After a long absence from this blog, its now time to start writing on it again, now that the future looks a bit clearer.
The last few months of 2011 were quite hectic from a professional standpoint. From scouring the job market night and day to keeping the business objectives on track. I wasn’t looking forward to getting back in the rat race, but as I mentioned in earlier posts, if the property portfolio ambition was going to be my primary focus, then realistically there was no other way. Its already an ambitious plan, to achieve financial freedom in a little over three years, but the figures look promising.
So here we are almost at the end of the first month of 2012, the year of the London Olympics (to which I’ve got tickets btw). I’ve now been officially back in the rat race for a little over two months and its actually not as big a shock to the system as I thought it would be. I’m now in the public sector for the first time in my career, and funnily enough, even that’s not as big a shock as I expected it to be.
It might be the progressive nature of this particular local authority, but I was expecting a more backward looking, slow-paced, “difficult to make decisions” environment. Although you can see elements of this, its not as bad as I was expecting. Ok the IT systems are stuck in the 1990’s (I never thought I’d ever be using Novell Networks or IE6 again!), but thankfully, an upgrade is on its way.
The commute was one thing I wasn’t looking forward to originally. I’m one of the few people in London who actually rather enjoy travelling on the tube. Its a great way to get a lot of reading done, which is one thing I sorely missed when I quit a few years ago. I didn’t think this role was going to bring that back as I fully expected to drive the expected 90-minute (one-way) commute every day. However after giving the tube and train a go, it turned out to be a little quicker and much less stressful so out came those books I was halfway through reading in 2009. In fact those have already been finished and I’ve just received a fresh batch from Amazon.
On the business front, things have become a bit slower, as expected. Not as much time in the day means I’m ever more reliant on my army of VA’s, who are, for the most part, doing a fantastic job and really being proactive with the areas of responsibility assigned to them. It really is exhilarating when you can delegate work to others, especially when you’ve been so used to doing that work yourself for such a long time. Stepping back and letting someone else takeover is difficult but I knew it had to be done if my business was to go to that next level.
LRC is doing well too considering I’m not there and available 24/7 anymore, and a side-benefit to being back in the rat race has given me a level of objectivity I wasn’t expecting. Its easier to look at the big picture and see what the priorities for the business should be and make decisive decisions on how to achieve these.
Lunchtimes aren’t what they used to be when I was last employed as I fully utilise this precious time to work on websites, catch up on some internet marketing, liaising with prospective clients & my VA team on email, phone or social media and general business admin stuff. The plan is to cram three hours of business work into each weekday – I think I’m managing two at the moment, between lunch and late evenings so some improvements needed there I think.
All in all a great start to 2012 work-wise, a much busier person has come out of 2011 and is steam rolling ahead into 2012!
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