Journalled on Wednesday, 28th of August 2024 | Santo Cristo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: 23 degrees, warm, sunny and slightly overcast.
My meeting with Fernando, my accountant, was originally scheduled for 3 p.m., but last night he asked me to move it up to 9 a.m.
It’s funny how things fall into place. I usually have a class with Elisa at this time, but on Monday she asked to move it to Friday, as if the universe were clearing the way.
The accountancy office sat on the eighth floor of a building on the corner of Avenida Presidente Vargas, one of the most important streets in Rio de Janeiro’s city centre, and Avenida Passos, just around the corner from the Central Bank building where I’ve spent more than a decade teaching classes. I must have walked past that building a million times.
The reception was a tiny space that opened onto a bigger open-plan office, rows of computers stretching back, maybe half of them staffed at that moment.
At the far end of the room was a small meeting room, where Fernando greeted me: a man in his mid to late thirties, casually dressed, warm and easy to talk to.
The meeting ran for almost two hours. We talked about his firm’s services and, more importantly, the benefits of setting up my new company, ‘Teahogui’, through them, especially knowing the first year is going to be tough.
I tried to negotiate a few more benefits, since I know it will be difficult early on, but he said this was already the most he could offer. In the end, I thought the terms and conditions were good, and I could accept them.
The meeting went well overall. Now it’s just a matter of deciding the right time to open the company. One important point that came up was name registration: in the past, having a .com was enough, but now you also have to register the trade name, or marketing name, with INPI, the Brazilian government body that handles this.
When I get home, I’ll register it myself through their online platform. I already ran a name check, and thankfully, ‘Teahogui’ wasn’t taken. I’ll probably file the registration in the next week or two.
I doubt anyone else is likely to register the name any time soon, but it’s better not to be sorry later. I’m meeting Alex on Friday to talk it through.
The meeting also made one thing clear: we’ll need to be very well organised with money, since we’ll be operating as an international intermediary. Receiving and sending funds has to be quick, easy, and efficient, which means we’ll need a third partner to handle the financial side of ‘Teahogui’.
I can see my role clearly: overall concept, running the company, and marketing. Alex would handle operations, the site, and the platforms, and a third person would take on the financial side. It’s clear as day to me, and I’m glad I’ve figured this out now rather than later.
I spent the rest of the day teaching and copying old ‘The Long Gringo’ blog posts into Descript.
The plan is to get everything up to July in there (more than 150 posts, covering the first half of the year), ready to become videos for YouTube over the next six months. If the channel does reasonably well and gets monetised, some of that money can go straight back into ‘Teahogui’.
I want all the posts copied over by the end of this weekend, so that next week I can start transcribing and editing them in batches. Slowly but steadily, things are coming together. ‘Teahogui’ is starting to take shape, and after a year of just intending to, I’m actually using Descript for video editing.
It took me a whole year to work up the courage, and now that I’ve started using the platform, it’s not the seven-headed monster I imagined it to be. It’s a shame I waited so long, because every day now brings a new, rewarding challenge and another piece of the learning curve.
It’s remarkable how often we self-sabotage, building up problems in our heads that were never really there.
In bed by 11p.m.
Thank you
Thank you for reading. Please explore my other posts and share your thoughts in the comments.
Richard
