An infopreneur is a self-employed professional who uses his/her expertise and experience to create and sell infoproducts (ebooks, audio or video recordings, ecourses etc.). If you are an infopreneur or interested in this activity...
"If you've tried your hand at building an Internet-based business but haven't yet reach the success you want, find out these 11 deadly mistakes and how to avoid them.
Mistake #1 - Not Treating What You Do as a Business.
The difference between a hobby and a business is that a hobby doesn't make you money it costs you money.
If you're serious about starting a building a profitable online business approach seriously and focus on generating revenue.
Mistake #2 Being Distracted by Too Many Good Ideas.
You can light up a room with a light bulb, but you can cut through steel with a laser beam. The same is true with your effort and ideas.
Too many Internet-Entrepreneur-Wanna-Bes lack the will power to stay focused."...I read again the ebook by Jo Parfitt Starting a Business Overseas today. It is quite interesting either for expats, who want for example to stay in their new country and become self-employed, or for expat spouses, who want to become self-employed and to create a home-business. In fact, you can find there all the substance of Jo parfitt's book The Expat Entrepreneur, but without all the examples of entrepreneurs (which are not always ideally chosen) and lists of resources.
I like in particular the checklists that can help you reflect about your potentiel as an entrepreneur (do you have what it takes?) and develop original business ideas. But, as I mentioned on this blog in my book review of The Expat Entrepreneur, I think the "entrepreneur" title is not quite appropriate, as it focusses solely on self-employed activities that are done from home and paid by the hour, quite often on a part-time basis.
Despite these restrictions, those expats or "trailing spouses" who want to develop a self-employment idea and haven't had any business experience yet will find the book quite useful. You can download it by clicking on the title of this article.
A crucial question that potential coaching clients have to think about, before hiring me as their entrepreneur coach, is the question of the costs of the coaching.
Of course, there is the question of the fees. You can check my fees by clicking once on the "Payment Plan" button on the right. An entrepreneur should know that such costs cannot be considered separately from everything else, but by answering also the following questions:
I spend a lot of time answering inquiries about my coaching services, usually with more or less the same questions. Therefore I attempt here to summarize the most usual answers that I provide to these questions.
Where have you been trained as a coach?
What is your academic and professional background?
You'll find (almost) everything on my Linkedin profile.
What kinds of clients do you coach, and in which format?
I coach specifically these target groups:
For some expats, or expat spouses, who want to create their own small business abroad, opening your own "café" can be an interesting business opportunity. It is not only a way to make a sustainable living, but also a scalable business, as you can even open several cafés once the first one is successful. It is also, at the same time, a way to meet many people (expats and locals) everyday.
If you want somebody who has gone through it successfully to explain everything from A to Z about how to do it anywhere in the world, the ebook "Start Your Own Cafe with Little Money & Live from it" is what you need. You can order it online here:
If, after reading this ebook, you think that this business idea is the right one for you, don't forget one thing: having a good business idea that fits you and your situation, and a lot of motivation, is a perfect start. But having also a support system in place in the form of regular coaching sessions, in order to support you with the organization and all the steps involved and to make you accountable about everything you need to undertake, is the background that quite often makes the difference between starting a business - and develop a successful and sustainable business one over the years. I am at your disposal if you want to discuss about it.
I like not only to read many books about the various aspects of coaching, entrepreneurship and marketing, but also to read them again after some time. Most of the time, I discover new nuggets of knowledge and insights.
This is also the case for The Successful Coach by Terri Levine, Larina Kase and Joe Vitale that I re-read yesterday. I found an interesting part about the five phases of change.
I have different types of clients:
Are you a French mobile entrepreneur, or do you speak French? If so, please note that I also have a blog called Entrepreneurs expatriés. You'll find also a small window on the right side that allows you to subscribe to the new articles and resources.
For the last few months, I have been spending quite a lot of time creating this blog and writing articles. But a blog is also an interactive too. Therefore, all my readers are kindly invited to use the "comment" function on this blog, below this article, in order to express their impressions, wishes, etc. Are there in particular any specific subjects that you would like to be covered or developed?
Thanks a lot and "see" you soon on this blog!
The title of The Expat Entrepreneur, by Jo Parfitt, is slightly misleading. The book is in fact much more a motivating reading about how to become self-employed from home as an expat, doing what you are passionate about, and how to use your creativity in the development of new activities that can eventually bring money - all this based mostly on 23 interviews of expats who "have been there & done it".
