I only have a few weeks left in gainful employment and thoughts about what I might do next are coming into focus.

Despite it probably being the worst possible time for this I have decided to try and spin up a little ‘lifestyle’ business (well two-ish) rather than go in-house or take a contract/interim role.

I’m not going to rush into either of them – in fact my plan is to not officially launch either of them until January (maybe at Govcamp) and to do a bit of coaching / advisory / research work before that while I am working on getting all my ducks in a row.

The main idea is Digital by Default Academy. A training provider for ‘internet-era’ skills – initially based on product, delivery and agile comms courses (but with wider ambitions than that) aimed at public service people (or people from similar big, old, legacy organisations.) 

At the moment I am thinking of just four or five in-person, one-day courses split between Bristol, London and Manchester. I have ideas of the basic topics and shape of the courses but I want to take the time to design them properly and – and this is important – I don’t want to do this alone. My hope is that each course is created and delivered with a partner – bringing more than one perspective to things.

More than this idea of collaborating on the courses I also have this concept of the site promoting other courses from freelancers in my community – forever loyal to the network.

This will also be where I primarily promote my 1-2-1 and team coaching services. Though I’ll maintain my jukes.ie site as my personal, professional ‘identity’.

The other service I’m planning to launch has been a long time coming and probably won’t be a surprise to many. I’m going to finally set-up Digital by Default Jobs (digitalbydefault.jobs doesn’t point anywhere yet!) – a jobs board spin-off from my jobs newsletter. I’ve decided I’ve been overthinking it in the past so – assuming I can find a WordPress freelancer these days – I’m just going to build it based on WP Job Manager and the Job Stack Pro theme. The roles will be categorised according to the DDaT taxonomy and (I think) I will charge a flat £50 per month and will include options for permanent and contractor roles.

Obviously my newsletter and this blog will have to do a lot of heavy lifting promotion wise – especially given how broken social media is now – and honestly it is probably a bit crazy to try and become some kind of entrepreneur at 50. I’m not sure even across both ideas I’ll make much of a living but they seem like a fun couple of ideas to try out and if not now, when.

So this is the plan I think – I am speaking to a bunch of friends who have succeeded in making a living either as coaches or supporting their own products over the next few weeks/months to try and avoid too many silly mistakes but I figure I’m going to been stumbling for a while – should make for some fun weeknotes though!

Wish me luck 🙂