Life Updates - Why I left Germany & What's Next
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When I chat with students and followers, I realize I've done a pretty terrible job of keeping you updated on what's really going on behind the scenes of my business and my life, and I thought it's time I fixed that!
So buckle up for the most HONEST post I've ever written...
In fact it's so honest that I asked one of my teamies after I'd recorded it if she thought it was "too honest"... she said she loved the peek behind the scenes, so we can blame Helen for this one if it all goes wrong 😉
So in the last little while, we bought a house, got partway through renovating it, then decided to move countries mid-renovation.
I started a German corporation, which cost 35,000 euros only to shut it down a couple of months later.
I dealt with the toughest year in my business ever. Then bust out with our most successful launch ever to the tune of ...
$200,000 in sales in an hour.
It's been A TIME to say the least!
Clearly I have lots to catch you up with, but first I wanna tell you about my new neighborhood in London.
The things I love about our neighborhood most are
There's so many different beautiful styles of architecture here.
We're really close to a park and it's honestly pretty quiet. The subway station is a bit of a hike away, which isn't so convenient if you wanna get into Central London. But because our area is so badly connected, it also doesn't tend to be as busy and overwhelming like it is in central London (you can tell I'm into my 30s now where the quiet life is just the ticket!).
The neighborhood has some incredible cafes to work from (I love that London café life!)
I didn't know a lot about the different areas of London. But once we moved, I realized we picked the perfect location. I also have a membership at a co-working space in Central London, which I go to one or two days a week so I get the best of both worlds...
But I still love working from my most tried and true location...
That is, of course, my couch!
Now you might be wondering,
Paige - why did you move to London when you just bought a house in Germany?
Great question.
To be honest, I didn't love living there.
I remember a follower messaged me on Instagram and they said, Ugh, I wish I met a German guy in a bar who just wished me away to live in Europe.
And I honestly didn't have the heart to tell her at the time that I was going through some serious struggles with living in Germany.
I could say without a doubt, trying to get myself to learn German was the most challenging thing I have EVER done 🤯. And the reason for that wasn't actually that the language is difficult or complicated.
The fact was that I had one foot on the gas and one on the brake the entire time.
Trying to get myself to learn German, I felt less than no motivation to learn the language. When I think about the things that I wanted to do that day, learning German just did not make the list anywhere.
I spent years trying to figure out how to motivate myself to want to learn it. I legitimately was Googling and reading about how to motivate yourself to do something you just don't want to do, and how to change your attitude towards something that you hate.
And I just kept coming up empty.
I also had a lot of really annoying experiences 😡 with other people's opinions and expectations of me learning German, which only made me hate having to learn the language even more.
Now, my German challenge affected every aspect of my life.
I wanted to integrate into life there, but kept putting off joining a sports team or going to a coworking space. Cause I figured that my German wasn't good enough...
And my German did incrementally improve, but I never became fully confident speaking it and so I never really integrated into life there, and was always kind of like living on the outside of life.
It felt like life was happening "over there" and I was standing here watching it, but I wasn't a part of it.
So after my German struggles... I would reluctantly again sign up for another German class, because I really did want to make it work. But my foot was on the brake, not actually wanting to do it as I did it.
And I honestly did this for years.
Slowly getting better at the language, but also facing more and more problems operating in the country...
And if anything, my frustration with living there and resentment to the country, just grew and grew and grew.
The longer it went on for, I realized I genuinely didn't like the person that I had become... I was often upset with my situation, even though it was completely of my own making and weirdly, I also started to feel like a different person when I was in Germany and not one which I liked... one bit.
I'm naturally chatty and I like to crack lots of bad jokes (as you probz know by now), and I just love having interesting conversations and meeting people.
But my fear of speaking German led me to be a homebody, to feel more timid and shy than I would be normally. And like an uninteresting version of myself.
So when I was in Germany, I didn't like who I was becoming.
And anytime I went home to Canada, I just felt like me again.
Life was just so easy at home and so not easy in Germany.
And then we bought a house, which took the whole problem to a whole other level.
Before this, I could totally chit-chat with you at a dinner party for an hour in German and do my shopping and stuff.
But I wasn't capable of admin things like managing my own health insurance or buying a car for myself, or the 40 other daily adult tasks that you just have to deal with as an adult.
So my husband did all of those things. He didn't love doing it, and I didn't love being incapable of doing it. And this became super apparent when we bought our house...
Managing the legal aspects of buying a house there, which is by the way, waaaay more complex and lengthy and a bureaucratic process than back home, wasn't something I could do.
So it fell to my husband. And then on top of managing my life administration, his life administration, my entrepreneurial administration, which the more successful I became, the more complicated and time intensive that got (successful entrepreneur strugglez are real 😂) my husband also had managing a really complex house purchase on his plate...