There are a few practical parts, like the assessment "Do you have what it takes?" and the resources that are classified by countries. Despite the assessment, the first part of the book is rather in the style of the American self-help books, something like "if you want it, you can do it". The 23 interviews of "expat entrepreneurs" are quite interesting and there are a few specific resources behind each of them, which can provide food for further thoughts and research.
As I mentioned, the book is certainly about expats who became self-employed and it also motivates to do the same. But it cannot be considered a business book for budding entrepreneurs.
Many of the examples that are provided in the 23 interviews belong to the areas that I wouldn't really call a business, like painting, although I am always happy to see artists making a good living. Among the more "business-like" examples, I saw one case of a company that I know well and that has been constantly operating on the verge of bankrupcy for many years, and another one of a person who runs among other things a translation agency, but has a website in French that is very miserably translated, which is not a surprise considering that the translations into French are done... by a Danish person. Therefore, a better selection of the examples would have been needed.
I also regret that, although the book is written by a woman and its intended readers are expat spouses, i.e. mostly women, the examples that are provided are the typical traditional female occupations (teacher, artist, image consultant, women in various helping professions, etc.) as if we were still in the 50s. The very few examples that are more business oriented are the rather obvious ones that can provide a portable career for expats: relocation, web design and consultant.
What about women who are freelance engineers? Or who have a PhD and work as independant researchers and consultants for international organizations? And what about the people in the biotechnology sector who come from the US or Asia, in order to create a company in Europe in one of the recently created biotech clusters? Or the young finance specialists from Asia who come to London or Geneva in order to create a company in the financial sector? Aren't these people expat entrepreneurs too?
I also regret that, although the book is supposed to help budding expat entrepreneurs, such elementary words like a business plan or a marketing strategy are not even mentioned, although they are key elements of success for entrepreneurs of any kind. How to deal with bankers is also absent from the book, although, if we consider the missing examples that I mentioned before, it would even be appropriate here to mention examples of expat entrepreneurs who managed to get financing through business angels and venture capitalists.
I also regret that the book doesn't make a clear distinction between
If you are an expat entrepreneur, your probably often face the problem of sending money abroad, or accepting payments from various foreign countries. I recommend using Paypal. You can open an account for free, and even create various types of payment buttons (in English or other languages) that you can put very easily on your website or blog, as I did on the right side of the present blog. The fee for money transfers is very small, and in any case much lower than what banks usually charge for international money transfers. Your clients can pay you through Paypal per credit card. They can also transfer money from their bank account to their personal Paypal account, and then pay you "manually" - you just have to send a payment request per email through Paypal. You can also use your Paypal account the other way round, for example in order to transfer money back home.
If you are interested in opening a Paypal account, just click on the banner here:
I created the notion of "portable business" in the context of expatriates and expat spouses back in 2007, when I launched several blogs either for expats or for international or mobile entrepreneurs. In fact, I haven't defined yet what I meant with this, apart from my coaching sessions with clients that deal with this.
The term "portable business" came to my mind as the quite obvious alternative to the "portable career" - a term which was coined by Joanna Parfitt, who wrote among other things A Career in Your Suitcase and A Moveable Marriage.
In fact, creating your own "portable business", usually from home in a foreign location, is quite often the sole alternative for:
I just published an article on my other blog, "Expat Coaching", about EFT or the Emotional Freedom Technique. You can read the article here.
I already used the term "infopreneur" on this blog several times. In fact, this is what I do: I translate and create ebooks and articles, tele-programs, and other kinds of information products, or infoproducts, that will be sold soon on the Internet.
Being, or becoming, an "infopreneur", is also probably one of the best types of "portable business" that an expatriate, or an expat spouse, can create for him- or herself - and I also coach my entrepreneur clients on doing this.
Additional information on this subject will be published here in the next weeks and months. But, before, maybe it would be useful to define what an infopreneur is?
There is such an excellent definition of "infopreneur" on Wikipedia that I simply copy it here:
"Infopreneur is a person whose primary business is gathering and selling electronic information.[1] This term is a neologism portmanteau derived from the words "information" and "entrepreneur". An infopreneur is generally considered an entrepreneur who makes money selling information on the Internet. They use existing data and target an audience.
