Editing on a phone is quirky, so further detail: the AdWeek profile lists him as being in Germany. Also, of all the cities in the USA, Fitness SF was unable to find a designer they liked in San Francisco? Please.
Which means they're less likely to be jaded, have up-front fees, verbose contracts and installation payments. As is obvious, in this case, when he talks about having 6 months of unpaid work.
1. Keep money in the local economy. 2. Build a local network. 3. Have face to face meetings to get your ideas across more quickly - whiteboarding, seeing facial reactions to comps, hands-on testing, etc.
I've done remote work, and I've done work with clients in my local area. There's reasons for both, but most clients I work with want local, or at least want the ability to meet face to face on occasion. The few that didn't want to (or even declined attempts to meet f2f) either skipped out on their bill, or were wanting extremely commodity services (install wordpress on my server, fix this javascript error, etc).