Early Retirement & Giving Up Your Dreams

For many years I've been running a business of sorts and trying desperately at times to make a serious success of the business idea I'm working on.
The thing is that there was always something "in the way" of my success or situations that prevented me from doing well or making more money from the business idea.
It was in the late 1980's that I first ventured into business for myself having been made redundant from a local printing company in Brighton England I decided to to buy my own printing press and start to sell the services to other local businesses.
I set up the small press in my garage and started to approach businesses in the high streets around asking if they needed any printing work done. If you knock on enough doors you'll eventually get the answer you are looking for and so the work started to come in.

I worked on my own but had a family to support so it was a tough life. However business grew and I started to get more work and found myself doing the work more that being out selling the service; inevitably the work died off a bit so I had more time to be out selling and the work increased. This rollercoaster ride business continued for a while until I landed a huge job worth £5000, in 1988 that was a massive amount of money but it was to be the end of the business.

In the very late 80's the recession took hold and things went bad on the cash flow front while trying to support the expenses of taking on that £5000 order. The bank pulled the plug on my overdraft and so effectively closed the business with me owing a lot of money.

This failure put me in good stead for the future and as time passed I eventually regained some financial good standing and was working in the late 1990's for a telecoms company on a rather handsome salary of about £70,000 a year. A start-up company with backing from British Gas. Once again though, due to the startup being sold off, redundancy came around and I found myself once again feeling rather let down by employment status and wanted to branch out again.

While working for a small web company I teamed up with a sales guy who told be he could sell technology products and services to the public if I could make the services work.
THis was music to my ears and we went forward together with me setting up broadband services for rural communities and the sales guy selling to the locals in the rural communities we were setting up in.
Well it turned out that selling these much needed and excellent services was much more challenging than the sales guy had imagined and the business was in some serious financial problems. It went broke and I was once again left with an enormous debt to pay off (£40,000 loan on credit cards!).

Luckily my skills as a project manager came in and I was able to set myself up as a contractor and worked for some of the big names in the IT industry such as BBC, Seimans Business Services, Capita etc. The contracting rates allowed me to pay off the debts quickly and I was then left with a reasonable bank balance but forced to stay away from home during the week and only see my wife for a short time at weekends.
After much thought I decided that I would not work away from him,e any longer but would once again set up in business and look for clients locally.
I am a keen and pretty good photographer and so set up as a photography business which made a little money but because of my IT background I started to get involved with photography clients websites and search engine optimisation / ongoing marketing. This came about because they'd found my photo business on Google and wondered how I'd got to the top of google for the search term "Brighton Photographer". Well it was easier back in 2007 !

Time moved on and my SEO / Website business was starting to become established but it's been a very long and hard road over the last 5 years to get to a point where our income was starting to meet our expenses each month. But at least my decades long dream of having a successful business was at last coming true and I'd started to manage the work and outsource much of it rather than trying the ":get the work" and then "do the work" and have that "SawTooth" sales profile from the 1980's that so crippled my printing business.

My wife's (Wendy) parents were getting older and needed quite a bit of attention and Wendy was spending about 3 days a week looking after them. And making sure that they were coping along with that we'd visit on a Saturday afternoon.

Wendy's father became ill with a reoccurrence of lymphoma and died about six months later. This period meant that we had to virtually live at their house and while I am pretty flexible this did make things hard when it comes to running a business.

Following this Wendy's mother was not in a fit state to live by herself and so she moved to our flat in Brighton and my business office became her bedroom.
My office desk was moved to the lounge and we managed to work with this situation for a while but eventually we decided that running a business just about breaking even in terms of providing for us, in such a stressful environment was not a good thing for any of us and so in December 2014 we made the decision to close the website and SEO business and I notified all of the client in December that services would cease in January 2015.

SInce then both Wendy and I have looked after her mother who became increasingly unwell with dementia setting in towards the end when she passed away ion January 2016.

The previous few years had taken it's toll on us both and we did not feel like we had it in us to "start again" with any sort of work of business and so we decided to take a year off to travel and with the help of Wendy's mum's inheritance cash we set about moving into semi-retirement and going on our travels around the UK.

Fast forward to today and we're both working at a caravan site in the North West of England and living full time in a newly purchased motorhome we call Jasmin Mya. We're happy working together and have plenty of free time to venture out and see the rest of England.

For me, the lack of a business process around me is a deep regret and one that I will likely carry to my grave. I suppose it's a matter of how I have been conditioned to view success and feeling like I have failed at several businesses and been made redundant from 4 other businesses does tend to instil a deep sense of failure.

I now consider myself retired and have all but given up on my dream of having a thriving business that pays me a salary and dividend distributions. At least I have a happy life and a good wife to see me through to the end.

Life is not all bad :)