I am in the process of shutting down the leftovers of my consulting practice. No one tells you how much work it is to shutter a business. Everyone gives you advice for setting things up, getting a bank account, creating an LLC, getting a tax ID number, setting up quickbooks, Harvest, a website, an email address, a phone number.
Well, going the other direction, for some reason seems to be taking much longer. I stopped consulting in July 2023, after my long-term contract with ADL finished, the startup I was working with ran out of funds, and all my outreach and job applications led to nothing but crickets or rejections. At 60, (yes, 60), I find that I am too old on paper – even when I lose the first 10 years of work off my resume. And at 60, I find I don’t want to work that hard for someone else to get rich. So I quit. (Only after working through the numbers with financial advisors).
Now I am in the process of shutting it all down. The clients are gone. Harvest has been paused and as of this week deleted. The book keepers let go, except for the closing out for this tax season. The bank account is closed. Now I am moving files from one google account to another so I can shut off the google email and all the office tools with it – including drive. That is taking the longest.
I have transferred portfolio work to emdezine.com and a short version is linked in my header – but it’s not the robust portfolio I had before – just a sampling of design, modeling and writing work.
The email and web domain will be the last to go once I am certain I have moved everything and that client files are available somewhere else. My future attention is on 8PawPress – printmaking artwork and writing history – as well as teaching. It’s sad and I miss some of the work, but I see what’s happening in the market and it is not place I want to be right now. My happy place is deep in my studio, carving cats and birds out of linoleum, and researching and writing about our collective histories.
