So, back in February 2007, I finally did something about it and decided I had to separate my work from my life, my office from my home.
The solution I settled on was to move the office into a business centre — in Spain a centro de negocios is a serviced office building, where you rent a room and share the reception and the meeting rooms. I looked at the subsidised options first (CADE, CME de Málaga…), the publicly funded business support centres, but in the end I went for the Centro de Negocios Reding, in El Limonar.
Several things went into that decision: the location (it was in the part of Málaga where the architects were, next door to the office of a good friend of mine in advertising, and close to the offices of my main client at the time, EPSA — the Empresa Pública de Suelo de Andalucía, the regional government’s public land and housing agency); the fact that there were offices going at a very good price; and, if I’m honest, that I got on very well with both the owner and the secretary.
The business centre, with its ups and downs, was, I think, the right call compared with what I had before. I had no colleagues of my own, but I had neighbouring offices whose people I got on with, and I’m still in touch with some of them — Manuel, of Colexon Iberia, for one. Along the corridor there were the Miss Málaga offices, a firm of consultants, a Vodafone subsidiary… and a couple of estate agencies, which went under one after another. Plenty of people, in short, so that when I stopped for a while there was somebody to talk to and have a coffee with.
The office was barely 10 m², but working on my own that was no problem, and it was next door to a print and copy shop, which was no small advantage.
This was when the first flood of commissions from EPSA arrived: 14 projects in six months, which made me change the business model. I brought in collaborators to develop the construction drawings and concentrated on the review work myself. The volume of work was enormous. That, together with what I expected to be paid, made me see that collaborators alone were not enough: I needed someone employed, so that the strategic side of every project could be handled from ‘inside’ the office.
And around then, in June 2007, the next stage of the office begins.
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