The challenges of letting go and embracing freedom

Being retired isn’t so easy when you have owned your own business for 23 years, and spent most of them hunting clients, delivering assignments under pressure whilst keeping the company together. So, in effect, when I declared that “I am done”, that was the start of the process.

After my daughter’s wedding, I was good to my word, I jumped in my VW Camper and headed to off-grid to the Highlands of Scotland with my dog Tess as company.  Wooksie (my wife) asked how long I would be gone for, “more than a week, but less than 3”, and that was about as much planning as I had done. The trip to Scotland is a separate blog, but for here, I was gone 10 days, rejoiced in the freedom but eventually got bored with nothingness and made my way home.

I had been delivering a company strategy over the previous 5 years that moved all our services to digital online solutions depending on face-to-face service, this development work helped us through Covid and gave us a way out. We had reached a point 2 years previous where the change was done and in effect, we could deliver our services from anywhere in the world, we just needed a laptop to manage the whole thing. As I explained to Wooksie, we can now live on a yacht in the Bahamas, login every day to deal with requests and put our feet up.

At this point Wooksie pointed out that she doesn’t like yachts, the sea or the sun as she is a red head. This was the start of the first unexpected issue, my business partner of 23 years, who often complained she hated the job and wanted to leave, but who happened to be 12 years younger than me pointed out she wasn’t ready to retire.  

Boom I didn’t see that one coming, I had a vision for a retirement full of fun, adventure and travel which wasn’t shared.  I had always had this exit plan that we could have a business that would essentially run itself with minimal input from ourselves but give us an income, this was now seriously under threat.

This came as a real shock, but slowly we worked out how to make it work. The company would keep running to allow for a gradual transition as the hard-earned client based slowly withered. As I wouldn’t be doing the sales, account management and service development demand would inevitably drop off, which it did. This seemed a solution that worked for everyone, including the staff, as the last one was happy to retire in that timescale.

The first year was hard in other ways as well. I struggled to say, “I’m retired”, so when offers of work came in, I found it really hard to turn them away, as money is money and habits of a lifetime don’t change overnight.

Talking to others that had taken retirement from employment, they seemed to have different issues, but these helped me understand my challenges. If you go into work for an employer everyday of your life, when you stop work, you are faced with a void – suddenly you don’t have to get up, go into work or get on with your task list or routine. I’ve noticed these people seem to drift back into full time or part time jobs as they struggle to fill the void.

When you own and run a business, it is different, you live that business 24 hours a day, clients, staff, finances, suppliers, payment is in your head 24 all the time, and you are the escalation point for everything, so saying you are retired doesn’t change much. What does change is that your energy and ambition is no longer driving the business forward with an eye on the strategic challenges and opportunities, but this takes time to take effect.

The challenge for me was that I wanted this stuff out of my head as I had mentally moved on and opened a new chapter in my life, but the business was sucking me back in. We also faced a number of unexpected challenges from government bodies that undermined the 5 years of investment in that business model and the services we had developed, which was hugely frustrating for me and our customers but helped with marking the end for the team, the company was over.

To be honest, in that first year of supposed retirement the company were hit by these unexpected missiles, we might even have decided to call it a day anyway. A number of our competitors of 20 years did make that decision, but it was a tough year for all of us, and we found a way though as we always do.

It wasn’t just work that was changing, at home we had one daughter heading into her last year at university and youngest son had just finished A levels and was heading for university.  There was a lot of disruption at home too, this isn’t the normal retirement scenario for most people, having 2 kids at university and having to shut down a business!

By the end of summer, Wooksie had warmed to the idea of less work, but not enough to consider living on a yacht in the Bahamas.  As a way of marking the start of a new era, she came up with the idea of doing the Inca Trail in Peru (BBC’s Race Round the World helped a lot with the transition !), this was something we had planned 20 years early but pregnancy put an end to that, So 5 days after youngest son went to Liverpool Uni, we were on a flight to Peru to open our new chapter.  It was great trip, but not without incidents that will be part of the travel blog in due course.

The real benefit was that it started to draw a line under being the dedicated business owners and always on tap parents, though mobile phones still worked in Peru 😊.

Even though I was trying to stop working, I settled for “running down” as I was back in the office 2 or 3 days a week, but I did offload the baggage of “attendancism”,  and moved to a “work to live” mode rather than a “live to work” mode.

This worked, I continued delivering limited client assignments to keep the company accounts in good shape and in truth, when winter came along, I was glad of the company of the team. I’d go to the gym or meet a mate for coffee, but head to the office to help and have a chat with the girls.

The first year ended the following April undertaking a progress review for a client. This was a review of recommendations I had made 18 months earlier that had been reported to the top-level board in that organisation. The board approved the report and funded the implementation of the recommendations.

My review was to check on progress with the consultancy that had been given the task of delivering our recommendations.  What became evident was that hardly any progress had been made, in fact, they had implemented things we had said should NOT happen.

At a workshop, I asked the group, “did any of you actually read my report and recommendations”. there was silence. Millions had been spent on this consultancy to implement our recommendations, and, they did what they thought should happen not what they were commissioned to do, and the things they implemented were the things that had repeatedly failed in the past.

At this point, I was completely exasperated. I honestly concluded I was wasting my life doing this sort of work when I could have been out having fun, the money was obviously nice but most of it goes on tax anyway, so what was the point.

12 months on from “I’m done”, I had another big moment where I realised my hunger for money was gone as well, and I didn’t want to waste my time advising people who were going to ignore me. I now really wanted to get on with my next chapter.

I discussed this with my old friend Ugly Bloke in May; he had managed his transition at a much younger age and was a good sounding board for me. He didn’t believe that I was going to call it a day, so I wrote down some promises about what I would and wouldn’t do in the next 12 months, because I still did have obligations to the team. He looked after the notes on a napkin and The Ugly Bloke commitments proved very powerful when I had a big decision to make in the next year.

Lessons from the first year

So, what are my conclusions from that first year:

• You can’t just walk away from something that has taken 20 years to create it is hard to walk away from the old habits and behaviours, it’s different to retiring from a job. However, you can make promises to yourself about the scope of what is acceptable and test it out.
• Having an epiphany, where you realise it’s time for change, helps the motivation to make the change, it is very hard not looking back. I used to advise clients they had to “mark the end” of the old ways before change can happen, this applied to me too.
• Making assumptions about people around you, what they want and need, how fast the world is changing undermines plans all the time.
• Signature adventures – the trip to Peru marked a major change in our life, it enabled planning future adventures to places we had never been, like Patagonia, safaris, and other adventures we can look forward to, in fact, they start to take over your life.

So, moving into the second year, I am now openly talking about being “retired”, though I prefer to say being “finished with work”. I have my commitments to Ugly Bloke to uphold, so let’s see how it goes.