So here are plain answers to the things people ask me before they hire, starting with the unglamorous ones. They tend to matter more than anything on a CV, and they're usually the reason a remote hire works out or doesn't.
01
Will you be online when I need you?
Yes. I work to your timezone, not mine. You tell me your core hours and I'm at my desk for them, starting at the same time each day so you can rely on it.
If I'm ever going to be unavailable, you hear about it days in advance, never on the morning itself.
02
Is your internet, power and equipment reliable?
Yes, and I've built it so that no single failure takes me offline. There are two separate internet connections and up to four independent power sources, so if one goes down, another takes over straight away. Here's the setup, measured rather than guessed:
- Main line
- 5G router, about 139 Mbps down and 40 Mbps up
- Backup
- Mobile connection, about 144 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up
- Power
- Solar and a generator, with up to four backups in total
- Laptop
- HP EliteBook, Intel Core i5, 16GB RAM, Windows 11 Pro
03
Can I trust you with logins and customer data?
Access is something you lend me, and I treat it that way. I take logins through a password manager or whatever secure method you already use, never pasted into chat or email, and two-factor authentication stays switched on.
I'm happy to sign an NDA before day one. When we finish working together, I hand everything back and confirm it in writing.
04
How good is your written English?
You're reading it. English is my working language, and I've spent five years writing professionally, including customer emails and sales copy for American brands.
The messages I send on your behalf read like a person wrote them, because one did. You won't be rewriting my replies before they go out.
05
Am I going to have to manage you closely?
No. Give me your SOP, or let me write one while I learn the task. I ask my questions up front, in one message, instead of dripping them into your day one at a time.
After the first couple of weeks, most clients stop checking my work, which is the whole point of hiring someone.
06
What happens when you get something wrong?
You hear it from me first, on the same day. I'll tell you what happened, what I've already done to fix it, and what I've changed so it doesn't happen again.
The mistakes that end working relationships are the ones a client has to discover for themselves, so I make sure you never have to.
07
Do you know the tools we already use?
Probably. I work in Asana, ClickUp, Notion, Slack, Google Workspace, GoHighLevel, HubSpot and most of the major email platforms every week. The full list is further down.
If yours isn't on it, I'll learn it on my own time before your first invoice, not on yours.
08
Can we try it before committing?
Yes, and I'd suggest it. We start with a small paid batch of real work from your business, so you can judge the quality, the communication and the turnaround before signing up to anything longer.
If it isn't right, you've lost very little, and you'll know within a week rather than a month.
