What happens when you sell a 100-employee company at 28 and decide freedom matters more than following the traditional playbook? Lauren Fernandez didn’t just dream about working from anywhere; she made it a reality. But this isn’t your typical “digital nomad success story.” It’s the unfiltered truth about building a recruiting business while navigating serious health crises, redefining what success actually means, and discovering that your best life might look nothing like what everyone expects.
Lauren is the founder of Palm Coast Staffing, a legal recruiting practice she built while crisscrossing the U.S. in an RV. After selling her first company with 100+ employees across three states, she and her husband considered buying a house…, but they decided to buy an RV instead.
In this interview, Lauren shares her three-section daily system that creates freedom through discipline, why she believes relationship-building beats cold calling, and how she’s structured her business to adapt to unexpected challenges.
Episode Outline and Highlights
- [2:51] How selling rocks as a kid led to building and selling a 100-employee company by age 28.
- [8:17] What hiring over 1,000 people taught Lauren about matching success to the individual.
- [13:07] The moment they rejected buying a house and chose an RV and recruiting business instead.
- [15:10] The unglamorous reality behind digital nomad life that Instagram doesn’t show you.
- [18:23] Lauren’s three-section daily planning system that works anywhere (zero tech required).
- [23:19] Her anti-cold calling approach: “find people where they are” philosophy.
- [27:59] Why returning to the same conferences year after year builds unshakeable credibility.
- [34:42] How Lauren combats recruiting industry distrust through authentic relationship building.
- [38:25] Maintaining business momentum while navigating her husband’s serious health diagnosis.
- [44:52] Why entrepreneurial lows aren’t as devastating as you think (and highs aren’t as high).
On Building a Business That Serves Your Life
One of the most powerful moments in Lauren’s journey came after selling her successful company. Instead of scaling bigger, she chose differently. When her husband was diagnosed with myositis and developed stage three heart failure, their flexible business model proved its worth.
In Lauren’s words, “Success looks different for different people at different times. Maybe right now you’re in the building phase and you can work 12 hours a day, seven days a week. But maybe in a few years you’ve got kids and success is having freedom to spend time with them while they’re young.”
She asks the question every agency owner should consider: “Is your company the tool to get you success, or is your company the success? Is it the means to the end or is it the end?” This mindset shift allowed them to adapt when a crisis hit, rather than watch their business collapse.
Her System for Freedom Through Discipline
Lauren’s three-section daily planning system is refreshingly simple. With nothing more than a paper planner, she breaks her day into three buckets: business development, recruiting, and operations. The sections are interchangeable, preventing one disruption from derailing the entire day.
“When you run your own business, there’s a lot in the other section,” Lauren explains. This system allowed her to continue placing candidates and winning clients even during week-long hospital stays with her husband. The key insight is that discipline in planning creates the freedom to adapt when life demands it.