And then we also decided to do a renovation.
Oh, and the whole house-buying process was also way more complicated because of me, because apparently, banks don't love giving mortgages to foreigners with visas that will expire in a year and who are also self-employed. So the buy-in process was...
Another level.
So like I said, then we decided to renovate before we moved in, which made sense logically because installing flooring after moving in is a pain.
But then this involved coordinating a zillion different contractors, which also got added to my husband's plate.
We quickly realized both of us were super unhappy with the situation.
Buying the house, made us realize our life and work setup was not working for us. And of course, at this point we were considering children, and of course with children comes more work and administration, which just did not feel like something that we could handle.
And this was also the time that I started to hear more than a few horror stories about international relationships and children.
Through my travels, I had met a few people who had had children with people from other countries. The marriages failed, and then the foreigner became stuck in the country, unable to leave. I knew this wouldn't necessarily happen to me, but I was already not loving being there, and the idea of being stuck there forever against my will was genuinely terrifying.
And then finally, there's one other aspect that was happening this entire time, which was a significant factor in the choice to move, and that was
Germany's business laws and corporation instruction options.
If I got fully into this topic, this would be about a seven hour rant (and I know you don't need that!)
And while I will admit fully my own failings, I just don't really see the purpose of hating on the German government in this video. I don't think they're about to change their laws and corporation structures anytime soon.
So I'll just summarize this by saying, well, Germany's lack of business friendliness was a major, major factor from the moment I got there until the moment I left. I'm just gonna skip over that whole aspect in this video (it's for the best!), but just know the other things that I've talked about were literally peanuts in comparison to the problems which I had operating as an entrepreneur there.
Now the funny thing is when people hear that we moved, they often assume it had something to do with taxes. But as I hope you can see from everything, which I have explained, that was genuinely never a factor in this decision at all.
The tax difference between Germany and the UK is pretty minimal and the UK has a much higher cost of living. So financially at the end of the day, it doesn't make a difference to our personal budget.
And if you're wondering why we chose the UK 🇬🇧 , there were actually a few reasons.
We love its location and proximity to Europe.
All my family is also from the uk, so culturally it's very homey to me.
I did an exchange semester here in university and I just loved the people and the country
I love it being English speaking as well.
It also has solid American style corporation options, and I personally just love how digital their entire government infrastructure is, and having come from a country that still uses fax machines, that was just SO WONDERFUL.
Plus airport wise, Heathrow Airport is a fantastic airport, and that actually becomes a really major factor in your decision when you choose to live abroad is ease of getting home 🛫!
Now operating our lives and businesses here has been like skipping through a field of flowers, and I am so, so grateful for the UK for taking us in.
So the long and short of it is I didn't love living in Germany. I found operating as an entrepreneur there beyond impossible.
So I decided living there just was not worth it. Even if we had bought a house and just renovated it. A lot of people questioned our decision, especially since we had just bought the house.
But I learned a very valuable life lesson in the entire process, which I would recommend to everyone, and that is that sunk costs and other people's opinions are an awful guide for making decisions in your life.
Moving has truly been one of the most beautiful changes in my life, and I'm so grateful that we're here now.
Back to the house renovation for everyone who asked.
We got partway through the renovation and furnishing when we decided to move, so it did take a good while from when we decided to actually getting on a plane and moving. In that time, we polished up any projects that were part way and scrapped some future renovation and furnishing plans.
We were able to take down some really god-awful wallpaper 😂, repaint, do some electrical work, change the flooring, and completely overhaul the backyard. That was probably the biggest thing we did before moving abroad, which was so much fun and so satisfying, and it was such a joy to see a vision come to life regardless if we don't actually live there anymore!
We really hope whoever lives there next loves the changes that we made.
London Life
But now we're in London, we have new projects to focus on from having lived abroad in a few different countries. I know that if you just make friends with other internationals and expats, they move and then you have to go make friends again in another couple years...
So while we've made a ton of expat friends already, they're super easy to get to know, we definitely are very conscious of making an effort to meet English locals as well.
The other thing happening in my life is weddings and babies...
Not mine, but my friends! This summer when I went back to Canada, I could definitely tell how everyone is entering a whole new phase and seeing that we're not in it I've gone ahead and made
the bucket list of bucket lists!
There are so many exciting adventures and business goals that I have ahead.
I want to learn how to sail across the Atlantic myself.
Write in a dressage competition
Go on a 10 day meditation retreat
Become a morning person
Write a book equally as impactful on the industry as Tim Ferris's Four Hour Work Week,
and... drum roll please... 🥁🥁🥁
grow my YouTube channel to a hundred thousand subscribers
Now let me explain that last one and the "why" behind it, because this has been a massive focus for myself and my team behind the scenes.
My business size and following have always been hidden numbers, just inherently from the marketing strategies, which I've chosen up until now.
So I'm not on social media. I blog and I built an email list, which only I and my team can see the numbers for... from the outside, I don't think it's really possible to tell the size of this business, which to me up until recently was totally fine.
But I realized lately that actually can become a little bit of a problem.
I was chatting with a friend who told me that she was just texting with Pat Flynn about business, to which I asked, how the hell did you get Pat Flynn's number?
And she apparently just got in touch on Instagram and because of her huge Instagram following and her coupla best-selling books, she just looks super legitimate online and therefore can get in touch with anyone and have them get back to her.
Which then when I thought about it, I realized maybe that social proof and a public follower count does really have some really useful benefits to your business outside of just stroking your own ego.
So that was just one reason for choosing YouTube.
It's a public subscriber and viewer account, and with time as that grows, that also opens doors. The other reason I chose YouTube is that it replaces the personal aspect, which I'm missing in my business from not being on social media.
A video on Youtube has that personal, relationship-building element that is less present in a blog post. With a Youtube video you basically get the relationship of social media without being on social media...
You also get that without being online when you create it. So when I'm shooting a video, it's just me and a camera, and I'm not connected like you are when you're on social.
So YouTube to me is kind of like an offline online marketing strategy, which I love!
I've also been personally loving watching YouTubers really recently. Before, on YouTube, it just seemed like some sort of place for brain-dead cat videos or shallow beauty blogging, and that was just never really something I wanted to create.
But lately, as I've been seeing YouTubers creating really intelligent, interesting, thought-provoking content and showing me that that kind of content can also be really successful on the platform, it's really made me want to do it myself.
Now if you haven't noticed, I'm currently a long way off from my goal of getting to 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.
I'm almost 96,000 subscribers away, which is great!
I have a solid challenge ahead of me, and if there's something I love, it's a solid challenge, which I can overcome as long as it's not speaking German.
That one, I just never got the excitement of overcoming. As you all now well know.
And here's the thing which I love about this. My followers often see me as way ahead of them, with thousands of students and millions in sales, and they just think like, "oh, well I could never get there... she started earlier, she had a head start. It was different back then".
And there's a hard lesson there, which I learned coming onto this platform specifically, and that's that having an audience already doesn't actually give you as much of a leg up on YouTube as you might think!
Someone who I follow over on Youtube, Caitlin James, a photographer. She mentioned in one of her videos about what she learned when she started her YouTube channel and that you can have an email list of a hundred thousand and huge, huge social media following, and it still takes serious time and effort to grow a YouTube channel, and I've definitely found that to be true.
YouTube people are different people, so your followers from another channel just might not be into watching you on YouTube, and that's totally great because it means I can get in front of a whole new audience!
It also means I'm starting from mostly where others are too! And so I really wanna bring you along for that ride. I feel like this is the perfect opportunity to bring you behind the scenes and share what I'm learning as I grow this channel to my goal of a hundred thousand.
This is basically your chance to get inside my brain and see how I'm overcoming the challenges of growing a new YouTube channel. And if you're considering getting on YouTube for your business, then this will be gold for you.
It's kinda like having your own personal crash test dummy. You can sit there all cozy on your couch while I go out and do the thing the hard way and bring you back my takeaways!
So as I marked my way to a hundred thousand subscribers, I'm going to be sharing updates with those who get on my 100 K club list.
And though I don't expect this is going to be a walk in the park and I expect it'll take me a good long while to reach my goal. I have something very special to motivate me...
My bottle of Necker Island Champagne!
This is the bottle of champagne, which I got when I traveled to Richard Branson's Necker Island. The man is a baller, and instead of just getting any old champagne to serve on his private island, he decided to get his own branded champagne.
So I took a bottle home as my Necker souvenir and decided I would only open it when I hit a business goal and overcame a challenge deserving of this beautiful thing so...
When I hit a hundred thousand subscribers, I'm popping this beauty.
So this is gonna live in my apartment for a little while now.
Now, there are a few things I already know for my years of consistent blogging that will be essential to me actually achieving my 100,000 subscriber goal, and that is
Having a clear plan of what content I'm creating next.
Specifically, having a good system for storing all my content ideas so I never run out of them, and really organizing the workflow of creating all of the content, which means
I need a really freaking organized editorial calendar
If you've been struggling to create consistent content in your Biz. An editorial calendar is the solution, so watch this video next to learn how I organize my editorial calendar inside Asana.
To find out more about what's going on at PB HQ, make sure you join the 100K Club...
And whilst you’re at it, subscribe to my channel to make sure never to miss another juicy life update & catch all of the great content we have planned for the next few months!
