298: Mine Gold in Your People with Andrew Jernigan

https://youtu.be/FB11MbVTtlo Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads, is on a mission to redefine insurance for the globally distributed workforce. His Globally Distributed Company OS includes communication, documentation, education, and integration—core pillars that help companies effectively manage international remote teams. We learn about Andrew’s journey from banking and global living to founding Insured Nomads—a company providing health, travel, and risk coverage for digital nomads, remote teams, and expats. Andrew shares how cultural nuance, asynchronous collaboration, and documentation help build trust and cohesion in a fully remote environment. We also explore how comprehensive global health insurance differs from standard travel insurance, what digital nomads often overlook, and why benefits like mental health access, cybersecurity, and global lounge access are becoming essential for the international workforce. --- Mine Gold in Your People with Andrew Jernigan Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads, providing frictionless travel and health insurance for globally distributed teams, expatriates, digital nomads, remote workers, travelers, world schoolers for a successful international lifestyle. Andrew, welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Steve. And hi, everyone. I'm glad you're tuning in. This is going to be a fun episode. Yeah, it is going to be fun. I'm super excited about what you have up your sleeves about how you built this business, because this really a post-COVID type remotely operated business that you have, and it's a global business. You have like an interesting background. You lived in Amsterdam for several years. You're married to a Brazilian woman. I lived in Ghana, worked in England, Thailand, Emirates. Running a cross-border team is something I've been part of for a couple of decades now. So this is a valuable conversation for the way the world works today and the future of work as well. Yeah, so basically you are the target market of your company, maybe, that you call the Insured Nomads. So tell me, what is your “Why,” your personal “Why,” that inspired you to start Insured Nomads in the first place? I've lived the lifestyle, I've had the plans and then fast forward a few years, I brokered over 26 of the international companies in our space and realized, took me back to my banking days back out of university, where I was building online banking and a lot of the FinTech components many years ago. And I realized, wow, insurance needs that kind of change. Healthcare, financing of healthcare needs reform. And so brought together some leaders in the industry and said, let's do it differently. Took off to build Insured Nomads for health insurance and short term travel insurance that meets today's standards. And this was before the pandemic was declared. I was working from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. And my co-founders were oceans apart. And this was birthed and soon after pandemic was declared, and the trigger effect of that, of realizing, okay, flexible, hybrid, remote first, digital first, etc. Work dynamics have affected the world.Share on X Yeah. So basically, you fell into this. So you had this international background, then suddenly the Zoom revolution came and it made it possible, or somehow people's paradigm shifted and suddenly it was totally okay to meet on Zoom. If you can meet on Zoom, then you can meet with anyone in the world on Zoom, basically, and then suddenly the world becomes your oyster because you can hire people anywhere in the world. So how did that evolve and how do you put the blocks together? Was it hard to start to build a culture with more people? Well, prior to this, we go back in time, we had ICQ, we had AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, etc. and others in other cultures and regions of the w...