As a home business owner, how do you deal with major disruptions to your life? In this instance, as I have already mentioned I am emigrating.

In all honesty I think that I need a good amount of time off. My work is mostly computer based, and I'll need to safely pack my machine away-I'll have to do that at least two days before I leave to get it shipped off and won't have it for about a week.

But with relocating the whole household, its a big job! I think honestly I need at least a couple of weeks-one before, one after, to pack and unpack and then a sanity third week after!!

I don't want to leave people without contact for so long.

So as I said at the start-how do you deal with major disruption like house moving, when you have a business to run?

I recently bought a house, and had all the joy that entails. I had my support people handling most of the frontline business / client requests, I checked in with the server maintenance people twice a day after giving them my new contact information, and other than that, I just took some downtime.

For your emigration, you might look into hiring some of the per-incident support companies out there. They will handle your support queues, and only charge you for the number of tickets actually handled. (This assumes you don't have anyone else working with you, not even part-time support personnel.) Check back in with any "temporary" folks (such as the third-party support providers) regularly, though - just to make sure that you can adjust to any Situations that may develop. Your check-ins may amount to nothing more than looking at your email queue, saying, "Nothing that can't wait another week", and shutting back down. But that gives you the hands-off time without getting you entirely out of the loop.

Good luck with the emigration!! Here's hoping that the Moving Gremlins demand a very small sacrifice (say, an extremely worn paperback and a few pairs of socks. Possibly that one grotty coffee mug you've managed to hang on to.)

I thought you said you were going to close down the US business and restart in the UK. Or did you mean only that you were going to transfer the official aspects to a UK company?

Yes I meant transferring basically for tax purposes, but that everything else will continue to run as is, so I need to keep people as happy as possible. I've just dealt with my US taxes, a few days ago, so I don't have to worry about that immediately.

I haven't looked into third party support before, and no I don't have anyone working with me. Any of my ongoing services that I provide have simply been suspended for a while so all I have to consider is support.

I'm sure that given how often I am contacted it would not be too pricey to outsource for a couple of weeks and get the time that I need so thank you for that. The moving Gremlins need to leave me alone because I'm already only taking the really important stuff! That translates to-I'm leaving almost everything of mine behind and taking only what is important to the three year old (who obviously doesn't understand why she has to give up her stuff) and I really don't want to deal with tantrums because something goes missing or gets smashed! Oy, this is so nerve wracking!

There are some decent third party support places out there that are cheap but offer only whats needed and not the extra fluff. This week I was home sick and working from the home office my youngest was home with me while I was on the phone with a design client. Working at home can sometimes be fun but mostly its challenging. I could not even imagine trying to move in all that hassle.

Well I had also thought of the fact that much stuff can be handled by email, which I can access on my phone once my service is cut off. Once I get to the UK I can do similar through the mobile phone, and that would allow me to do minor stuff.

I'm not sure I could differentiate between minor and heavy so as to get the right ones through to a third party though so might have to just hand it all over. Oh dear, what a hard life, having to stop work for a couple of weeks.....

i prefer to get a third party phone call support. They are many third party company that can offer remote support, something like a call center