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I don't know whether I should write up a thread for this or not, but figured I should post here first for some advice on the feasability of it. My dad died a couple years back quite suddenly, and I was being groomed to go into a business area of my choosing under his guidance and experience (worked as a very successful international freight and shipping consultant for 30 years). Amongst other things, it left me adrift with no direction and no backup plan for what I wanted to do or where to start. Had a couple of lucky breaks recently, and I think I am getting back on my feet and ready to take some direction. Now, I worked in Africa qutie recently for a few months and made a good deal of contacts in law, engineering, construction, and government. I want to register a company, go back to my work area in Africa and work free of charge on various projects that I originally had a hand in starting (under a less than stellar programme that I would like to scrub off my CV). Then use that work experience under my private company name as a starting point to get into very low-level contracted work and progress from there. I understand that doing free work as a company de-values you, but I would be starting out at pretty much rock bottom anyway. Is this a feasible thing to do? If I have a reasonable number of past contracts, even though they are unpaid or at most extremely low-pay, under a registered company name with the contacts to back me up could I progress (albeit very slowly) to proper paid work? The work I am looking at is construction management primarily in poor and underdeveloped areas. Specifically basic architectural planning, brokering supply deals, negotiating funding and permissions, and actually managing the sites and workers. I actually did a drat good job whilst I was out there, and I have a pretty high personal bar for 'good job', but because of the lovely organisation I was employed under it gets dismissed by employers even though they had no hand in, or even knowledge of, most of what I was doing. I have a very cool project involving super-cheap shipping containers that would be areally great selling point for me, although dependant on funding from the state government. Basically 'I am very good at this thing but how do I prove to the people giving me money that I am very good at this thing'. (Also I realise it's not a textbook startup, but the idea should follow the same principles) Creepy Goat fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Oct 16, 2012 |
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Oct 16, 2012 23:29
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I know for certain the funds are there, there was around £350,000 a month completely unaccounted for that was meant to be channeled into public services. Expanding my contacts into national government would be tricky, but if I have my foot in the door at state-level then I should have a chance. The angle I was going for is exactly like you said, find people with money who want to gain political and social standing and then persuade them that my project(s) would be the most cost effective way to get the prestige they want. It is unfortunate that this is the best way to go about it, but whenever I pitched my plans to officials they always wanted to know what they would personally gain from them, even though the money was meant for public spending. The government is incredibly corrupt so you have to find a way to spin your negotiations so that it is personally favourable, either finacially or prestigiously, to the officials with all the cards in their hands. Eventually I would love to expand into disaster zones and conflict areas. Things like refugee shelters perhaps and safe-zones. I am driven by pride rather than huge profits, otherwise I'd just go into oil engineering or something. There were a huge number of jobs for example during the close of the Libyan civil war such as constructing communication posts and temporary medical facilities.
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Oct 17, 2012 10:24
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Hummer Driving human being posted:Creepy Goat, send me a pm or let me know how to contact you. Don't have plat, my email is *bleep*. lunatikfringe posted:Seems theres a lot of good ideas in this thread, what say we start organizing some entrepreneurial goon meets over coffee or drinks? Ughh I would love this, but I am across the pond. It's very difficult to find anyone to even have lighthearted business discussions with where I live, everyone is either a student at the two not-so-great universities and not interested, or fulltime retail workers. It's very stifling when you can't have casual face-to-face discussions about these things 
Creepy Goat fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 21:36
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