My practice went fully remote and stayed that way. No office that clients visit, no physical file room, no fixed desk where the work happens. Here is what actually changed, including the parts that did not go the way I expected.
The client relationship got closer, not more distant
This surprised me most. The assumption in professional services is that proximity builds trust, and that a client who cannot visit your office will feel held at arm’s length.
The opposite happened. When meetings required travel, clients saved up their questions for a quarterly visit. Now they ask when the question occurs to them. I hear about issues while they are still small and cheap, instead of discovering them three months later when they have grown.
Frequency of contact turns out to matter far more than formality of contact. Twelve short conversations a year builds a much better understanding of a business than four long ones.
Geography stopped defining the practice
I am based in Gurgaon, and it no longer determines who my clients are. A meaningful share of my work is now with NRIs and foreign-owned entities in different time zones, and there is no practical difference between advising someone in Dubai and someone across the city.
It also changed the shape of the work. When your addressable market is a city, you take whatever that city brings. When it is not, you can specialise. My practice narrowed to cross-border taxation and India entry work, which is what I am best at, and that narrowing was only possible because the client base widened.
What genuinely got harder
Reading the room. A significant part of advisory work is noticing what a client is not saying. Hesitation before answering a question about a particular transaction, discomfort when a related party comes up. Some of that survives a video call. Some of it does not, and I have learned to ask more direct questions to compensate rather than pretending the signal is still there.
The unplanned conversation. In an office, someone drops in to ask something small and it becomes the important discussion of the week. Remote work has no equivalent, because every conversation is scheduled and therefore has a stated purpose. I now deliberately hold open, agenda-free calls with clients whose situations are complex. It feels artificial and it works.
Training juniors. Learning professional judgement happens by watching someone exercise it, over and over, in unremarkable moments. That is very hard to replicate when the moments are not shared. This is the part I have not fully solved.
Boundaries. Without the physical separation of leaving a building, work expands. This took real discipline rather than good intentions.
What had to be rebuilt
Three things needed deliberate reconstruction:
- Documents. A physical file room enforces a structure. Remote work requires you to invent one and enforce it yourself. Naming conventions, a single place per client, and a rule against documents living in chat threads
- Security. Client data on laptops in different places is a different risk profile from a locked room. Encryption, access control and a considered view on where data actually sits are not optional
- Verification. Some things need a physical presence — documents that have to be seen, identity that has to be verified. There is a small set of tasks where remote does not work and a process is needed rather than a workaround
The economics
Costs fell, which was expected. The less obvious effect is on time. Commuting and office administration were consuming a substantial share of the week, and that time did not disappear — it moved into client work and into thinking, which is the part of the job that actually compounds.
The temptation is to fill the recovered time with more clients. I put some of it into fewer, deeper engagements instead, and the practice is better for it.
What I would tell another professional considering it
Do not treat remote as the office with the walls removed. It is a different operating model and it needs different habits: more frequent contact, more explicit communication, more deliberate structure behind the scenes.
Be honest about what you lose. If your practice depends on apprenticeship, or on the kind of trust built by sitting across a table, you will need to replace those deliberately rather than assume they survive the transition.
And decide early what your front door is. Mine is a WhatsApp message, which suits a practice built on direct access to the person doing the work.
Firm-level mandates — audit, transfer pricing, group structuring — run through AeTx, which operates the same way: distributed, responsive, and organised around the client rather than a building.