Working From Home

Here I sit in my home office, the Easter weekend is nearly over, and I'm preparing for week three in my life as a business owner. I've got three meetings this week, my first meetings, so I'm fired up! Finally after two weeks of training and two weeks of calling, I get to sit in front of potential clients and hopefully convince them that I will be worth engaging (and of course give me the...

The First Sales Calls

A week ago I landed back in Auckland, my two weeks of training complete, ready to jump in and get my business going. My home office still wasn't properly organised as I did not have sufficient time to sort it out prior to departing for the USA, so my first task was to get some semblance of order into it. As a new franchisee, I had been assigned a mentor to help me for the first three months...

Trained and Ready

Once again I'm sitting on an Air New Zealand Boeing, this time a 747, taxing out to the runway to begin the long journey home from Los Angeles to Auckland. Two weeks ago I arrived in the USA to begin my two weeks of training for my new business with ERA. And now suddenly it's all over! There are no more excuses, now the rubber has hit the road - I have to make it work - I have to generate an...

Welcome to Smart Moves - a blog about my journey from redundancy to business owner.

Just a few minutes ago the Air New Zealand Boeing 777 was straining against its brakes as the engines powered up for take-off. As the nose lifted and the plane climbed into the night sky, my long journey to Los Angeles began.

As I write, I'm sitting against the aircraft's window, looking out into the black night at the start of my journey to Carlsbad, California (that's 30 miles north of San ...