record.
To be a good tenant and take care of a space that isn’t mine. To show up on the day I said I would. To keep the promises I make to everyone who comes into the orbit of this business, and in a small town with people watching, none of that is abstract. It’s how I will build trust, and trust is all we have in business.
Proximity is the fuel that grows your business.
One thing I can’t stop thinking about as I prepare to move into my new space is the role of proximity in business decisions.
One of the real reasons I said yes to this office is because of where it is and who’s around it, because I want to be surrounded by people who are building things, doing good work, and raising my standards just by being nearby.
Proximity shapes every aspect of the decisions I make. It’s been about choosing my friend group with intention, inviting the right people for coffee, being selective about which masterminds I join, and deciding whose content I spend time with and whose I scroll past.
All of those are business decisions, and they shape what you think is possible and who you become.
Expect the unexpected.
I designed this practice around freedom.
What I didn’t expect was that freedom, after a while, would lead me straight back to my own town, to a corner office with good light and good neighbours, ready to put down roots.
Back to our regular programming next week.
Build smart,
Sonya
P.S. Will I still travel? Do hobbits live in hobbit-holes?
Awe, you didn’t come to NZ to see us? Good thing, since we spent most of our time recovering from tummy bugs & trying to catch up to you all! 😆 Congrats on your new space.