Old Timer Garage

This part of the story doesn’t have much to do with American cars but it leads to it so I will try and cover it quickly to come back to the topic of interest.

So after this first trip in the US, it was clear to me that if I wanted to spend some time in the US, I had to find a way to make some money there because I can’t afford to spend a year without working which on top of being impossible (the maximum duration of a tourist visa is 6 months) would put me in a position where I would have to use a part of my savings in order to live there without an income.
The next solution on the list is to find a job there. I have tried during a few months to find a job after coming back to the UK but I did it a little bit without really wanting to do it for several reasons. The first one of them is that I have been self employed for several years. I have created several companies in the UK and I would probably struggle to go back to being an employee where you just have to obey orders because you were told to and not because they always make sense to you. I like to understand why I am doing things and to have the possibility to organize my work myself.
The second reason is that my field of expertise is in a domain where plenty of qualified people can be found in the US so why would an American company spend extra money (a lot of it) to sponsor a foreigner like me when they could find someone already local to them and save the money? Don’t look for a reason, there is none.
I still tried for a few months, contacted everybody I knew who could referred me to someone over there, offered projects to companies but without success.

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Another solution was to create a company in the US. Several aspects are appealing to me about this solution: first of all, this approach corresponds more to my way of working. The biggest downside of it being the risk associated to creating a brand new company. I know by experience that launching a company from scratch requires a lot of work and the result is never guaranteed. I launched 3 companies in the UK but at least another 20 other projects that didn’t work. So if I try this option in the US and fail, I don’t have any back up solution. I have to get out of the country and wouldn’t be sure to be able to come back to the UK (at least not easily because of Brexit) and I don’t have anywhere to go in France apart from moving back in with my parents. Besides, another point that could be a problem with this option is that the investment required to create a brand new company in the US and get an investor visa is around 100,000 dollars so even though this is not impossible to gather, it represents a huge risk. So I put this solution aside after a few months of exploring all the possible ways of doing it.

There are more options but I am still in the process of studying them so I will talk about them when I know more on the topic.

In parallel, I started to learn everything I could about American cars. Not because I wanted to make it my full time job but because I didn’t know much about them.
I got into the classic car world through the small back door of Citroen 2cv like many people. I restored a few of them and taught myself pretty much everything I know.

One day, I saw a post on Facebook with a picture of what seemed to me to be a Belgium 2cv in the US. I didn’t know any 2cv in the US so I contacted the owner to ask for more information about his car out of curiosity. And it turns out the owner was quite happy to talk about his car and every other cars he had. That’s how I started to communicate with him by email with this man who I learned later on also owned several 4cv of which one was one of 6 real 4cv convertible in the US. He also had two 203 but also and most importantly owned and company that restores and exports American classic cars all over the world and my new friend was sharing with me the cars he was seeing and buying.

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After a few months of these email exchanges, I asked him if he would accept to show me his company the next time I was visiting the US and he accepted straight away so I didn’t wait any longer and started to look at flights to go back. And this is how, not even 6 months after my first trip to the US, I was going back a second time and to make things even better, at a price that was cheaper than anything I had ever seen so far. This trip will be shorter (just 10 days) but I will see cars from a bit closer this time.

To be continued… here: 20- Second trip and Dodge Challenger

 

 

 

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