The term is often used on the Internet. In November 2006, the term first appeared in the printed book title From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur.[2]
Before the explosive popularity of the Internet, at the turn of the millennium, such an occupation already existed. Prior to the wide-spread availability of the Internet, these legacyaudio tapes, audio CDs, CD-ROMs, videos, talk shows, and conferences. The classification of infopreneur has created a new style of business on the Internet, which allows anybody with a computer and an Internet connection to start a businesses by publishing information that may appeal to a specific market. inforpreneurs sold their information in other mediums such as
There are generally two kinds of infopreneurs: those that sell information they have amassed on their own and those that earn commissions from selling information that they know nothing about. The latter may be considered more of a "information trafficker".
As the infopreneur is his/her own developer, marketer, producer, and distributor - some infopreneurs consider themselves being in the publishing business. Unlike in traditional print publishing, the infopreneur puts down, in electronic form, what he/she knows from experience or what he/she learned and passes them on to the world through publishing on websites, blogs, ebooks, emails, etc.
Information traffickers do consider themselves infopreneurs. Afterall, they are making money off of information. Many of them utilize the power of the World Wide Web - creating web sites and blogs to act as their storefront.
The infopreneur may attract traffic to his/her site by manipulating their site to appear higher on search engine results.[3] This may be done by creating a site that is robust in information, and configuring META keywords and descriptions that accurately describes the web page. But often, infopreneurs that are out to get a "quick buck", will create a mash-together of information by publishing popular, sought after content, often incorporating RSS feeds from more popular sites. The infopreneur then makes money from Adsense ads, affiliate links, referrals and leads, and/or selling ebooks that are related to the search parameters and keywords. Essentially, these infopreneurs "piggy-back" on already established information. In fact, there are many such splogs that copy verbatim the articles from Wikipedia."
"The Best Top 10 Lists for Home and Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs" is a catalogue of 10 lists, which in turn contain Top 10 lists of advice about how to run a home business or small business, and which mistakes are to be avoided. A great resource for budding entrepreneurs!
The 10 Ten Lists were created by Coachville, the biggest coaching networking and training institute in the world.
This article was published originally on http://www.expats.org.uk/. It presents the book "The Expat Entrepreneur" by Jo Parfitt. You can click on the link in the right column of this blog to order the book directly on Amazon.com.
"Jo Parfitt looks at a new breed of professional expat spouse - the entrepreneur.
I have been running my own business for longer than I have been an expat wife. In fact, my first opportunity to leave '9-5' arose when I was just 25 years old. A year later I was living in Dubai, so working for myself seemed an obvious choice. Since then I have created and maintained what I call a 'shifting portfolio of portable careers'. Most have had something to do with writing, and so, during my 18 years abroad I have been a copywriter, journalist, CV writer, author, publisher and writing teacher and now help others to write their books. But I am also passionate about the concept of portable careers in general and have developed a range of books and workshops that focus on this topic too. Oh, and I have sold Dorling Kindersley books, made and sold date chutney and even framed my mother's watercolours of Oman to sell at Muscat craft fairs. Perhaps I am just a 'serial entrepreneur'?
You may not be comfortable describing yourself as an entrepreneur. It may be a term that makes you think of Bill Gates, Richard Branson or Anita Roddick. If you are happier to consider that you are 'freelance', 'self-employed', 'work for yourself' or 'run your own business', that's fine. It's the same thing.
For many expatriate partners, like you, working for yourself is the solution to the dual career problem. Running a business of some kind that can move when you do is the best way to retain a professional identity and even sanity while on the move. Work, for me, is a necessary constant amidst all that change.
Do you have what it takes?
So, could you be an expat entrepreneur? Ivan Gould recently conducted a survey to ascertain whether women or men were more cut out to run their own businesses. He found that sex had nothing to do with it. Both required the same five traits, which are:
Some expatriate entrepreneurs (and in particular so-called "solopreneurs") experience a double challenge in the area of networking. They feel isolated working from home, without any support from colleagues and teams, and they find it difficult to network locally because they are not fluent enough in the local language.
Another aspect of this problem is that the situation of expatriation often works like a magnifying glass for situations who would barely be considered as problems at home, or who would be approached differently. For example, if you move to another town within your own country, you might be thrilled at the idea of meeting new people and take active steps towards this purpose, instead of feeling overwhelmed and staying at home watching TV because you don't know anybody. Do you remember the Peanuts cartoons and the little dog lying on the roof of his kennel, with his paws above his head, thinking "Nobody loves me"?
In the wave of the new social networking solutions that are now developed on the basis of Internet, a new system appeared a bit more than a year ago: the Meetup meetings. You can go to the website, enter your country and town, and get a list of the Meetups that already exist in your area. They are quite often in English, or bilingual, and focused mainly on expats, or with a high percentage of them. If there are not many Meetups to choose from yet, you'll get a lost of all the possible Meetups by subjects, and quite often several local people have already signed up in order to be informed once a group is created.
