The first events on my return were Christmas in England with my family and then New Year in Scotland with friends. That's a great time of year to be starting afresh and reconnecting.
After that I settled back into my parents place - my home since childhood. It was a welcoming, familiar environment to start working in, with a few friends in the area, but I quickly felt the difference from the large and lively office and ex-pat community I'd had around me in Germany. I was a little surprised to find I enjoyed the quiet and freedom from distraction. I'd been very social before so I had expected to find it quite lonely. This is a pretty common problem for the self-employed and it can be reason enough to go back to a regular office. For me, social as I as before, that feeling took a couple of years to really be felt, by which time there were some new options opening for me.
What I did find was that I should get out of there, go on a trip and visit some friends every second weekend, or I would go stir-crazy. In fact it's an old habit to join up the dots available for any journey like the travelling salesman of proverb, visiting as many friends as possible - and when you can work on the move on a laptop, it opens up a lot more possibilities.
While I was meeting up in person with lots of old UK friends, I was still keeping my other networks going. I found I had friends (mostly through work) scattered across the globe, and the number has gone up dramatically since. Occasional emails go a long way, and whenever I'm travelling somewhere I try to think of who I know in the area and get in touch. You can only keep travelling while you keep enjoying it, and visiting friends is one of the best perks.
Facebook was a lifesaver. I think it would have been incredibly hard to go from having so many friends around me to so few, if it weren't for those status updates - hearing what they were up to, chiming in, posting about my adventures and getting responses to tell me they still cared. Months later, I realised I came to depend on it too much.
But I've always kept in touch with people. I've rarely distinguished between friends and colleagues and keeping in touch with old friends turns out to have served me well. Suddenly I realised I'd been building a wide professional network all these years, and when I asked around, there were people keen to put in a good word for me from the US to Japan. Turning those into suitable paid contracts doesn't just happen, but it's a great start.
First Diggs
I was lucky to be able to stay with family. I wanted to spend more time with them, it was where all my stuff was, it was cheap and I could leave whenever I wanted. It was a good jumping-off point.When you don't have anything lined up, it's tempting to go somewhere cheap or free - but my advice is not to ignore how productive an environment it is and the distractions that come with it. If you're focussing on just your budget, maybe you're not being ambitious enough. I paid my parents for food and bills, as I didn't want to be a freeloader. However, after a few weeks it seemed my Dad feared it would become permanent - and I thought the best way to reassure him was to get travelling.
If you're able to move back in with family and use their home as a base, that's great. Perhaps you could stay with friends in the same way. However, if it's not a clear paid arrangement, it's likely to get awkward after a while. On top of that, you're not your own master and, above all, that should be one of the goals of portability. So, unless you really find it's an ideal environment for you, don't take the easy option and stop there.
Building a Name
I had some ideas for software projects and I planned to start developing one. However, though a contact, I had got a professional online presentation lined up that would potentially put me in from of a lot of customers. I had never given a presentation to an external audience before, so this was quite a big deal. In fact it was the perfect first step for a growing series of professional presentations I would be giving in the next couple of years. I put a lot of time into it. I'll talk more about presentations in future, but the time I've put into them has perhaps remained fairly constant - my experience has ramped up, but so has the perceived value of the events. Such presentations are key to establishing value and reputation in your field. They can be a big source of stress, but my advice is to spend as much time as you need to feel fully prepared and if people tell you've already done enough - ignore them.In this case, I spent a few days preparing a software demo of the technique I was going to talk about, integrating it with a real and familiar application; and also going through slides as a dry-run. Insomnia has been a big problem for me, so it wasn't too surprising that I got very little sleep the night before, and it affected me worse than you might expect. I felt a wreck - running on coffee and adrenaline - and my performance suffered, causing a lot of umming and arring (which can ruin a presentation). However, all the preparation I'd put in meant I didn't get totally stuck. I felt I'd done a poor job and was very nervous to review the results! But it seems it was good enough - I've had a couple of clients since talk about that presentation, and I was accepted for a conference presentation later by the same team. It was indeed a good first step.
In presenting yourself as a professional, there are a few things that you need if you're going to be taken seriously. In the old days, my understanding is that this included a good business card and a phone number with an answering machine. Now, you primarily need a simple professional website.
People will occasionally find your website and contact you from nowhere. So far I have still had very few people contact be from nowhere because of my website, and most of those went nowhere - the real business all came through word of mouth. The reason for having one is mainly to provide existing contacts with basic information about you and a professional impression. Most of you will know the feeling of following a random link and deciding in half a second that the page is a waste of your time. You need to pass that test.
I'd already got hold of appropriate domain names. I'm a programmer, I could certainly have built a website myself. However, I knew very little web technology and I knew I was going to be very busy with all this moving and the presentation. And, in practice. anything takes a long time when you have no experience of it. I asked my brother to do it, who had done a little web contracting before. This helped me get something up and running.
Business cards are a nice-to-have, for occasions when you're meeting new contacts offline. Get some if you're going to conferences - simple and professional, with just your name, email and web address.
Setting Up
I also started looking for an accountant. This was something that everyone told me would be easy and I didn't believe them. Three years later, I still don't think it is easy. The problem is that everyone sees you as a very small business and so assumes you can't be much trouble. Then when you're earning dollars and euros and you're doing it in different places and people are asking for the right form to be filled out and you do not have time to figure it all out yourself… then you might find that a small local firm doesn't have the experience. I'll be discussing this in detail in a future post.I went to some local business seminars. Actually, that's an exaggeration. I intended to go to several, made it to one - very late - and when I left I was still unconvinced that I needed a "business plan", since I didn't know what I was going to do and I wanted to take advantage of whatever opportunities came why way - so how could I possibly plan? Again, the seminars included some wise words from experienced people, but their idea of a small business seemed worlds apart from my attitude to it.
I needed a simple computer to work on and I didn't actually have anything suitable. I threw something cheap from component parts at a minimum spec. At this time, I didn't have a laptop at all and I expected to need to upgrade to something quite powerful later.
Rounding up
This was a period of great optimism and motivation, with endless possibilities and wonderful opportunities ready for the taking.I was not actively looking for work, as I already had some work lined up with my old company - you'll hear more about that.
My advice is: enjoy this time. If you've been in a job for a while, or tied down some other way, take advantage of this independence, the energy of change, and the blank slate. Whatever plans you have, they can probably wait a little while, and right now you've got fewer ties, fewer concrete plans, fewer habits and commitments than you've probably had in quite a while.
It won't always be like that: you will start building them all up again and that's natural and good. But savour it while you can.
