Babel Business Development (What Peter has been up to lately - Part 2)

As my faithful 2 readers know, over a year ago I founded "Babel Translations and Text Creation", by now the largest and oldest translation agency in Second Life. Part of the service of Babel Translations was always to offer conceptual and planning work to clients as well. I did not advertise this - it more came naturally during the discussions with the clients. My close friend and SL sister Trinity Dechou suggested a while ago to branch these services out. We discussed the idea a while, made concepts and plans, a portfolio of services and towards the end of July we founded Babel Business Development, a company offering full service marketing and business services to Second Life companies.

Our slogan is "We make a difference", and our goal is to provide exactly what a business owner in SL needs. Unlike RL, where specialists care for their respective areas, in SL businesses are often run by individuals with limited capacity who need to take care of a lot of things: creating their products and services, handling sales, generating public interest,supporting their clients, etc. Trinity and myself have both RL backgrounds in Sales and Marketing/PR, as well as a track record for being successful in SL. With this experience we offer the tools often forgotten or misunderstood to business. With the ability to view business as an outside source we can offer advice on areas to be developed. One core concept is to give our clients only what they need. We do not want to "take over" their business, not change their ways, not take away the power to make the decisions from them. Our clients remain independent, and get from us as much or as little as they want.

Fairly fast we found our first prospective client, an averagely known fashion designer with her partner, who reported to struggle with sales lately. A visit on site revealed many things with potential for optimization, starting from the layout of their shop, product presentation, and continuing with their blog and brand representation. We prepared a report and a number of next steps, alas we seemed to have overwhelmed them and they literally fled the scene.

We changed a few things in our presentation, and set a "Meet and Greet" on the client's property as the first step, and soon enough we found our second client, a rather well known accessory designer, and conduct a brand research for them as of the writing of this blogpost.

Coming from a country where creating your own business is ridiculously difficult, and been employed my whole adult life, for the third time I am thrilled how easy it is to create a business in SL. People with good ideas, designs and creations can simply start to market them, and the abundance of creativity in SL is proof of that. I did not come to SL to become an entrepreneur - but here I am, running the market leader in translation services, a successful furniture company, being the business soul of another company, and now the co-founder of a business development company. Not only is this fun, not only is this useful, it only taught me a lot about myself.

Coming full circle

Yes, I have been unusually quiet for the last 10 days. The reason for this is, that the last 10 days have been an emotional roller coaster ride for me, which made me cry tears of pain and tears of joy (sometimes at the same time) on an almost daily basis.

The event that marked the beginning of those intense 10 days is that I met a wonderful person. This person, of which I will surely tell more when the time is right, made me realize that I was in a state of limbo. Drifting, rather than actively living my second life.

The event that marked the end of those intense 10 days was that I finally could embrace my wonderful partner Gina Glimmer in-world again, after having spoken barely for about 15 minutes total during the last 10 weeks. And in an amicable athmosphere, with full trust, love and appreciation, we resolved our partnership at the same place where I proposed to her almost exactly 6 months before. I hugged and kissed my SL wife for a last time, only to hug and kiss her as my closest SL friend the second later.

Between those two events, I had to intentionally hurt one of my friends, with whom I hope friendship can be achieved again after some healing has taken place. And between those events I unintentionally hurt another friend of whose feelings I was not aware.
Between those two events, I also experienced the most intense and most shaking hour I ever had in SL, and on which I tend to report in a bit. And between those events I happened to find myself on the racing track for Relay for Life, fundraising for cancer research, and all the time thinking of my mother who struggles with this illness.

I have come full circle now, and I am ready to start my second lap in SL. Those 10 days leave me matured, and with sharpened senses. And my thank goes to my ex-wife and now friend Gina, my SL sister Trinity, my friend Ivanova, and to a very special person - thank you all for not letting me down, for being fair, for being brutally honest, for hugging me when I needed it, for listening, and for encouraging me.

My second lap in SL wll start now.