In 2013 I started Hydrakos Consulting with the idea that it would help me ease into retirement. It has worked out pretty much as I had planned. I’ve been fortunate to have good clients who liked my work enough to keep bringing me back – or not let me go for long periods. I am grateful to them. What I was not planning for was the length of what I considered a transition period after which I would stop working altogether. Hydrakos hits the 10 year mark this month. I don’t know what I would have said in 2013 was the amount of time I needed to complete the easing into retirement process but I’m pretty sure it would have been less than a decade.
Ten years is enough to learn what interests you and what doesn’t. What you would like to avoid and what you want to seek out. But being in business means you are selling something and therefore willing buyers are required. There are always trade-offs in that situation.
My first exposure to small business was watching my father struggle to feed four kids and pay the rent with the money he made selling antiques out of a storefront in a low-rent section of New Haven, Connecticut. For him buying and selling antiques was a labor of love and he kept at in one form or another his whole life.
While not everything about technology consulting has that kind of effect on me, I’ve been fortunate to have a large percentage of what I do be engaging and challenging. Maybe that’s why the endpoint for Hydrakos keeps its distance out on the horizon. That day is still somewhere off but no longer receding. As John Donne said in another context “Thine age asks ease…” And so it does but for now Hydrakos Consulting is open for business as it has been these last 10 years.
