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Here’s The Secret On Starting A Business Overseas

Remember This When You’re Just About To Give Up

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Apr 16, 2017
in Employment, Ireland, Lifestyle, Panama
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The Secret To Starting A Business Overseas
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While retire overseas is my beat, it’s not my personal agenda. I didn’t move overseas to retire but to run a business, first for someone else, now for myself.

When I left Baltimore, Maryland, nearly two decades ago, headed for Waterford, Ireland, I carried with me clear marching orders from my partner of the time:

Establish an office, an EU base.

Back in Baltimore this Easter holiday weekend, that long-ago history is on my mind…

Our first year in Waterford, Lief and I pushed ahead, stubbornly, persistently, enthusiastically even, through challenge after challenge. We’d come to establish an office for a direct-marketing publishing company, but no such industry existed in Ireland and hardly any industry whatever existed in Waterford.

The pool of available local labor was thin. For marketing, fulfillment, and editorial support staff we hired people with no relevant experience. They’d worked as receptionists in hotels, hands in local stables, cashiers in local shops. We tried to identify people who seemed to want to learn and then set about trying to teach them something.

Staffing our fledgling office was tough but so, too, frankly, was just about everything else, including finding the office in the first place. We didn’t want to be located in the new “industrial park” being built on the outskirts of Waterford City (it looked like a prison compound to me), but other options for commercialspace, like options for staffing, were limited.

Opening a corporate bank account, getting a company credit card (these were uncommon in Ireland back then), finding an Irish tax accountant to keep us compliant, drafting employment contracts (which, we were told, had to allow for things like regular tea breaks)… these kinds of administrative support tasks were also a struggle.

Meantime, Lief and I, only recently married, were struggling on every other front, as well—struggling to solidify our new family unit, struggling to adapt to life in Waterford, struggling to communicate our situation to those back in Baltimore, where the publishing company we were working for was based. They couldn’t understand how or why it was taking so long to do simple, straightforward things like rent office space, open a company bank account, and hire core staff.

We couldn’t adequately explain the delays or the struggles, because we didn’t understand them ourselves.

Today, a half-dozen starting-a-business-in-a-foreign-country-from-nothing experiences later, I can explain. Someone who hasn’t done it isn’t going to understand, but it’s just the way it goes.

Way back when in Waterford, though, I was among those who hadn’t done it. I didn’t know yet that the only way through the challenges is through them. Perseverance is perhaps the biggest prerequisite for the successful entrepreneur abroad.

About a year after we’d landed in Waterford, I’d about had it. I was worn out trying to teach a bunch of sometimes-interested folks how to build and run a direct-marketing publishing operation.

I was worn out by social charges, Bank Holidays, twice-daily tea breaks, bankers who didn’t return your phone calls, tax auditors who’d never heard of the business we were in and couldn’t make heads or tails of our financial statements…

I was lonely for people who understood my questions when I asked them without my having to provide endless background and context. I wanted to be among folks who’d shared at least some of my experiences, personal and professional. Because telling every story from scratch every day all over again… about how to produce a magazine, how to publish a book, how to sell a subscription, and then how to renew it? That was getting old.

Nearly desperate, I called my partner for this venture, based in France at the time, and told him I wasn’t sure this establish-an-office-in-Waterford thing was going to work out. He told me to sit tight. He’d fly over from Paris as soon as he could for a visit.

Bill came to Waterford and spent a couple of days in the office, meeting with me, Lief, and the little team we’d assembled by that point. We’d just moved into new office space at this time, a big improvement over our original (windowless) digs. The new office was in a three-story townhouse in the heart of Waterford City with a Georgian front door that I’d had painted red.

The afternoon he was leaving for the airport and his return flight to Paris, Bill and I walked out the big red front door and stood for a minute on the landing. Bill looked up and down Catherine Street, at the other Georgian-style townhouses, and then back at the red door of our place.

“You’ve planted a seed here,” he said. “You’ve really started something. It will continue to grow…

“It’d be a shame to walk away from this now.”

The second most important thing for an entrepreneur abroad to possess, along with perseverance, is perspective. You’ve got to be able to see what’s before you in the context of the bigger-picture agenda. Most of the time, you’ve got to do this on your own, reminding yourself that you’re making progress.

Despite the challenges and the struggles, you’re building and growing. You’re on track, moving ahead…

Sometimes, though, it will get hard to believe yourself. I was lucky way back when in Waterford to have someone to call for a dose of perspective when I needed it. Had Bill not been around to point out that day that, struggles to get to that point aside, there I was at that point… I might have called it a day.

I might have moved back home to Baltimore and the like-minded company I was longing for. Might, indeed, have walked away… meaning that the years since would have played out very differently…

Happy Easter.

Kathleen Peddicord

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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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