Setting out a vision for the future

It is always a good chat with my business partner.  Both of us had cancer at the same time and surgery overlapped by a day or two.  Mine wasn't radical surgery - his was and so we both began to spend time chatting comparing notes and it's been cathartic because we were both going through similar symptoms and reactions and so we've helped each other along the way.  He is about 6 or 7 years my junior and this is an interesting age gap - he hasn't hit 50 yet and so we have different outlooks on where to go from here.  I've said before that I really want to just take things easy, make a living but on my terms as I've had so much time for myself and my needs and wants to have that taken away is one of the areas that I can see would affect my decisions.

Currently I am waiting to hear back from one job.  It's a pretty interesting job but would mean me becoming an employee again and I just don't know that I really, deep down inside, want that.  However I need to be a realist and to set out something for sticking some money into the bank account and allowing us to eat and pay the bills.  I'm a bit of a closet artisan really - I'd love to make money by making things, pottery, paintings, photographs, crafts and so on.  Of course I very much doubt that you'd actually pay the bills doing this for a living and you'd need a series of small enterprises to keep you going.  A chap in the village paints and sells prints of the originals but he also does commissions and he runs the weekly Jazz club too.  I think he just about keeps body and soul together doing that, you see his paintings all around the local area in pubs and clubs and exhibitions.  I'd certainly like to do something like that but of course you need to find you niche and then go for it.  

I think that the genealogy business will have three peak times per year, Christmas, Father's and Mother's Day.  I can see some times when it will be quiet and then I'll need to substitute doing something else in its place and I could set up a couple of small businesses aimed at the clubs and social market.  It would be something along the line of targeted marketing and selling on personalised items that they can use for fund-raising etc.  I know there is a market or an appetite for these sorts of things as many people ask me whether I can source things like pens and personal pepper pots etc.  It might be another line to pursue especially as I have friends who are engravers and another who runs a personalisation business.

I will work on this from next week when I get back from Scotland.