Building a Business From the Highlands: On Being Too Far Away

How far away is too far away? For most of my working life, someone somewhere has gently suggested that I am. I have been running Madhatter Creative Co. from a scenic spot near Inverness, and when I moved here, the raised eyebrows of my industry arrived almost immediately. Surely, people said, you need to be closer to the action. Closer to the clients, the pitches, the after-work drinks where the real deals get done. You will miss out, they warned, all the way up here.

I have thought about that word a great deal over the years. Up. As though there is a natural centre of gravity somewhere south, and everything else is a slow slide away from relevance. I no longer believe it. In fact, I have come to think the distance has been one of the best things that ever happened to this business.

Let me be honest about the early days. There were moments the isolation stung. A ten-hour train to London to a meeting that could, frankly, have been an email. The quiet certainty that opportunities were happening elsewhere and I was not in the room. If you have ever built something from a place the maps treat as an afterthought, you will know the particular loneliness of it.

Finding strength in remoteness

But something shifted, and it shifted in my favour. When you cannot rely on proximity, you have to rely on being genuinely good. Nobody was going to hire Madhatter Creative CO. because they bumped into me at a networking breakfast. They hired us because the work was sharp, the thinking was clear, and we did what we said we would do. Distance strips away the shortcuts. What is left is the substance, and substance travels.

There is a myth that the best ideas come from being in the thick of things, surrounded by noise and movement and other clever people bouncing off one another. I understand the appeal. But some of the clearest thinking I have ever done has come from a walk along a quiet loch with nobody to interrupt me. The Highlands give you room. Room to think a problem all the way through instead of reaching for the first plausible answer. Room to notice what actually matters to a client rather than what the industry has decided should matter this quarter. When you are not chasing the herd, you can see where the herd is going, and often that it is going the wrong way.

The world caught up

The world caught up with us, too. When the pandemic sent everyone to their spare rooms and kitchen tables, I did not blink. I had been working this way for years. The tools that were suddenly essential for everybody else were simply how Madhatter Creative Co. had always run. It turned out the future of work looked a lot like a small values-led agency in the north of Scotland, quietly getting on with it.

I am not selling you a fantasy. Building a business from somewhere remote asks things of you. You have to be deliberate about connection. You have to travel when travel matters and resist it when it does not. You have to build trust across a screen and mean it. And you have to make peace with the fact that some doors will stay closed simply because you are not physically leaning on them. That is real, and pretending otherwise would be daft.

The remote work advantage

But here is what I would say to anyone reading this from their own too-far-away corner of the world, wondering whether they need to move closer to succeed. You do not. The thing you think is holding you back may well be the thing that sets you apart. Clients remember the agency that thinks differently, that is not soaked in the same assumptions as everyone else, that answers the phone with a bit of weather in its voice and a bit of space in its head.

So plant yourself where you can do your best work, not where the map tells you the action is. Be so good that geography becomes a footnote. And every so often, step outside, look at the hills, and remember that being far away from the crowd is precisely how you end up seeing further than they do.