Solving the move; moving on

It’s been a busy week: an assessment to prepare at Cambridge, conducting interviews for the business, a host of reports and summaries to write.  I also needed to really lean into the search for temporary digs: the to-let market around Poole / Bournemouth has heated up a lot and listings are being taken off the market almost as fast as I can look at them.

The goal is really short-term: a few months for the business to meet its immediate goals and to understand where we’ll plant the offices, then a final shift to join up with it.  So I need something like a house share: bedroom, kitchen, a place to work, a spot for the car, and peaceful neighbors.

The search has dragged on,  though,  and I hit bottom on Wednesday,  weary.  it was 8 pm, I hadn’t had dinner, and I had just viewed the fourth ugly house of the day. Work still to be done on the business that couldn't finish because of viewings,  three back-to-back conference calls from the car,  and it was raining cats and dogs (“raining stair-rods”, advises the FT) on the dark flooded streets of Canford Cliffs. 

Other people had full-time jobs and half-term vacations.  I had a real sense that plausible incremental decisions and hard work was leading to a dead-end: loss and compromise where I'd wanted to create and build.  It was becoming life in a Hopper tableaux; every entrepreneur hits it from time to time,  and this was my rainy night.

I do know the solution: call a friend, vent and unload, get perspective, and shoulder on.  And it works: the perfect share came available this morning, joining two physicians in a spacious home in Penn Hill.

 

The sun came out; the phone crackled with better news as I drove to Cambridge.  ‘still a few hurdles to jump and demons to exorcise, but the big blocks are starting to dissolve.  Still, it would just be nice to know what life holds, even looking ahead only two weeks from now.