Therefore, if you are a lonely expat and/or entrepreneur, just take the initiative and create your own Meetup. It costs, according to the payment plan you choose, something between 150 and 200 US$/year, but it is certainly worth every cent.
You are invited to post comments about this article directly on the blog. You can also use the "comment" function to put some information about your local Meetups, or even the ones you created after having read this article!
The Swiss Entrepeneur group on Yahoogroups is a great mailing list about entrepeneurship in Switzerland. If you join as a member, you also get access to the message archive.
Click to join SwissEntrepreneur
The "Cercle des Dirigeants d'Entreprise", which is based in Geneva, organizes the next "Place des Affaires" at the International Conference Centre (CIC) near the Place des Nations in Geneva. It will be open to the public on January 22nd-25th. I plan to attend at least the two meetings for entrepreneurs at 9:00 AM on the 22nd and 23rd. Please contact me at office[at]aplusb-coaching.info if you wish to attend too, so that we can meet and discuss our respective projects. Click here for more information about the whole conference. Click here if you wish to attend specifically the "Petits déjeuners des start-up" on the 22nd and 23rd at 9 AM and register directly.
Andrea J. Lee is one of my mentor coaches and the developer of very powerful "multiple streams of income" systems for coaches and other information professionals. I reproduce here an article that she published a few months ago. It contains many original ideas - although they cover, in fact, many things that I have to deal with when I coach clients, and in particular entrepreneur clients, like the underlying fear of success, or allowing yourself to be successful only if it is the result of hard work and long hours.
"With apologies to Byron Katie's important 'Work,' I've been using the phrase Unwork quite a bit lately to help foster the premise that working hard is NOT the way to riches or happiness.
For some people working hard is a license to feel justified about complaining. Or feeling self-important.
For others it's a way to pull the wool over their eyes about the fact they aren't succeeding - they're doing everything they can, aren't they? Exhaustion is the proof of this statement. It can't be their fault because they're trying so very hard.
Still others are subconsciously using hard work as a way to avoid something. Could it be fear of success? or almost any other fear/feeling?
I've been exposed to enough variations on the theme of hard work that I feel I can say with confidence:
The message "Work hard and you'll be rewarded" is MOST useful to people in authority (teachers, parents, church leaders, politicians, etc.) Tired people (adults and children) are less likely to act up.
What I know for sure is that it takes a certain amount of guts to think about Unworking. Hard work is a potent anesthetic that like any addiction numbs us to life. Time to wake up.
Let me be clear that Unwork isn't about being lazy. And it isn't some fancy way of talking about delegation or time management either. I hate to say it's a kind of 'consciousness' as that's just too floofy for many people to care about, but it is in fact what it is. And...there are specifics that can help you start 'doing' unwork in a concrete way so this isn't all just ethereal stuff.
Register for the no-fee Open House TeleSeminar on Unwork (post coming soon) if you'd prefer a more interactive version of this. But here are my notes in response to those of you who don't want to wait. ;) Remember - Suzanne Falter-Barns is spearheading the call so I'm sure she'll have much to contribute on her end too.
Or, check out the radio show Pam Slim did with me on 'Taking the Struggle out of building your business' over at VoiceAmericaBusiness. You can download the program here.
Now here are my notes on just what Unwork is and how you can start integrating some...
(1) What does Unwork mean?
The first step to understanding the concept of Unwork is noticing that for everything you do, there is a hard way and an easy way. Whether it's picking a photograph at IstockPhoto to illustrate your blog post; putting together your new TV stand or making ends meet this month, there IS a hard way to reach your goal. Perhaps it's the road you're most used to taking.
So the best way to help connect you with the concept of Unwork is to ask you to assume with me there IS an easier way to what you are doing. So pick a challenge you're working on this week. Or a long-standing obstacle in your life. My assumption is going to be that there is an easier way. If you were to play along, what comes up?
This is about practice because letting go of the habit of thinking life has to be hard isn't going to be an overnight thing. So practice challenging yourself. Gradually your way of 'being' in your business will become less onerous.
Just start with one thing. Go ahead, you can think of one thing that you're annoyed at that feels terribly hard...what is it?
Unwork = noun. Definition = a contrarian idea that for everything human beings seek to do or achieve in life there is a hard way and an easy way or unwork way. Especially applicable in entrepreneurial settings.
