What am I doing?

What am I doing? is a question I ask myself with some frequency (virtually every day in fact). Usually that's because I've got a terrible attention span and find it's a good idea to remind myself exactly what should be getting my limited attention-allowance.

I'm finding recently though, that other people have started to ask me what I'm doing too. And they don't mean specifically at that moment in time. No, they mean what am I doing with my life.

This is a perfectly reasonable question really, given recent developments and although I've promised repeatedly to give everyone I know a heads up, I still haven't got round to it. So I decided to answer the question on the blog, ergo saving myself some time. Now when someone asks, I'll just send them here (although when my mum asks for the umpteenth time I'll have to first explain to her what a blog is, meaning time savings for that particular interaction will be negligible at best).

As I've hinted previously, I intend to pursue a new direction now that my time at Omni has come to a close. To be more specific, I'm currently setting up as a freelance consultant and will soon (as of next week, when my period of gardening leave finishes) be able to offer my services to interested parties.

The work won't be a complete departure from what I did previously as I'll be operating essentially as a marketing consultant. My focus will be on new marketing, branding and communications (fortuitously things that are both my passions and my areas of expertise).

I won't go into too much more detail than that on the blog, save to say that if you read some of my previous posts you'll get the gist of the direction I'll be taking with my consultative advice (communities, transparency, honesty, happiness etc all watchwords).

I intend to have a website dedicated to my new venture up shortly (details of which I'll post here). The blog, although obviously inextricably linked to my adventures, will hopefully remain somewhat separate. In essence, I'd like to talk about all the things that interest me here, have conversations with people and generally rant and vent as appropriate, whilst saving the more business-type stuff for the website.

I'm sure there will be some crossover, but basically what I'm saying is that I don't intend to start pimping myself out on the blog! I'll still be talking about things that are completely unrelated to my new business (or at least may seem it to people) and I'll still be looking to poke my nose into various conversations with my usual limited grasp of the facts and unlimited enthusiasm for a good ding dong. I think it's important therefore to have some demarcation of territory, if only so I don't get confused and start calling out my clients for a ruck and fawning obsequiously over my blog readers. (This is a joke, I will ruck and fawn in equal measure with my clients and my readers).

Right now, things are moving along, albeit a little slower than I would like. Pace should pick up soon I hope though. I need an accountant, a finished website and some other bits and bobs (including a bloody internet connection, which is proving problematic in the new place). Once I have those things the rest should fall into place fairly easily (or at the least I'll feel better about things so the other stuff won't matter as much).

I'm excited about this new venture because it's allowing me the freedom to focus on the things that are most important to me. I'm under no illusions about the amount of hard work that will be involved, but I'm sure someone famous once said something about the work you love being no work at all.

Thanks again for all your patience with things guys. I'll be back with another post as soon as I can get online again. Although if the internet people don't sort it out in the next couple of days you may see me on the 24 hour news channel before you see me back here, accompanied by the scrolling announcement 'Manchester man reeks bloody revenge on ISP'...