Starting a Foreign Business Series – Part 2
Hello fellow entrepreneurs!
Last week I started a new series about some of my experiences starting a business in another country. This week I’ll write about the process of moving to another country. What an adventure!
No matter which way you slice it, packing up your life and moving it somewhere else is a difficult process. We sold our house and most of our furniture, only keeping enough personal items that would fit in a 10ft x 20ft storage unit. We were planning on being in our new home in Europe for 12 to 18 months, so would purchase what we needed once we got there. Since my company was a startup, there was no money to hire companies that move people and their things. An investor stepped up to build us a suitable crate to hold all the things we were taking and arrange shipping by boat. We took the crate, filled mostly with tools and business stuff and a few personal effects, plus 9 additional rubbermaid tubs that would go with us by plane. That sounds like a lot, but when you reduce your life to 9 rubbermaid tubs, things start looking pretty grim. First world problems, right? It was quite an adventure finding the right company to ship our crate, and we found out it has to be made of special wood that’s hard to find. Who knew you can only send “special” wood on a boat to Europe?
The flight over was quite eventful. Despite traveling business class, we had to listen to a baby scream its head off the entire way, so nobody slept at all. My 5 year old daughter got food poisoning on the plane and was sick the rest of the way to our new home, through multiple flights. Amusingly, border guards do not allow you to carry an air sickness bag from the plane through security, when it has more then 100ml of “liquid” in it, even if they just witnessed you depositing said “liquid” into the bag seconds earlier. They made us throw out the only thing keeping my daughter from making a mess everywhere. I secretly hoped she would throw up right on the guards shoes, but I didn’t get that satisfaction. It seems there just isn’t any justice in this world.
Our personal stuff (9 rubbermaid tubs) had been lost in transit on the way over, so we showed up to our new (empty) home with only our carry-on and the clothes on our backs. Let me tell you, it’s not a pretty sight when a fuse in your wife’s brain pops. Rest assured, our luggage was delivered within a few days. Lost luggage is a great reason to travel with some critical things like medication and a change of clothes in your carry-on. We had to negotiate with a local pharmacy to get medication to carry us over until our personal items arrived. All part of the adventure right?
As it turns out, it’s a pretty big mistake to ship personal items and business items in the same crate. Evidently this causes European customs agents to have aneurysms and strokes and soil their pants, causing them to be downright grumpy. It turns out you need to have an inventory list with every single item, down to every wrench, nut, bolt, sock or underwear. When you don’t have that, all of a sudden the odds of them releasing your crate drastically decreases every minute. The business manager we had hired to help run our operation accompanied me almost everywhere and he saved the day. There was a lot of talking in the native language, and heated discussions. Eventually the customs agent reluctantly released the crate with all our stuff. There’s huge value in having a trusted local individual advocating for you in a new strange place.
With all of our personal things now in our possession, and our crate on the way to our place with the rest of our things (and the wife finding out how many great wines a European grocery store carries), we thought that we were through the worst of it.
This was just the beginning of our story there, with MANY more adventures to follow. Next week I’ll continue the story and reveal the next hurdles. I’m sure many of you are wondering about the coffee and the Soprano’s…but you’ll have to stay tuned for those. I promise they’ll be worth it!
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Until next time,
Ernst Bergen
B.Sc. Mech. Eng.