Being the best local wedding celebrant near me today doesn't mean as much as it used to in the days of the Yellowpages.
Nine years ago my long distance mentor, Seth Godin, wrote:
Some of the most important inventions of the last hundred years:
- Air conditioning, which made it possible to do productive work in any climate
- Credit cards, which enabled transactions to take place at a distance
- Television, which homogenised 150 world cultures into just a few
- Federal Express and container ships, which made the transport of physical goods both dependable and insanely cheap
- The internet, which moved information from one end of the world to the other as easily as across the room
- Cell phones, which cut the wires
If you're still betting on geography, on winning merely because you're local, I hope you have a special case in mind.
Today I and you can work from wherever our laptop and phone can take us, I'm writing this in a small town called Gunning in New South Wales, in the only cafe in town run by a former bride of mine who found me because of a blog post I wrote ten years ago. I married her and Terry about four years ago, and driving down the Hume Highway I stopped in for coffee to write this letter on my laptop.
It's nice that you might have a home office, but it means nothing to your next client.