Slow Travel With Family, Without Quitting Your Job: An Interview with Marshall Nyman
NyMo & Co's founder talks building a location independent lifestyle business, slow family travel, and designing work around life instead of the other way around.
Nomad life doesn’t have to mean selling everything you own and living out of a suitcase. That’s one version of it, for sure. But I like to think it’s a mentality rather than one arrangement, and it turns up in a lot of shapes. I travel about nine months of the year and still have a home base in Ontario. Marshall Nyman takes his wife and three young children abroad for two months every summer and runs his agency, NyMo & Co., from wherever they are.
I first met Marshall more than a decade ago, when I was contracting for the company he worked at. We caught up recently to talk about what he’s built since.
When people tell him his life is amazing but they could never make it work, he says, the reason is almost never money. He’s got the numbers to win that argument and has won it many times.
It’s the work that’s keeping them stuck. Somebody else controls where they are and when they need to be at a desk.
That’s the part I wanted to highlight here, because it’s the same thing I hear a lot of you are up against.
It Started as Twelve Days
The first trip they took as a family was twelve days. Then it was longer, and then longer again, until it became full summers. Nobody sold the house or quit anything. The current version of their life is what several years of slightly bigger versions of the same trip turned into.
That evolution and the work that went into it is the part most people skip past when they hear the headline. “Two months in Asia! You’re so lucky.” In reality, it was closer to a habit that kept getting extended — one fuelled by both discipline and the willingness to do the thing people might have said was crazy.
Why the Money Argument Is the Easy One
Two months abroad can come in under two months of camps and childcare at home. Marshall has run that math for people and says he’s won the argument many times.
He also books it well — five economy seats back from Asia on Singapore Airlines at 44,000 miles each, against five to eight thousand dollars cash one way, using points earned on work travel during the year.
The employer version has no equivalent answer. If a boss says no to different hours or a few weeks somewhere else, there’s nothing to counter with.
He thinks companies misjudge this badly — that letting someone stay an extra week and stay slightly engaged returns a better employee than pulling them home on a PTO calendar.
Building a Side Gig Out of What He Already Knew
Marshall started what became NyMo & Co. as a side project while he was employed. His first client paid $500 a month. He says the business has been profitable every month since, because it was a service business and the only real cost was his own time.
He didn’t set out to run an agency. The pandemic pushed e-commerce brands toward outside help, the work arrived, and by the time he went full-time the business had revenue and people on payroll. He called a few friends expecting them to tell him to wait.
They all asked what he was waiting for.
He runs it as a lifestyle business rather than a growth-at-all-costs company — pushing his team to take more time off, while admitting he’s not especially good at unplugging himself. There’s no five-year vision; he moves forward step-by-step on short-term goals, with a preference for being where he actually is.
What’s in the Full Conversation
Our full conversation is below for members, along with the funding side Marshall’s own answer skips — how people cover a long stretch away without his points balance or his agency. In the interview, he gets specific about:
How the family structures a two-month trip — where they bounce around, where they slow down, and why the last four weeks work differently than the first four
Why hotels beat Airbnbs with young kids, and what that trade costs
The actual working schedule: what a 12-hour time difference does to his day, and where he sets up his laptop once the kids are asleep
Why he deliberately travels without an eSIM
How he took the agency from side income to full-time without outside investment, and what he’d tell someone starting now
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