(2) What might be a useful metaphor that conveys the sensibility of Unwork?
Unwork can feel like a foreign concept the first time you hear it so I like to use metaphors to help us get intuitive about it. Here are two:
Metaphor #1: If you were hanging a calendar on your wall, you wouldn't go to the basement to get your power tool, right? Yet so many of us in our daily 'to dos' are doing just that - using a power tool to put in a tack.
We might be spending way too much time to complete something...or doing a menial task at the time of day when our brains are most creative...whatever it is, there is an ineffective use of energy to accomplish the task in front of us...using a power tool on a tack when just your thumb would do the trick.
How are you burning out a power tool doing something little in your business?
Is it possible you're giving a long lecture to your teenager when a small curfew reminder would do the trick?
Metaphor #2: The Sun and the Wind fable, excerpted from the book 'Money, Meaning & Beyond' and previously posted here.
Okay, I lied. There is another very colourful and slightly PG-13 metaphor that illustrates Unwork to a 'T'. I think it's the MOST effective metaphor there is for some people but I'm not going to post it here. I'm being a little coy here alright? Okay maybe a little chicken too. :-) So if you'd like me to post it I will, but encourage me a little would you? I'm not a prude (especially in 1-on-1 coaching sessions) but I'm still not sure how colourful to be here...
(3) What are some recent examples of how you apply Unwork in your life?
Example #1: After being self-employed nearly 10 years, I know there are two major activities that consistently generate income. For me, these are speaking and writing; they may be different for you. But speaking takes a proportionately HUGE amount of my time, effort, patience from husband and family, etc. in order to do. Not to mention health and other environmental costs.
By contrast, writing takes up much fewer resources and - important - does almost as good a job generating business as speaking does.
Unwork decision I made? Speak even less frequently than I do now, and make every speaking engagement really count. Net result: I have much more energy and time to spend writing. Ultimately this gives me better results (more money) for less work over the course of the year - exactly what was proven when I visited my accountant last week - gross income increased only 10-20% last year, but we had about the same amount of expenses and both partners worked about 40% less. That's a great raise as a result of unwork.
Example #2: Here's a smaller example.
When searching for a great photo to illustrate a blog post, I discovered a friend who was looking and looking on IstockPhoto. We all do the equivalent of something like this - go through all the bids on Elance for example, or researching an additional hour when you've already found a good link.
What if you were to stop? Meaning, stop when you find the first useable photo? When you find a decent bid on Elance that meets all your criteria?
We spend a lot of time looking for what could possibly might be a slightly better answer. But all the while we already have a serviceable solution.
Does this apply to you? If you haven't been able to think of a place to concretely apply Unwork, this should help. Make a list of things you work unnecessarily hard at now and practice letting your work go.
Insert a food-related Andrea-ism here: Like trimming the fat off the steak before you barbeque, you can trim wasted energy off many of your daily tasks, if only you start thinking the Unwork Way.
Remember...Hope is not a strategy. Neither is hard work.
In conclusion...do you know the saying 'work smart, not hard?' I don't know who said it originally but I have a huge dislike for it. Why? I just don't think it's a useful phrase when it comes to implementation.
The phrase 'work SMART' has the exact opposite effect...in fact already-smart people are the ones who are most guilty of working too hard in their businesses. Their try to 'smart' their way out of problems when simplicity would be better. Since smartness already gets them in trouble, more smart thinking isn't going to make things better.
So I say dare to be different. Embrace unwork instead by picking a few clear action steps that lesson what you do in order to get a result, today. Now that you understand just what Unwork is about...you have no excuses!"
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Andrea Lee is the author of Multiple Streams of Coaching Income, Money Meaning and Beyond and Pink Spoon Marketing (with Tina Forsyth). She has helped businesses around the world reach six and seven figure financial success while creating lives rich with meaning and laughter.
Andrea mentors, teaches, coaches and writes from her home in Calgary, Alberta. To reach Andrea visit her website at: http://www.andreajlee.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Andrea_Lee
You can read the 3 tips by clicking on the title of this article or here. The tips alone are rather obvious and the list is a bit short, but the article is very valuable because of the examples of expat entrepreneurship that are presented under each tip.
I added recently a few books which are particularly useful for expat entrepreneurs and infopreneurs. Each book that is presented has a direct link to www.amazon.com. Please have a look at the column on the right side of this blog! Some of them could even be the perfect present for your expat friends (or yourself?).
