Business advisor finds new niche in travel writing as he sets up office in Spain

Colin Bielckus usually runs his business, Outsourced Finance Director, from his home in Whiteley, but since October he has been working from the home he rents in Spain.

The 64-year-old suffers from arthritis and rheumatism, which causes him pain during the winter as his joints stiffen up, so he decided to ditch the cold and up sticks to sunny Estepona.

Colin said: ‘My wife Lorraine and I visited Estepona in February and decided it was the place for us, so we put our house on the market.

‘We came back in September with the plan to stay for the foreseeable future. I came back home for a week to get everything I needed to be able to work out here and I’ve now been here permanently since the beginning of October.’

Colin, who now also runs a travel blog alongside his day-to-day job, has found that it has been just as easy to run a business - which has a client base in the Portsmouth area - from Spain as it is to run it from Whiteley.

He said: ‘I called all my clients and made sure they didn't mind me working from over here and none of them had a problem at all.

‘Nowadays, everything is done over Zoom or FaceTime, which is how I took a lot of my meetings anyway, so as long as I have wifi I can work just as easily. It helps that there’s not a big time difference, too.’

Colin’s daughter, Penelope, runs her own travel blog, The Flyaway Girl.

She helps Colin and Lorraine run their blogs, The Flyaway Mum and The Flyaway Dad.

Since moving abroad, Colin’s aches and pains have significantly eased and he has even started walking four miles every day and feels like he’s lost around a stone and a half.

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Colin said: ‘I’ve been saying for about a decade that I could run my business from anywhere in the world, but Covid has taught me that I really can. With the majority, if not all, of businesses operating online now, it’s possible to make it happen.

‘It has had a really positive effect on us and I’d recommend it to anyone who can make it work.’

A message from the Editor, Mark Waldron

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