Relocating to Berlin: Ending a Career

Just under 8,000 days.

That is how many days I have spent at my company.

This Friday will be my final day.

I was just four months out of college when I started working at my company.  During that brief time, I had done temp work at the National Labor Relations Board and the Smithsonian Institution for slightly above minimum wage, while sending my resume in response to every job posting in the Washington Post for which I was even remotely qualified.  In the end, my summer a couple of years earlier spent working in Prague on a documentary about the Czech "Velvet Revolution" was the remote qualification I needed to become an appraiser of video and audio equipment at television and radio stations.  I was hired on October 17, 1994 for the princely salary of $16,000 per year.  But the job came with pretty decent benefits, including health insurance, paid vacations and sick days, 401k retirement program with employer matching, and most importantly as it ended up accounting for over 1/3 of my income, 1.5x overtime pay.

I was lucky.  The work was vaguely interesting, and was relatively intellectually challenging.  Even better, I was working for a small company that made a lot of money, and my hard work did not go unnoticed by my employers.  When my supervisor left the company six months after I was hired, I was promoted to replace him.  After two years of increased responsibility, appraising the fixed assets for some of the largest media acquisitions in history, I was put on partnership track.  Five years after that, I became a partner, at which point the company put me through business school to get my MBA.  When that was done, the company put me through the accreditation process to become an Accredited Senior Appraiser through the American Society of Appraisers (there are only 679 in the world).  In addition to broadcasting properties, over the past 19 years I have also appraised publishing companies, automotive manufacturers, healthcare facilities, renewable energy companies, and even satellites, worth many hundreds of billions of dollars in aggregate.


So, here I am, just under 8,000 days after I started, and I am one of the most experienced, most highly educated, and most highly accredited machinery and technical equipment appraisers in the world.

And I don't want to do any of that any more.

Part of me thinks that it is crazy that I am giving up a lifetime's work to follow a dream in Berlin.  While I have enough money to live on for a while, I don't have a job lined up in Berlin.  Even if there are opportunities for appraisers in Berlin - and I am sure that there are - I simply don't want another appraiser's job.  My current company, as well as other accounting firms, have been asking me if I would be willing to continue work on a freelance basis from Berlin, and my answer has always been a firm "no".  Surely this is insanity.  Who willingly turns down lucrative work when they have no other employment prospects?

The other - more dominant - part of me thinks that it would be crazy to go to all the trouble of moving half way around the world, just to continue doing the same job that I have always been doing.  This voyage to Berlin is more than just a change of scenery.  It is an opportunity for a change of lifestyle; a change of mindset; and ultimately a change of career.

Of course, the easy part is to say "I want to do something else with my life."  The hard part is to define what that "something" is.  I honestly don't know.  I have an advanced degree in Strategic Management and almost 15 years of experience managing a very successful consulting firm.  But what does that mean in real terms?  I enjoy writing and public speaking.  But do I have the gumption, skills, and marketability to be able to make a living at them?   I find politics and international relations fascinating.  But have my experience and education pointed me in the completely opposite direction?

Time will ultimately tell.

If nothing else, I comfort myself with the idea that I can always go back to valuation consulting if my savings run out and I still don't have a steady job.  But I would consider returning to appraisals a personal failure.  I accept many things in life that I cannot control, but personal failure is not one of them.