Amazon just launched its new electronic reader, with which you can download and read e-books and American and international newspapers and magazines. This is certainly a very interesting device for expats who want to subscribe to their newspapers from home without any delay, and to read the latest books without having to pack a whole library in their suitcases...
"If you listen to some gloomy voices, you would think you would have to be mad to invest in Germany, with its bureaucracy, high unemployment and flatlining economy. In fact, many expatriates are choosing to set up businesses here. James Kennaway looks at how expats can start companies here, and the opportunities and pitfalls that await them."
The rest of the article can be found here: Click here.
A new Meetup event is being created in Geneva: the Geneva Entrepeneur Meetup group. Please find below a description of the group from the Meetup website. As I plan to attend the first meeting next week, on Tuesday 30 October, I'll write more about it afterwards. If you wish to come, please click on the title or on the button on the right of this blog (downwards). There is also another Meetup specifically for high-tech entrepreneurs (biotech, Internet, electronics & telecommunications, etc.) and their partners (business angels, venture capitalists), which I attend as much as I can. It is called the Geneva Open Coffee Meetup Group. It is really amazing to notice how many bright people from the whole world are attracted to Geneva, or want to stay here after a short-term expat assignment, and have a high potential and great ideas in order to create their own business here.
If you are an expat entrepreneur in another location, please click on the Meetup buttons in the right bar of this blog in order to find a suitable Entrepreneur Meetup near you.
"MEETUP, STARTUP.
Networking for people who are involved in a startup, running a business or looking to invest in one. Chill, chat. Expand your environment.
WHO ?
To those who are starting up, running or looking to invest, or would like to be in the future. Corporates with skills welcome.
FIELDS
No rules, the variety is great to get discussions going.
FEEL
Friendly. Laid-back. Conversational. Unstructured. Enjoyable. Open to those with ideas to share.
ORG
Monthly"
"Trailing husbands" or male trailing partners of expatriates, diplomats or international civil servants are a new phenomenon and their numbers are increasing. Apart from several issues that they they have to deal with, that are exactly the same as in the case of expat wives, they also encounter specific situations and problems. For example, the clubs and networking opportunities for expat spouses are mainly female. Stay-at-home dads are largely mistunderstood in many cultures. Even if a trailing husband welcomes at first the opportunity of taking 2 or 3 sabbatical years, the "hole" that appears afterwards on the résumé can be dangerous for the further development of his career.
I just created a new mailing list on Yahoogroups specifically for trailing husbands who want to discuss these issues and situations.
In order to register, please click here.
I copy below a great article about the differences in entrepeneurship in Europe (particularly France and Germany) and the USA. The article is a bit old (2000), but still highly interesting. It was published in Computerworld (click to see the original web page).
Invasion of the Entrepreneurs
Steffan Heuer 08/02/2000 12:01:01
SAN FRANCISCO (02/08/2000) - Most European entrepreneurs follow a well-beaten path in the United States. They take their ideas to Silicon Valley, gather a team of engineers and MBAs, and set up shop amid the faceless maze of office parks. They play it safe.
A rare few, however, seek a bigger thrill. They pack up and go home, carrying their crusade for innovation - and their IPOs - back to Europe. There they battle with conservative venture capitalists and timid partners; they stave off prohibitive stock-options regulations in France; they endure hardships they'd never face in the States, all to prove they can make the high-tech revolution work in the Old World.
"The single biggest asset I brought back [to Germany] was the optimistic mindset," says German engineer Gerhard Fettweis. "Every single researcher [in the U.S.] has some loony idea he or she is working on. And a year later, just like that, they turn it into a company."
After four years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fettweis decamped in 1994 and moved to the eastern German city of Dresden to assume a newly established chair in mobile telecommunications funded by telecom giant Mannesmann. Last June, the 37-year-old professor founded a chip company, Systemonic, to develop integrated circuits for mobile communications devices, so-called digital signal processors. He has $5 million in venture funding and a staff of 20. His company is a poster child for the East's economic revival since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Of course, he'd not be where he is now if he'd listened to his doctorate adviser in Germany, who told him in 1988 to embark on what Fettweis disparagingly calls "the classic German quest: Get a [research] assignment, perhaps take out a loan and then pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
The old-school engineer-cum-entrepreneur in Germany always planned for the worst-case scenario, Fettweis says. "Their exit strategy was to get bought by Siemens or, even more absurd, to buy back the stakes in their company. It still happens. If I hear somebody talking about approaching a bank with a business plan, they're already heading down the wrong path."
