11. Where do we find out about all the ins and outs of setting up a business?

Your bank is a good starting point for information about setting up in business. It should have information leaflets on the subject. Better still, have a look at its website. Many have comprehensive guides to starting up and maintaining small businesses, with helpful hints as to where to start, where and how to get financial support, and exactly what to include in a business plan. Local enterprise councils are a good source of information too. They will often help with writing a business plan and with finding out about any grants available for your new business.

There are also the subsidies available for many rural properties and businesses. Try contacting the Rural Enterprise Scheme which aims to breathe life back into the countryside of England and Wales and may help you set up a small business. Or contact the Rural Development Service which pays grants for planting woodland. There is a publication available from Lloyds TSB which sets out all the subsidies and grants on offer from the various organizations. These may not all be business orientated but they may help you make your property work for you in other ways. Be warned though: the necessary red tape and business plans can be challenging and you will be ceding control to a certain extent. You will have to follow the rules laid down by the awarding of the grant – if you are claiming a subsidy for restoring farm buildings, for example, then the use of certain materials will be stipulated.

12. What are the key differences in moving from the town to the country?

Some of these are obvious, though perhaps not until you actually arrive in your new home. When we moved down to Wiltshire, our house was outside the village, down a country lane with no street lighting. We moved in winter and as the removal van left, it started to get dark. Unfortunately we hadn’t noticed that there were hardly any central ceiling lights in the new house. We had to search the boxes frantically to find table lamps as the house grew darker and darker. Later that night, when I was alone in the house, the doorbell rang. As it was pitch black outside I must confess that I didn’t dare answer the door. I later found out that a neighbour had called to welcome us to the village. The darkness can take you by surprise, but you quickly get used to it. It has a real plus side when you see the beauty of the sky on a starlit night – something you can never fully appreciate in a town.

Distances are greater in the country. But travelling to the supermarket through several miles of countryside is no burden – much more pleasurable than sitting in traffic in town. Visits to the cinema, to a restaurant or pub, to the theatre or to visit friends may take longer, or may not when you think of all the traffic you had to negotiate in the city. At least the journeys are more relaxing.

If you intend to carry on a business, you may have to be willing to travel, but if so, a wide range of wage-earning activities are possible. With the national network of flights growing year on year, it is becoming easier to travel around the country. Living up a small glen 50 miles south-west of Inverness, Chris can catch the early ‘red eye’ flight to Gatwick and be in a meeting in London by 10.00 am. He has to get out of bed around 04.30 in order to drive to the airport, so he wouldn’t want to do it every day, but it does open up possibilities. He has run training events using video-conferencing facilities and provides coaching/mentoring services by e-mail and telephone link-ups, while obviously still travelling to provide some workshops and seminars face to face. The options are wide and varied but need not be too time consuming if scheduled sensibly to maintain that work/life balance.

As to life on a day-to-day basis, there are so many advantages to living in the country. Hanging out the washing on a frosty day, I once saw a fox lope unafraid over the fields behind the house. Watching from my sitting room windows I have seen the occasional deer walk along the road down at the lochside. The bird life is wonderful and we have an owl sitting in the rafters of the barn on many a night. If we travel a few miles westwards we can see the stags feeding at the roadside. You are much closer to nature and the seasons in the country – the first snow on the mountains, the sweep of the sun across the hillside and, of course, the west winds blowing fiercely in the winter months.

13. How can I turn a hobby into a living? How do I prepare?

In order to make a living, you need to be businesslike. You must sort out a business plan and have a clear idea of the services or products you are going to offer and how you are going to market and sell them. There’s little point in building up large stocks of paintings, pottery pots or wooden carvings if nobody is buying them and you are therefore not receiving any income. If you think you’re already proficient at producing the items to a professional standard, take objective opinion and advice on this from non-relatives, as there is some really amateurish tourist tat around on the shelves. You may decide that you could benefit from some more input, perhaps through a course or by speaking to other artists. Reach the point where you’re proud of your product or service when you see it displayed side by side with the competition.

You don’t necessarily have to extend a hobby directly or continue a previous profession or skill working from your home/office base. Sometimes a little lateral thinking is required.

• Interested in local history and keen on driving? Buy a people carrier and set up as a specific tour guide.
• A talented musician? Start a band and teach others to play.
• Interested in writing? Produce articles for publishing in local and national newspapers and magazines or find a publisher for your first novel.
• A natural cook? Open a small restaurant or offer your services to cook for private parties. Or extend it further and become a function organizer yourself.
• Like children? Set up a nursery, creche or babysitting service.

The list could go on and on. Don’t settle for the first idea – think ‘outside the box’ a little. Check out what is already happening in your chosen area. Could you provide a better service or product? If you spot a gap in the market, could you fill it? What types of marketing are used in the area? Are you aware of any other ways to market which might catch the local eye as they are new and innovative?

The key question you need to ask yourself is: ‘how am I going to market my service or product?’ Finding an answer to this will help you refine exactly what your product or service should be and give you indicators of facilities and equipment which you will need in order to provide it. Objective discussions regarding expected quality standards, packaging and advertising will help to sharpen up your product or service and you will be well on your journey of change from hobbyist to professional.

14. How do I choose the correct level of downshifting?

This is obviously a personal question and answers will vary dramatically. I would really have to throw the question back to you to find out the most appropriate level. It depends on a range of considerations:

• the minimum income that you require;
• whether you want to focus on one activity or multi-task;
• how much free time you require for relaxation;
• whether you see this move as semi-retirement or a new business start-up;
• whether it’s a shorter-term money spinner or a longer-term cash provider.

