My retirement status… and what it means…

So is Uncle Daryl retired, semi-retired,  or what? Yea, I’ve been confused too, but I finally figured it out.

I’m retired three weeks out of every four.

One of the beauties of running your own consulting firm is no mandatory retirement date. And when you do retire, you don’t need to come to a complete halt.

You can taper off, pick and choose the stuff you still like to do, and hand the rest off to colleagues. But you can still be engaged with interesting work.

This is exactly what I’ve done. For the last several years, I pulled back from consulting (aka fire-fighting) but remained involved with training and publishing.

That worked well until my business partner died last year. He enjoyed the panic situations — in fact, his idea of a good time was when the call came in at 9 AM and he was on a plane at 4 PM. Me? Not so much.

So when Bill passed away, I was left wondering what to do.

The solution was to set up a stable of vetted consultants, and then pass the leads along.

To keep it simple, no money changes hands. The goals are simply to help our clients, and to help our younger colleagues (and a few not so young) with their businesses. So far it has worked well.

At the same time, I remain active with training – which I consider “group consulting.” With only one engineer now in the firm, the training load went up. But to keep my sanity (and to keep my wife happy) I limit classes to not more than one per month.

So far that has worked well too. April was the first month in a long time with no class, and I’m almost fully booked through 2016.

How long will this continue? I don’t know, but I’m flexible.

I’ve always enjoyed training. There is nothing quite like seeing the “light go on” a student’s eyes. Even Warren Buffet agrees — when asked how he would like to be remembered, he answered, “As a teacher.” Plus training allows one to set a schedule well in advance – no panic calls at 9 AM.

What about the three weeks per month of retirement? Pretty busy there.

• I’m still winding down Kimmel Gerke Associates, the consulting firm. A new web site now archives much of our IP – articles, newsletters, books, and more. Much is free.

• The JumpToConsulting project remains a high priority. I’ve got some ideas that I’m about to roll out, so if you are interested in consulting,  please stick around.

• The rest of the time I plan to spend goofing off — playing with the grandkids, the dog, and traveling in the RV with my bride of almost 50 years.

Retired three weeks – working one week – it works for me. The consulting life is great!

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