That's why he quit his lucrative job as head of a research group at TCSI in Berkeley, Calif., and went back to Dresden. He wanted to evangelize his students and colleagues, to convince them that they could and should start their own companies. "I was literally trying to get disciples," Fettweis adds, "to create the mentality, the hunger for a startup team."
He encouraged his students to spend one semester out of 10 abroad, advice that only half of them accepted, to Fettweis' disappointment. "We need more people to learn on-site in Silicon Valley to catch up in the next five years," he notes.
THE MARCO POLO EFFECT You could call it entrepreneurial tourism. John Griffin, an American expat living near Geneva, calls it the "Marco Polo effect" - Europeans traveling to the United States to learn new ways of doing business.
"The idea is to go off to this exotic place, see what's going on," says Griffin. "You can't get it by reading or hearing about it. You have to experience firsthand the lack of fear, the feeling that building a company is a natural thing."
Griffin moved from San Francisco to Switzerland four years ago and now advises startups in Austria, France and Germany on the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurial financing. The 49-year-old former Hewlett-Packard executive deals with the intricacies of structuring options packages in countries that until very recently didn't even consider the stock market a sound investment for individuals.
But aside from the urge to bring American know-how back home, Griffin says there's another reason why Europeans are returning to the old country: quality of life. "Europeans go to the U.S. and see how exciting it is, but then they realize that other things are missing. Things like culture, lifestyle, the well-roundedness of life are not as good in Silicon Valley. So they say, 'I'd rather go back and try to do exciting stuff at home.'" But before there's a true shift in the status quo, Griffin adds, more entrepreneurs will have to make the trip to America. Once the entrepreneurs reach critical mass, he says, change will build on its own.
To push things along, the European VC scene needs to evolve as well. Financing is now about where it was 15 years ago in the United States. "Three years ago they were 30 years behind," Griffin says. "The catch-up rate is ever-accelerating." [See "Old World, New Economy,".] Why does Griffin put up with the laggards? For the same reason Europeans go home. "If you know the recipe to make bread, you can apply it anywhere," he notes. "It's the business equivalent to technology transfer. Besides, I like life much better over here."
LE COLD SHOULDER Croissants, cobbled streets, free schools - nice perks, sure, but not enough to lure every European back across the Atlantic. "Honestly, most of my friends don't go back after spending three, four, five years in the Valley. After that much time, you've become a local," says Pierre Cesarini, CEO and founder of Paris-based software maker TempoSoft. He lived in the Bay Area for nine years, rising through the ranks of Apple Computer, before his wife finally talked him into going home.
Repatriation was a double-edged sword for Cesarini, 36. "I knew things were slowly changing, but I had lost touch with France," he says. "Going back was about as hard as first coming to the States in 1989. I knew more people in the U.S.; I could have put a team with global experience together faster and come up with funding more easily." Instead, Cesarini got "le cold shoulder" from the risk-averse financial community in France. "They want to see not just a business plan," he adds. "You need to have a team, a product, customers. But if you have all three and still seek VC funding, I think you did something wrong."
After knocking on doors for a year, the determined Frenchman finally scored $5 million for his idea: software for enterprise workforce management. "I think that was a first in France, to get that much funding without a line of code, without a customer," he declares. He launched TempoSoft in April 1998 and now has 40 employees in France, the U.K. and the U.S. Sales are expected to hit $10 million this year.
Cesarini sees an upside to leaving the easy access in Silicon Valley for the stodgy ways of his native France. "The odds are much higher," he says. "You have to accomplish more in a much more fragmented market; you have to deal with three or four countries in the first year, otherwise you will be perceived as a local company. On the other hand, valuations in Europe are 10 times under what you see on the Nasdaq. There's enormous potential."
FRONTIER EUROPE Youssef Ghazal, Clemens Henle and two other students from Switzerland and Germany took their Harvard MBAs and their Silicon Valley exposure and went back to Europe to get seed money as fast as they could.
The four had been runners-up in their school's high-profile business-plan contest with a scheme for Vitago, their European knockoff of Drugstore.com, and immediately had East Coast VCs banging on their dorm-room doors. Instead, they moved to Munich a few months after graduating last May. Why haggle with European financiers instead of taking the easy U.S. money? Because the payoff is bigger in the less-crowded European market, explains Vitago cofounder and CFO Ghazal, 32.
