Qualiteers Blog: An Anniversary of sorts

It was exactly one year ago that I started to realistically dream about becoming self-employed. I still remember how I wrote an email to Holger who I though would know all about self-employment in Germany. Well, it turned out that his wife Dörte (pronounced "dirty") knew even more. She wrote a long email as reply and I tried my best to understand the German terms and conditions.
I drew a mind map combining the information on the email with what little knowledge I had at the time. Here's the mind map, I've kept it. I like to store things, I have a hard time throwing anything away. Well, not anything, but things and papers that might come in handy one day. Those I won't easily part with.

The mind map was a basis for our further discussion over a few beers. I don't remember too much from that meeting, but luckily Holger was making notes. Right from the beginning we talked about the possibility of becoming a freelancer (Freiberufler) but the other forms of enterprises were also considered during the past year. However, it seems to be simplest to start as a freelancer and see how everything goes and adapt accordingly. The long-term vision is to have a real company with skilled trainers presenting the course I'm doing right now.

The half-serious joke about getting rich, I invented about a year ago goes like this: "The further you are from actual work, the more money you make. You won't get rich by working. If you teach how to work, you're already better off. But if you train people who train other people how to work better, you have it really good. Imagine if you owned a company that has trainers who train people who train other people how to work better...That's my goal!"

I remember talking with Theo, who still owned his own Internet service provider company at the time. He gave me good advice on tax issues, although I haven't been able to use any of it yet. The tax issues will become actual pretty soon, though. I hope I remember Theo's and Nicki's advice.

"The road seems to know when straighten right out" sings Mary Chapin Carpenter, who has been my new favorite singer along with Billy Joel last year. Both of them have been around for ages, but I found them only recently. Great songs, magnificent lyrics. Music and especially music that lifts me up and makes me think is extremely important to me. I like song lyrics that express nuances with so little effort. One line speaks volumes in the best case.

Dominik, who was a contractor at Nokia and one of the two guys who were needed to replace Jem. Jem was a 55-year old contractor, who didn't return from his summer holiday in England. He had died quite suddenly. This was already in 2004, so I must be over it already. Or was it 2003? You see that my head is not for remembering timelines or old memories, it is hopefully focused on always learning new things. Anyway, Dominik has been a contractor for a long time and he also runs an internet grocery store with his wife. He had some good advice to give.

The other guy who replaced Jem for a while, before quitting Nokia and finding a more challenging job, was Antek. Antek is real cosmopolitan, he had ties to at least Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands. He had worked everywhere and to me who has had exactly two employers, his cv looked confusingly long. I didn't know what to think about him, did he have concentration or commitment problems, or did he just know himself really well? I've often thought that "things are not ok, I wonder if I should do something about it", only to notice that I haven't done anything. Sometimes time fixes things. And sometimes it is time to fix things.

In early 2005 I knew it was time to fix the situation. By August, Nokia had graciously arranged an outplacement coaching, which I selfishly abused to get to know myself better (I completed a few psychological tests, which don't normally belong to the coaching) and to write my cv properly. Dr. Hollmann was a great help, who supported me in getting ready for the first big deadline, the conference on my last working week. I still have to smile when I think how I left Nokia. On the last week of September, my last working week at Nokia, I took my last week of holiday and went to a software quality conference. Software quality, which would have fit perfectly with my job description. Software quality, which is also my future. I went to the conference on my own cost, because I knew nobody in their right mind would have paid me for it if I couldn't even report the results back. I didn't even ask, maybe I should have ;-)

And what did I do on the week before the conference? I went to Southwood, UK to train people. Many people said that had they known that their employment would end at the end of the month, they wouldn't have done anything beyond the mandatory. I, however, saw it as an opportunity to build critical mass inside the company. Mass, which could become handy in the future. And now it has. I have high hopes that it still will. The 200 or so people that I have personally trained are a large body of evidence for the quality of my training and the method i teach.

In the early fall, I hired an enterprise advisor (Unternehmensberaterin) to help with the details of founding a self-employed existence. She has been a huge help. She is probably the only reason I didn't get a three-month waiting period for my unemployment benefits, which would have delayed my founding a few months. There has been many things to organize for me but without Mrs. Jünkering I couldn't have done it.

I said to myself a year ago that if I manage to start a company in Germany, I can be proud. There is so much to go through and most of it in a foreign language, even. Now I'm really close to this goal and I am proud. But the challenges never end. "There's always one more thing to do" and "That golden bridge is just around the bend" sings Chris Rea in "That's What They Always Say" and he's nailed it.

One of the people who affected my decision positively is my father, whose becoming an entrepreneur has given my the courage to try it myself. Although nobody knows what my father really does, he must be doing ok. He's been doing it for some years now.

Here's another mind map showing my capabilities. I haven't totally forgotten my dreams about becoming a Seven-Habits trainer but it seems to be out of focus at the moment. But that seems appealing to me. I'm sure I would learn useful things myself. Maybe there's a hole in my logic currently. I'm teaching and therefore I learn. But if I'm teaching code inspection and not programming myself, how are the things I learn going to be useful and therefore interesting for me? I'm sure they help me in becoming a better trainer, which should be enough. Huh, no hole in logic found!