A while back I blogged that it was likely I'd be leaving my current employment. In two weeks, that is going to come to pass. I'm fortunate that I'm leaving with a decent redundancy package and it's becoming quite a liberating experience! I also had to manage many redundancies in my team which is never easy, although I think it could have been a lot harder if I had not kept my team informed of what was going on throughout the whole process. If I had one piece of advice to leaders in similar circumstances it would be that you can never do enough communication and treating people like adults is critical.
The redundancy package has enabled me to take a completely different view on what to do next. I don't have to immediately go and get a new job, instead I'm looking at higher risk opportunities that, if they work out, will have higher rewards. The opportunity I'm most looking forward to working on is a web business start-up. The founder is a friend of mine and I'm going to join him in getting the venture funded and in to profit by year 2, well that's what our business plan says anyway. I'd love to tell more at this stage, but it's at a delicate stage and it'd be a shame to alert potential competitors to what we're doing! What I will say though is it's a massive step-change going from a big corporate to an unfunded start-up, but one that is rewarding in a whole different way.
On top of that, I'm creating my own business that aims to provide business partnership services in IT and HR to SMEs and 3rd Sector businesses. That business is called GreenBOLD, and I've already got the website up and running thanks to Donna at DFDesign. Now, I need to find out what CEOs/Owners/FDs/CFOs in £10m-£100m organisations think of the proposiation, contacts gratefully received!
So, I suspect over the coming months, I may have plenty to blog about. I've never sought funding before (we're looking for £500k), I've never started my own business before, I've never been out of corporate life for more than 2-3 months since I graduated, I've never worked for myself before or in a very small organisation, I've never taken this level of risk before... The future has never looked more bright and more bleak all at the same time ever before and quite frankly I'm loving it!
