This month was very much a holiday month and a welcome break from work.

When I left TPXimpact last December I wanted to take a month off, but January wasn’t a good time to be taking time away, so we planned it for the summer instead.

So in late July we loaded up our motorhome and headed to France for a four week tour. It was the longest I’ve been away from work since summer 2019 and was a superb break.

I deliberately didn’t want to work while I was away and managed to stick to that pretty well. I had to do a couple of work-related calls, but other than that I didn’t have to do or think about work at all.

I was able to properly reflect upon my first seven months working independently across fractional and consultancy engagements.

When I started out in January, my goal was to work more flexibly and get greater variety in my work. I’ve been pretty much achieving those things in the way I’ve been working so far this year.

But I also realised that my thinking about work has moved on too.

I miss working with a consistent team that’s on a mission to achieve something. The experience of solving tricky problems and hitting goals together is something I really value and isn’t quite the same when working as a consultant or advisor.

So while I’ll be continuing with my consultancy and advisory work, my focus for the autumn is finding an interesting interim role where I can get back into working with a leadership team.

That might be an interim COO or CEO role – or even a permanent gig if it’s a really good fit.

My focus is on tech-centric businesses that have up to 100 people as that’s where I think I can add most leadership value and enjoy working most. In practice that probably means seed or series A stage funded businesses.

I’m in no rush to leap into anything as I am still enjoying consulting and advising, but I will be stepping up my search for interim roles over the next few weeks.

It’s going to be fascinating to see where some existing and some new discussions lead this autumn. Bring it on!

Music this month…

I did a lot of running and cycling while I was away. Sometimes I was a bit low on energy so this piano house classics megamix was my musical pick-up of choice. It’s a relentlessly intense mix of classics – the audio equivalent of a strong caffeine and sugar-loaded energy drink. Not something for every day, but useful once in a while!

Reading this month…

Read a lot while I was away too. I particularly found Gillian Tett’s book – Fool’s Gold – about the 2008/9 financial crash really interesting. It gets into some complex detail on financial markets which helped me understand more about why the crash happened. I don’t know much about financial services so it was good to learn more about that world.

Cycling this month…

382.3 miles.

Running this month…

42.8 miles.