A Year In Redwood

It has been a busy time since I last wrote….

When we moved here 6 years ago, I know that there were friends in Dublin who thought we were stark raving mad, especially as we had no jobs to move to.  I have been extremely lucky though.  I have been working solidly for the past six years, up to the end of August this year.  It was strange adjusting to being the employee, rather than the employer, but you know you can get very used to going to work, doing your job, getting paid, and having no worries about work out of hours and getting holidays!  I spent the last five years working with County Enterprise Boards – firstly, with Offaly County Enterprise Board (4 years) and then the last 8 months with Tipperary North Enterprise Board.

I had had contact with Fingal Enterprise Board when we lived in Dublin, and when we ran the National Diving School.  They had in fact been a great help to us way back then.  So here I was on the other side of the desk, advising people on how to start, develop and progress their business.  And it is also a great way to meet people!  I ran the business network in Offaly Enterprise Board for 2 years so that definitely gave lots of scope to meet people.

Now, of course, I am back on the job hunting trail, and I am looking at various options at the moment.  Since I finished up with North Tipp Enterprise Board in August, I have taken on a course in Entrepreneurship & Strategic Planning at the National College of Ireland.  Both Sarah and I have been doing the course.  Again this was a new learning experience in more ways than one way.  The ‘academics’ of starting a business are rather different.  As part of the course we had to produce a Business Plan – all very well…. and again, from my previous job, it would not have been a problem for me to produce a business plan for someone else, but now I had to do one for myself…. nightmare!  I have so many ideas going about in my head, the first hurdle was to decide on a topic!  Eventually with 10 days to go to the deadline, I decided to write about our Pigs & Pork – Oldfarm Heritage Pork – of course!  Another idea I have is to set myself up as a Virtual Assistant, specializing in e-Marketing for small business owners – you know developing ezines and website content for the busy entrepreneur.  So many of the small business owners I know just don’t have the time or the inclination to keep their websites updated, or to build a marketing strategy using the web.  I enjoy doing this type of work, so the plan is to build on that.  Hopefully, both of these very different ventures can in fact run together and keep me busy!

So this week I worked with a client all day Monday, attended the Offaly Network meeting on Monday night (strange doing that as a delegate rather than as the organiser).  Spent Tuesday and Wednesday literally tied to the computer in order to meet the 5 o’clock on Wednesday deadline for submission.  Got it done with an hour to spare!  Don’t think it was my most inspirational Business Plan but I figure it will be a work in progress and can be revisited when the reality starts to become more of a focus than the theory!  Thursday was catch up day, and then Friday it was off to the National Women’s Enterprise Day in Mullingar.

I have attended this for the last 3 years, and it is a good place to meet people who are starting business.  It was good this year to catch up with colleagues from other Enterprise Boards, who I hadn’t seen in months.  It was also a chance to catch up with people, like Lisa and Fiona, who I only meet at these big networking events – we should perhaps make more of an effort to meet up!

This year they had Rita Shah and Jo Fairley as guest speakers, as well as a group of 5 women who were ‘case studies’.  It was all very inspirational.

Now my challenge is to get focussed and get these two businesses up and running properly!  So this morning I was up at 7.30 writing lists of jobs to be done starting tomorrow morning!  Roll on Monday morning!