How to Move Your Base
If you’re excited by a challenge and determined to stretch your resources beyond what you are sure you already know, I recommend the program described below to prepare yourself for living and working overseas. Again, you will need even more time and energy and openness for some places than you do for the “average” overseas destination.
Not hastily! Remember, we’re talking about a year of preparation time. Don’t skimp! That’s time and work.
Explore
First of all, see what countries, cities, peoples, and cultures interest you. Separate these from those that you think ought to interest you (List B) or that others tell you must interest you (List C), then discard Lists B and C.
Research, Stretch, Take a Deep Breath
Immediately, even before you organize a plan, switch on your network, get the support, ideas and advice of your friends, acquaintances, associates, hired help and everyone you can.
Baltimore–based Michael Bryant, the brains and force behind Career Transition Services and best career advisor I’ve known, provided indispensable insight, strategies and inspiration for years before I’d heard of Singapore. My new destination and need for untried approaches left him unfazed — and merely called out still more creativity and practical ideas.
Keep in mind that it is not only to find suitable clients and work opportunities overseas that you will be working hard. In the process, you are also learning about the culture and preparing yourself mentally for living in such a place.
Settle On Your Destination Country
Select one “target” country. The meter on the 12 months that you have set aside starts running the day you begin research and stops the day you start your first project or job in your overseas destination. Expect to make 400 contacts with individuals, at least half in real time. That way you can hear and/or see the person and experience your own and others’ reactions to you being heard and seen.
Use All Your Connections — ALL!
Use all your connections: your employer, if any; your friends, acquaintances and business associates — those based in the target country as well as those in your current town and across your country and elsewhere. Follow up with individuals, agencies, and companies that you are referred to.
Even though you’re busy at your current business or job, set aside a great deal of time to identify and read books, articles and online material relevant to employment, business conditions and local culture. If you can hire a friend or someone to help you with the research, so much the better. Get hold of newspapers and magazines from the target country. See if you can find out how to obtain membership directories for organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce in the target country.
Use the Internet!
For example, if you are looking for a job (as opposed to trying to set up a business) in the UK, you can get a list of agencies, online services, magazines and newspapers and quite a few ideas from Jill Newton’s Finding a Job as a Technical Communicator in the UK.
Visit the Target Country
Go to the target country four to six months before you intend to begin living there. This isn’t optional.
Meet with, Talk with Dozens of People There
Expect to have three dozen live, wide–ranging job–related conversations. Meet with as many of the individuals as you can; use the telephone for the others. If there is a local STC or a similar organization, meet with individuals and try to learn what conditions are and what approaches to take.
If there is a local STC chapter, you can get the contact information from the Chapter Presidents and Advisors Web page.
Keep in mind that no single individual is a fully reliable causeway to the truth. The first STC member I got hold of on my preliminary visit to Singapore told me not to bother applying to one particular department (which, as it happened, was where he worked); I unfortunately believed him and did not wind up with a job in that department until 13 months later.
Get Ahold of Membership Directories
Bring back from your target country directories for the Chamber(s) of Commerce and several business councils. These councils are often groups of “local” businesses (often subdivided by language or culture) or foreign (“multinational”) businesses. You may be able to find a book providing background and contact information on American companies, another on European companies, a third on Japanese companies.
Don’t forget to leave room in your suitcase for white and yellow pages for cities or regions in your target country.
Return to your old base and follow up endlessly
Write, fax, phone and/or email the people you've spoken with as well as those listed in the directories, yellow pages, or even newspaper ads — get a feel for how people do business there.
Help from the STC
Whether or not there is a local STC in your target country, use the international organization for information, ideas about how to proceed, the names of individuals who could be useful either here or there, and technological tricks you haven't thought of or that didn’t exist last year.
Carrying out a process like this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. In the end, it was colossally satisfying: I felt almost like I’d been asleep for a couple of decades.
And as far as the initial search for clients went, there was no dearth of results: I wound up with one full–time project and one full–time job. Completing negotiations took 7 months with HP; and 5½ months with the National University of Singapore. And carrying out both jobs for the first several months required something like 90 hours a week. It took me another half year to find someone to help with the manual writing, to make my life more bearable. But in this way I got myself into management more and more.
Commit
You need to commit yourself to being in the country for 2½ years at the least.
You need that time to get into the new place and get something going before you’re thinking about the next place.
Don’t Worry
As the woman says, Worry is not Preparation. Don’t exhaust yourself and use too much time worrying or responding to bureaucratic matters — especially once you’re there. Spend the preparation time in advance! Once you’ve arrived you need your time and energy to do what you came to do.
Picking Up
Don’t count on having a set of enrolled clients or a job before you arrive — though a job is sometimes a useful and in some respects an easier way to prepare to base a business overseas. (On the other hand, it can be just as difficult to come by such a job as by the clients in the time before you actually demonstrate that you have arrived, that you’re there and you “mean business.”) But even with nothing firmly in hand, you’ll have a decent sense of the lay of the land and how to follow–up, whether you seek clients for your business or a full–time job.
Allow plenty of time for your departure from the old place. Start your main countdown list several months in advance. Get support, organizing ideas and maybe even physical help from your friends and co–workers. Don’t expect any particular "reliable" thing to go smoothly: once my Baltimore–Singapore plane had taxied out toward the runway and my friends had long abandoned the airport, the plane returned to the gate so that my fellow passengers and I could de–plane and wait for a better–functioning aircraft.