Tonight is my final night in Kuopio (Finland) as we’re moving to new office, and new home in Sumiainen tomorrow. I have to admit that I feel a bit sentimental, somewhat scared, but also very excited. One of my mentors in the past said a business person should reinvent him/her-self and set new challenges every 5 years; and that’s roughly the time I’ve been running my business and living in Kuopio with my family.
So, where’s the catch? Why move from a city of 90,000 citizens to small municipality of 1,300 citizens?
For me, enhancing quality of life is possibly the biggest factor behind the move…One of the things I rarely hear talked in the SEO & SEM industry (or in computing generally), are long term, personal goals. What do you expect from your life? What you do professionaly in 2020 / 2030? Are you happy with your current lifestyle etc? These are hard questions for anybody; and even harder if your living depends entirely on an unestablished industry like SEO/M.
These may be very personal questions, but they are also the ones that define how successful a person is / will be. The higher you set the personal goals, the more likely it is that success will follow since there's a source of motivation other than money.
I don’t know if people already inside the SEO/M industry realize how lucky we are, and how much we owe to the search engine industry (and yet we blame them most of the time, why?). After all, this is one of the very few business types where anyone, anywhere in the world, with the right motivation and limited assets has the possibility to build a meaningful and successful global/local business. Nobody says it will be easy and it is definitely not going to make every person filthy rich (though most hope for it). It’s just one pretty wicked cool way to make a living, and I'm very proud about it.
Times are though changing, and I honestly don’t know if SEO/M will be there in year 2032 when I need to pay the final mortgage payments, but that’s life. Hopefully the world of 2032 still needs enthusiastic geeks.
Thanks to all the folks and search engines who have helped me in making this possible.
See you soon (if & when we get all the boxes unpacked and new wireless system is up and running).
It is hard to predict how the search engines will work in ten, twenty or thirty years, so there is little to foretell here on the profession. That's why we are only left with focusing on our personal life and that's good, too.
Good luck on settling there. It must be real fun to live in a small town anyway.
Hi Keijo, generally speaking it's rare to hear people speak about these issues. In 1994 I gave up a pretty fancy job as a project engineer at the European Space Agency in Holland and moved back to Italy (I had left 5 years earlier).
I started working in this industry and bet everything I had on the Web. What made it even more challenging was my decision to move to a small town in the province that notoriously is slower at embracing new technologies and cultural shifts.
I did it because I felt that in the long run, if I made it, it would have been a better place to live for me and my family - 12 years down the line I was right but it was a hell of an adventure !!
I see there are many more opportunities for those operating in major cities like Milano or Rome but I simply refuse to live there.
So I can really relate to your mood and feelings in this moment - it might help to know someone else has been down that same path before you.
As per SEO and where it will be some years down the line it's an interesting question nobody can answer.
You know, I find an answer to this kind of question by looking back at what I was doing 7 years ago and what I am doing now - Things have changed significantly and they will continue to evolve, people will always need professionals to help them - what's important today and will be tomorrow is our capability to understand and embrace paradigm shifts and make something the ordinary guy can understand and is willing to invest (and bet) on
Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about these things and good luck on your move !
Sante
Have a safe move, Keijo. It's great that you're thinking long term and upgrading your quality of life when the industry is booming. I think we'll all need to recognize that boom/bust cycles are inevitable and plan ahead for how we'll stay profitable in the future.
I know that as we've grown from 3 to 8 employees, keeping the payroll stable and the company afloat has become a bigger weight than ever. Knowing how much people rely on you, not just as customers, but also for a living, is a new challenge for me.