My future is divided

Happy new year everyone and I hope you all have had a good start to 2023. As many do around the new year, I was reflecting on my current situation and for the first time since I left my previous job, it started to feel pretty clear.

Both during the first time when I took some time off work and now since I stopped my employment I have been searching for one thing that I will enjoy working with as well as something that can sustain me and my family financially. But what I have come to realise is that I will be doing several things.

My 3 current areas of focus:?

Yoga and Hiking retreats together with my wife Lisa -

Lisa has organised many yoga retreats before and she has always had a partner with whom she hosts the retreats. Since we moved to Mallorca she hasn’t found a partner so we started talking about if I could be her partner in this and what I can do. Hospitality is also something that I have felt drawn to for a long time, especially since I started my career working for a hotel chain in Sweden also since we used to Airbnb our spare room in Malta, I realised how much I enjoy hosting people and being part of making sure that they have a great vacation.

So we decided to combine one of my interests in hiking with Lisa’s yoga and create a retreat experience that incorporates many of the things Lisa and I love. Such as nourishing local food, walking in nature, doing yoga, and hosting people. Our first retreat will be now in January and it is sold out (Yippi), the second one will be in March and still has spaces available (A bit of advertising here but check out the retreat here)

Pay It Forward - The app

After my first blog post here on Linkedin, an old (not very close) friend reached out with a project that he and his wife had started working on and that they wanted to find a partner for. After he had read my thoughts about my dissatisfaction with corporate life he thought I could be a good addition to their team.

The project is to aid the growth of the circular economy by building a community-based marketplace where it is all about giving or paying it forward. The concept is widespread worldwide and exists as Facebook groups or badly built websites. Our idea (or to be honest Fredriks and Anne’s idea) is to build a platform that is tailored to this purpose. If you read Swedish you can read more about the project here, we hope to add an English version of the site soon.? Also, follow PIF here on LinkedIn.

For the last couple of months, me and the Pay It Forward (PIF) team have been working on building the app & we are now moving into an early testing phase. After that, we will release the beta version of the Pay It Forward app to a wider audience.

This is a project with a lot of heart and none of us are working full-time on it. We aim to do something good at the same time using the skills we have. I’m very excited to see where this project will go in 2023.

Marketing consultancy:

For the last couple of months, I have also helped a Dance and Yoga studio in Stockholm with their online marketing. The sisters who run the studio are friends of friends and I was open to helping them in an unpaid capacity mainly to see what I can do. I have been in charge of spending millions of ad dollars on both Facebook and Google, but for the last couple of years, I have not been very hands-on with setting up or running campaigns. So I thought this was a good opportunity to test my skills. Being a marketing consultant is definitely not something I want to do full time but it could be something that I spend a couple of hours a week on, and that can help with paying the bills. Who knows where this will lead but it has so far felt really good to be able to help out some friends and at the same time test my skills. If this leads to me taking on a few smaller clients in the future, I would probably be up for that.

Failed projects:?

I think it is important that we talk about failures too even though I don’t see my failures as failures but rather as a part of my exploration. Over the last 6 months, there have been 2 projects that I don’t think will turn into any business venture or into anything at all. The first is my limoncello making. I thought that maybe I would enjoy being an artisanal limoncello maker and that I would set up a little production here in Mallorca but the energy and will just weren’t there. I’m still making some limoncello but just as a hobby and I think that is the way it will stay.

Lisa and I also had some e-commerce ideas (body and face oils) that we researched quite a lot and that we turned up and down to try to make work. And financially I’m sure it can work (but it is a competitive industry) but the more we worked on exploring it, the less fun it felt, and once again the energy or the flow just wasn’t there to take the project into reality.

To Sum it all up: My future will be divided

It feels great and exciting to not only have found 1 avenue going forward but 3. My realisation over the last couple of weeks has been that that is how I want it. I don’t want to throw myself 100% into one project and I find it to be exciting to have several income streams rather than just one. We will see what happens with all these projects and maybe the challenge will be to keep balancing them as one or two of them start taking up more and more time. To be continued…