What we get up to when we’ve fallen off the radar

By Fiona Boyd |

I’d like to apologise to our regular Into the Mountain readers as you will have noticed that our blog posts have been a bit random over the past few weeks.

This does not signify a lack of interest or desire to write about what we understand or come to know in the entrepreneurial business space, but does indicate that David and Fiona have been up to our own ventures again.

In between consulting David and I have been putting our efforts towards a couple of new businesses we’re launching.

In the first instance, we’re doing a joint venture with a reputable and rather noble immigration law firm and in the second we’re jumping into the social media space and twinning our experience and interest in the arts and online, with some of the new channels the social media arena offers up.

I’m not sure what your default is when you’re in serious startup mode, however I am known to work all day in my pyjamas, skip meals, showers, even skip Taggart on 13^th Street on Foxtel. Having just come out of a phase of live-like-a-student as we worked strange hours to get up a new venture, I remind myself that once you’ve got your new thing up and running, you need to go back and sort out everything that’s been on hold while you were doing it and one of those things is our Into the Mountain blog.

If you read our posts you would know that we are fond of online content businesses. We’ve started up and sold two such beasts (Arts Hub, Screen Hub – you can find out more about these in our book Niche Content Millionaire) and have tried our hand at a few other online businesses, but really our interest lies in content businesses.

Our latest is a joint venture as mentioned with one of Australia’s leading immigration law firms, Erskine Rodan and Associates. Led by Partner Christine Rodan, the team at Erskine Rodan spent three years on researching and writing in plain English about all the intricacies and nuances of the Australian visa system and produced a book called Migrating to Australia The Guidebook. When we were doing our little tapdance before we committed to doing an online venture with the Erskine Rodan & Associates team, I asked Christine why she undertook the book venture? It struck me that by putting all the useful information one would need in order to work out how to migrate to Australia in a book, that the firm was giving up on some potential revenue that could be earned by representing the readers who without the knowledge in the book, would likely have been clients.

Book number 2 from the Migration Digest team will be launched in June. It's called Australian Business Skills Migration The Guidebook.

But Christine’s response was salient. Even though in Australia anyone who gives any kind of immigration advice at all must be a registered migration agent, there still seems to be a large amount of people who without with or without credentials, feel free to give advice to people trying to migrate to Australia and those on the receiving end of this advice can end up in terrible situations, at which point they sometimes get referred to Erskine Rodan & Associates. Christine Rodan is committed to making sure that as much as possible, there is access to a quality flow of information about all aspects of the migration process, so that those wishing to come to Australia to live and work can be fully informed, before they take the expensive step of engaging an immigration lawyer or migration agent.

I’ve read and typed up testimonials from hundreds of clients who Christine’s firm has helped over a 35 year period and I can tell you that the work they do is life-changing. The day I spent typing up the testimonials was spent with me teary eyed as I read how Christine and Erskine and individual members of their team had taken people through the immigration process, sometimes the clients situations were harrowing, and stuck with them to get to the result they wanted. For many people, migrating to Australia is a dream that they will work exceptionally hard and do double triple bendbacks to achieve. It is our belief that such people deserve the best quality information available to get their minds around what they’re doing and how to go about achieving that dream.

Hence our new venture is all about the timely dissemination of the latest immigration changes, combined with the definitive starting point for anyone wanting to migrate to Australia – Migrating to Australia The Guidebook. We also see that there is just so much interest in this topic that we’re compiling a monthly digest about all the latest trends and happenings in Australian immigration. This lets me get my hands on creating a news product again, which is something I miss dearly post-Arts Hub days.

If you’d like to know more about this venture, go take a look at www.migrationdigest.com.au

Okay the cat is now out of the bag with venture one, in coming weeks I hope to let you know what the other entrepreneurial business is, and it’s one that anyone can participate in, so we’d love to ask you to get involved when the time is right.

For now, thanks for your patience and if you know anybody who is drifting around trying to work out how to get the right visa to come and work, live or settle in Australia, do let them know about us at www.migrationdigest.com.au

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