To combat the ups and downs of self-employment, it makes sense to build up a portfolio of interests – the multi-tasking referred to above. We referred earlier to the idea of flying kites, with some ideas lying dormant while others are active. This can of course create situations where you are perhaps busier than you intended being in your projected downshifted existence, but you can always motivate yourself through the knowledge that you are building up some financial reserves. These can then be used either to develop further business ideas or to support periods of non-work and relaxation.

In reality, you will probably find that you don’t have total control over your level of downshifting, with markets, involvement and breadth of activity fluctuating quite dramatically over any given year. Working on the basis that you can always turn work down, or have a waiting list, it’s better to have too much on the go rather than too little (which creates the financial pressures we have already considered extensively). For that reason, try to develop a portfolio of activities, even though you may have one main service or product which you wish to promote.

15. How do you sort out your work/life balance when you’re self-employed?

This is a problem for many people, whether or not they are self-employed, have downshifted or have relocated to rural living. Work/ life balance involves more than just relative hours spent working; it also considers issues such as how you spend your waking hours overall and how you can blend life skills at work and vice versa.

It gets slightly more complicated when you are a self-employed sole trader as you are carrying all the responsibilities of the business on your shoulders. As you spend the majority of your time providing your chosen product(s) or service(s), the other secondary business activities such as administration, finance, advertising and marketing, procurement and distribution tend to be achieved in your ‘spare time’. If you’re working from a home base, it becomes very tempting to just pop back to the office in the evening to complete some of these secondary – but very important – activities. Doing this will obviously impact on your work/life balance.

Although there will naturally be crisis points when you will have to work longer hours to honour agreements and contracts, you must try as much as possible to establish normal working schedules which incorporate both primary and secondary elements of your business. This will provide the motivation to allow you to close the door and walk away from your business life in the evenings and weekends, as you would expect to do if you were an employee of a larger business.

Involved as you will be in virtually all aspects of your business, you should not experience the frustrations which you might face as an employee not being allowed to develop some of your latent skills. This is one of the additional aspects of normal work/life balance, in that you can meet the situation where someone gains experience applying skills in his life aspect because he is not being given scope to develop them at work. For example, someone who is prevented from being involved in giving training or business presentations at work could provide voluntary mentoring or business advice or get on the public speaking circuit. Alternatively, you can receive training and development in many soft skills at work which will help to improve your social skills in life generally. The same may be true for a sole trader. There is nothing to stop you booking up for further training and development. There are usually grants available to encourage you even further and much of the preliminary training at least can be achieved through e-learning, so you needn’t even leave your desk!

16. Do you feel a loss of status when you downshift from a professional job?

You may – it’s largely down to your attitude and how you view the situation. Gillean, for example, was a systems analyst, working for one of the major UK consultancy companies. Now she owns and manages a self-catering cottage business. The fact that she washes sheets, cleans bathrooms, handles telephone bookings and gets involved in the myriad (fairly mundane) tasks involved in the business does not detract from the fact that she owns a business and property worth thousands of pounds. And, as she has elaborated elsewhere, the quality of life is so much better than commuting to Reading.

Her ICT and business organizational experience has been of great value in developing our cottages business, which also provides additional job satisfaction and helps balance life and work. As I have detailed elsewhere, I am currently moving back into a greater involvement in training and development, but again focused on areas which are of particular interest to me. I too have parallel areas of involvement in the cottage business, including both the organization and the cleaning and preparation. We both enjoy writing, with our time spent on individual projects increasing year on year. So we see it more as a change of focus than a loss of status, but we do feel comfortable with our wide range of activities, which is evolving.

When we moved from London to Wiltshire, I downshifted fairly dramatically. Having cut back heavily on management development training and materials design, I became more involved in writing – and qualified as a massage therapist. As an off-shoot of this, I also manufactured and sold massage tables. This mixture of activities, in my experience, potentially created greater confusion than that experienced through ‘loss of face’. One day I might be providing and delivering a training course which earned me several hundred pounds in fees; the next I might be giving two or three massages during the day, earning around £20 per hour. I might only have cleared around £80 per table, which took the best part of a day to produce. When you have varying hourly rate values bouncing around like that, it’s difficult to equate values. You need to add the value of your personal enjoyment and satisfaction, plus the interest in developing a new venture, to gain some equation which gives your overall satisfaction rating.

You can extend this positive thinking even further to create the situation where you are involved in two or three high-earning days working at something which is perhaps more mundane or less satisfying, in order to subsidize your other days working on more enjoyable but less lucrative activities. The additional fact of having a range of wage-earning activities means that you are more likely to receive a reasonable income each month, even though the amounts will fluctuate. And when you’ve downshifted to rural living with simpler tastes and requirements, payments of £20 and £50 keep you going in groceries quite well! Life and its enjoyment are largely in your mind and heart and are truly of your making when you get your head round downshifting and relocation.

Onwards and upwards

There are doubtless many other questions which can and do crop up when we discuss such matters with individuals at meetings and in seminars. You could go on and on asking questions. We hope that by this stage, the detail in this book has given you enough confidence to reach your decisions, make your arrangements and set forth on your new path in life. In wishing you every encouragement and good wish, we would like to end with a final quotation, which brings all the thinking together wonderfully:

‘Come to the edge,’ he said.

They said, ‘We are afraid.’

‘Come to the edge,’ he said.

They came.

He pushed them ... and they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire