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Meet Debbie Jenkins: a Queen of Reinvention. Debbie’s courage to reinvent herself over and over, and to take risks in search of her passion and desired lifestyle, serves as a true inspiration to any of us who have ever wondered if reinventing ourselves at home or abroad, was possible.
Since the early 1980's, Debbie Jenkins has worked as an electronics engineer, a recruitment consultant, a public speaker, a sole trader, a partner, an employer, an advertising agent, a dot.com slayer, a business guru, an IT consultant, a marketing advisor and an IT lecturer. She has spoken on radio and been featured in national (UK) and local press. She’s had the opportunity to help individuals, small businesses and big corporations to make money and save money – all the time, having enormous fun.
Debbie now lives as an Expat Woman in Spain, running her innovative businesses: and – and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
ExpatWomen's Interview with Debbie
ExpatWomen: Debbie, can you please start by telling us about where you are living as an Expat and why you are living there?
Debbie: I live in the hills above a village in rural Murcia, Spain. I have a cave house (which is being refurbished) and am surrounded by hundreds of olive and almond trees!
I used to live in the inner city of Birmingham (where there seem to be more muggers and drug dealers than trees) with my husband Marcus and I ran my online marketing business from big offices in the city centre.
The business was thriving but driving to the office day after day, sitting in rush hour traffic, breathing everybody else's exhaust fumes and working longer and longer hours (getting in early and leaving late to avoid the worst of the traffic) wasn't my idea of paradise.
In fact, the more 'successful' the business became, the less happy I became. My original goal for starting a business was to be my own boss and have more freedom. But taking on employees and growing a business, where you effectively swap your time for money, actually led to less freedom and less free time.
My brother and co-director, Joe Gregory, was also unhappy with how our 'success' was affecting our lives. Rather than using the business to improve our quality of life we were trapped in jobs, of our own making, that we didn't want. Worst of all we couldn't even just leave or fire ourselves!
So, we decided the madness couldn't continue and so we worked out what our 'Perfect Day' would look like and whatever we decided to do with the business next would need to lead us closer to our perfect day and not further away from it.
As a result of this 'Perfect Day Session' we decided to make drastic changes. The first being our business (see questions 5 & 6) and the second being our environment.
In 2005 I moved with my husband to Spain. We didn't have electricity for the first 9 months, and made do with generators and batteries. Both of us still working for our respective companies. It was a challenge, but we did it.
ExpatWomen: What do you love about your new expat location and why?
Debbie: It's difficult to begin to say what I love about our new expat location - there's just so much!
The People - we live in a rural area of Spain (1km from a small village in Murcia), with very few other expats, so we've had to learn to get on with our new Spanish neighbours and integrate into village life. The village has just 101 people, including us. We've found nothing but friendship, fun and help from everyone we've met.
The Environment - surrounded by mountains (did I mention the trees?), 1/2 an hour from the sea (where we dive for 9 months of the year), easy access to a major (and incredibly beautiful) city and 2 good airports. In summary, the environment suits us just fine.
The Weather - we still get winter and rain but now it's a welcome excuse to put on the 'Winter Wardrobe' rather than an oppressive bane to our existence. It rains - a lot - in the UK and even in Summer you can never be sure whether it's going to stay bright and dry long enough to plan. Here it is much better.
The Food - the 'good things' in life such as wine and high quality local food are in plentiful supply which means a healthy diet is easier and cheaper to maintain here.
The Pace of Life - Being Brits we still rush around trying to get things done yesterday - old habits die hard - but on the whole the people we live amongst seem less stressed and more interested in the important stuff like family, friends and enjoying yourself.
ExpatWomen: You've gone so far as to write a book and even start a website about your location. Can you please tell us some more about what motivated you to do this, how the innovative website idea works, and how both of these projects are going?
Debbie: When we were looking at moving to Murcia we used all the usual sources: the library; guide books; tourist board sites; the Internet. What we found was either short on content, biased or written with a hidden agenda behind it (usually by estate agents).
And the amount of poor information was particularly extensive on the, as yet undiscovered (and as a result unspoilt), Murcia region. So little accurate, up to date information was available. You could say until recently that Murcia was the forgotten region of Spain. So, we decided to write about our own experiences and share them with other people and wrote 'Going Native In Murcia' which is still the most comprehensive guide on Murcia in print.
However, what we created, even though it was good (I'm so modest), was still just based on our experiences and research. And we just couldn't find the time to go investigating all those little restaurants and clubs! So, we decided that it would be great to let other people have their say. Let them tell us what was great about Murcia, what they liked, what they didn't like, what new restaurants had opened, etc... And that's how the idea for NativeSpain.com was born.
Over the next 2 years we aim to publish collaborative printed guides on every region in Spain. What makes these books different though is they are being written by the very people who visit and live in the regions covered. We call this concept of creating a community of people writing on a particular subject BookWorking™.
So far we have about 7 regional editors (the people who encourage people to share their experiences and edit the content into a manageable book at the end) on board. We're big into sharing and will be giving a credit (and 'author discounts') to every member of the site who contributes in the relevant guides as well as giving our Regional Editors up to 55% of the profit generated from advertising and book sales for their region.
It's essentially a 'social publishing project' complete with all the important stuff like personal profiles, diaries and forums. The books will be unique because they're not written by just a couple of 'experts' but a whole community of people with varying opinions, tastes and experiences.
ExpatWomen: Do you have any tips for women who want to start businesses abroad, particularly in relatively remote locations such as yours?
Debbie:
- Get Connected! The only way is to be connected – with people, organisations, government, the Internet – you can’t do this alone. Use all your connections to help you make it work.
- PLAN. Think through the consequences before you take the leap, have plans in place and then have some back-up plans.
- Be Flexible. Be prepared to change all and any of your plans! The idea that just because you’ve invested so much money, effort and time on a project you should carry on is stupid. If you gave something your best shot and yet you know you’re in the wrong business, be prepared to burn your bridges and start something new.
- Have a Routine. Living somewhere new and exciting can be enough of a distraction, let alone not having a boss. So it’s important to set yourself rules and get into the ‘work habit’ as quickly as possible.
- Your Business Should Work For You – Not The Other Way Round. Your business should be a vehicle for making quality of life better, richer and more rewarding. Businesses want to grow but not all people want to run a BIG business (I hated it). So be strong and resist the urge to ‘grow just for the sake of it’. It’s your business, so make it work for you and don’t become a slave to it.
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| ExpatWomen: Can you please tell us about your pre-Expat life? |
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Debbie:
Well, that's a big question, here's a potted history of the last 15 years, I guess you don't want to hear about my gymnastics certificates from when I was nine years old?
I spent years training as an electronics engineer and went on to work for several companies including British Telecom, a computer manufacturer and a seedy slot machine company.
Although this had led to a reasonable level of ‘financial success’, my life wasn't so great. Sitting in front of a computer screen in a windowless office drawing pictures of circuit-boards for 40+ hours of my life a week was making me miserable.
So, when I was headhunted by a manufacturing recruitment consultancy I jumped at the chance for a change and soon found I had a knack for matchmaking, creating win-wins and making money in the process. Of course, as a child, I never ever thought, “I want to be a recruitment consultant when I grow up.” And so after a few years as the company’s top fee earner I was yearning to sack my boss and go it alone – but definitely not in recruitment.
At the time, the world wide web was just starting to be taken seriously and my, then out-of-work, graphic designer brother, Joe, had developed a knack for creating websites.
So, putting my matchmaking skills into practice again, I convinced my boss to have a company website designed by my brother. The increase in business my boss achieved as a result and the amount of money my brother earned for a relatively small amount of his time stirred my entrepreneurial ambitions further, although it was almost another year before I had saved enough money to make the leap.
I got thinking with my husband Marcus about the perfect online marketing business. I called Joe who was then working for an ad agency in Birmingham to see if he’d go into business with me. He agreed and so I left my job and sacked my boss.
For the first three months of our business Joe carried on in his job and would pop to my house at weekends, evenings and on his lunch break to design our business cards, website and letterheads. I’d spend every day tapping contacts and calling people up to see if I could sell them on the idea of using a website – it worked and once we had enough contracts to keep us going my brother could finally hand in his notice too and work on the business full time. |
ExpatWomen: You started Bookshaker.com. Can you please tell us how that came about, why it is different to other book sites, and how you are able to run that business from your 'remote' location in Spain?
Debbie: After a while running the Online Marketing company (Cabal Group) we became unhappy. We didn’t want to admit it but we’d created a business that enslaved us, not a business we loved. Rather than give up we kept plodding on – but without the same passion that had got us to where we were and things began to fall apart.
Out of necessity we made lots of our staff redundant, dumped the large offices and started rebuilding ourselves and the business the way we needed to. We wrote our first book The Gorillas Want Bananas. The acclaim it got us kept us in business and made us a nice profit again but we were still stuck as a service business, swapping our time for money.
This was a challenge – we knew that if we had traditional clients, in a service business (which was what we had started out doing) then we would never be able to escape – we would always be needed by them.
After a while operating in ‘survival mode’ we sat down and decided what a Perfect Day would look like: what we’d be doing; where we’d be living; who we’d be with; and how we’d be spending our time. This Perfect Day session gave us the spark we needed to reinvent ourselves, use the skills we’d developed and have a lot more fun. We set out to get paid multiple times for a single effort and spend the rest of our time doing fun and exciting stuff and Bookshaker.com (our publishing business) was born.
As well as giving us really exciting things to aim for, the Perfect Day exercise made us realise that we didn’t want clients to pay us – we wanted to pay them! We wanted to be able to send money to the people we loved working with. We wanted to be writing them cheques instead of chasing them for payment! We wanted to take their knowledge and sell it for them to people who would benefit hugely from the advice in the books they bought.
I was doing matchmaking again and this time everyone would win! This philosophy lies at the heart of and .
All I needed to be able to make this work from Spain was electricity and the Internet. The only challenges we found in Spain were getting mains electricity and the Internet! So, 9 months working with power from a generator in the garage and our Internet connection being an aerial on one of our hills pointing vaguely in the direction of the village, really tested my commitment. However, these days everything is much more comfortable!
When you really find the thing you are meant to be doing good things happen: In just over 2 years we published 33 books and made 5 of them bestsellers. We give our authors 50% of the profit and when i'm writing those cheques I still get a buzz knowing that the money was created just from an idea.
ExpatWomen: Do you publish books by expatriates?
Debbie: We publish a number of books by expats and quite a few books for expats.
Here's a list:
Expat Entrepreneur by Jo Parfitt (A Brit living in Holland):
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An Insider's Guide: Buying Property in Romania by Alex I Pintea
(A Romanian living in England) |
Sell That House! The Easy Way To Add £££s To The Value of Your Home and Sell It Fast by Karen Burge (A Brit living in France)
Expat Writer: Release The Book Within and Find Your Passion (second edition) also by Jo Parfitt will be available in March 2007, via .
The NativeSpain series of books will start with Murcia, Alicante and Granada and should be available late in 2007.
These books can all be found on Amazon and from any good bookshop.
ExpatWomen: How can aspiring Expat Women authors get their book ideas published?
Debbie: Well depending upon what their ideas are, then we might be able to help them. If they have "Native" understanding of a town or region that we're writing a book on then we'd love to hear from them. We're working hard on NativeSpain.com at the moment. We have plans for NativeRomania, NativePortugal, NativePoland, NativeItaly, NativeFrance and a few others too...
Get in touch with us at and we'll see if we can help. And if we can't help we're sure to know someone who can.
ExpatWomen: To conclude, Debbie, what tips or advice can you offer our would-be-authors please?
Debbie: Before writing your book, and especially before submitting your book to agents or publishers, make sure you can answer the following questions:
- Your Audience – Will your book help? Who should read it?
- Your Message – What is the key point of your book? What will people who read it get at the end?
- Your Difference - How does this book differ from existing products on the same subject?
- Price – How much would you like to sell each book for? How would you justify that figure?
- Your Background – Why are you qualified to share knowledge on the book’s subject?
- Marketing – How will you help to market and sell your book? How connected are you?
If you're not sure, then read the book Expat Writer by Jo Parfitt. She explains the ins and outs for all aspiring writers whether they're looking for a conventional publisher or whether they're keen to self publish.
ExpatWomen: Thank you very much Debbie, we wish you all the best.
Debbie: You are very welcome. All the best to you too. |