The Austrian investment banker gives a lot of the credit for his initiative to Silicon Valley, where he got religion within a week. "You feel like a martian walking around there," he recalls. "Everything is new, everybody is talking shop all the time. It's hard not to want to do something immediately, too."
Before he went on Harvard's annual WesTrek excursion to California, Ghazal figured he'd do consulting. Then he didn't know what to do anymore. "I sat down with my girlfriend and spent night after night talking about it," he says.
"What's my unique selling proposition as a European?"
He decided to take his insight and his management tools back to Europe. "We figured the opportunity is much bigger back home," agrees cofounder Henle, a 28-year-old German who's now VP of purchasing at Vitago. "Our goal was to become players in e-commerce from the very start. Sure, we debated whether to start a business in the United States, like others from Europe do all the time."
Advantages, Henle points out, were a language and culture they're familiar with and the window of opportunity that's been left open by Europe's lagging adoption of the Net. Young entrepreneurs can pursue a niche without bruising competition and get huge exposure should they succeed.
Still, if they hadn't gone West first, there likely wouldn't be Vitago, which just closed its second financing round in the double-digit millions.
"The impulse from the U.S. and Silicon Valley in particular was absolutely necessary," Henle says. "It liberates you from that German mindset to get a job and climb the career ladder over decades. You realize people in Silicon Valley are just normal guys who were raised with entrepreneurial spirit and are not afraid to fail." They needed all the motivation they could get, since implementing their vision of an online health-care store - without any experience in either industry - turned out to be a bumpy ride. Henle remembers meeting with CEOs of large firms who were very curious about their business model but couldn't act on it even if they wanted to. "They would tell us how fascinating they thought our concept was, but they'd say, 'We have 15,000 employees. No way we can do something like this that fast."
TempoSoft's Cesarini met with similar intransigence when he went looking for executives in their 40s or 50s who would drop their careers to join a startup.
"It just doesn't yet happen in France," he sighs.
Vitago's founders even met resistance from their backers. Where American partners in an international venture firm would aggressively push for a deal, the Europeans were cautious, asking Vitago to think smaller and forcing them to negotiate longer.
If it works out, though, and Vitago goes public on Germany's Neuer Markt, its founders' decision to leave the relative safety of Silicon Valley for the European frontier could be right on the money.
Jo Parfitt, who published 'The Expat Entrepreneur' recently (book review follows), created the www.expatentrepreneurs.com website, where you can a free report about 'How to Start a Business Overseas' (24 pages).
Here is another link to an article that points out that, despite all the "get rich quickly" schemes, creating and developing a home-based business requires a lot of work, and not only that... You can find it at by clicking here.
Here is a very good checklist in order to find out if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. It is published by Living Abroad Report:
http://www.livingabroadreport.com/entrepreneur.html
Amazingly enough, some expat spouses move to a foreign country without enquiring properly beforehand if they are entitled to work at all once they arrive in the foreign country, and under which conditions.
In countries like Switzerland, for example, an expat couple usually gets a B permit. Therefore, only a spouse who comes from a country of the European Union may get a work permit, provided that they find a job - which means that they must prove that they are more qualified and competent than all the other Swiss candidates for a given job. If the spouse is not a member of a country of the European Union, she (or he) is not entitled to work at all. But this only means that this person cannot be hired by a local corporation and receive a work permit.
Under some circumstances, which depend from your host country, your nationality and various aspects, it is possible to work as an expat or trailing spouse, if you create what I call your "portable business" or virtual company. You can for example create a company in your host country. Or you can create an individual company or a micro-business in your home country, with its own office address and website, and then work from there. You can also create a business from a third country. When your husband or wife moves to another country, you can usually pursue your business from there too.
In any case, I wouldn't advise any "trailing spouse" to consider creating their own portable or virtual business in the first months after the move to another country. It is rather obvious that, 1st of all, you need time to adjust to everyday life, explore the new country and - last but not least - learn the local language in order to speak itfluently. Too many English-speaking spouses assume that they can do business anywhere in the world in English. This is not true, at least not if you want to be really successful. On top of that, learning the local language is also a way to adjust to the intercultural differences, which are an essential factor of success in business. It is also a key factor for networking locally, and for dealing with administrations, which are both essential for the creation and development of a business. Another mistake that many trailing spouses make is assuming that becoming self-employed is just a nice part-time occupation from home. You need to have what it takes to be an entrepreneur, to run your business and to market your products or services - and all of this in an international context, and with much less support than you would have in your own country.
Therefore, first things first:
