Currently...

I'm running http://www.skillsventure.com/" rel="nofollow">Skills Venture, a social enterprise that matches UK professionals (who could be working for a large City firm or for a small company or even for themselves) with entrepreneurs in Africa who need help in order to grow and create jobs. We organise short (1-3 week) assignments in Kenya, where the UK volunteers provide practical 1:1 mentoring support and advice to the entrepreneurs.

At the moment, most of my time is taken up with sales and marketing, and in particular working with large employers in the UK to sign them up to the programme - sending out small groups of high-performing employees to Kenya as a talent development and motivation programme.

Because I haven't yet got to the stage where Skills Venture is paying me a salary, I'm also doing some part-time consulting work - for UK Government, charities and anyone else who will pay me!

Before I escaped...

I spent the first three years after graduating in the voluntary sector in London (although I'd set up a charity, also in Kenya, while at university, so in a sense it's been longer than that).

Then I decided that I needed some formal training and some exposure to larger organisations, so I spent four years on the Civil Service Fast Stream, working first at the Department of Health and then the Department for International Development (DFID). Both were very interesting but came with all of the downsides of working for a large, bureaucratic organisation - which wasn't for me!

My moment of truth...

I knew that I wasn't cut out to be a civil servant on about day three of my Fast Stream career, watching a senior bureaucrat in action. It wasn't where I wanted to be in thirty years. I'd founded the charity at university with a friend called Rob, and he was having similar feelings about his career at Procter & Gamble.

So we decided to work together on something full time, and Skills Venture grew naturally out of this desire to do something and a realisation, from running the charity, that there was a gap in the market for short-term overseas volunteering opportunities that really made use of people's business skills.

Planning for it...

We spent about three months talking over the phone (Rob was working in Athens) about possible options, and having assembled the bare bones of an idea. We then spent a month in Kenya working out whether our idea (of short volunteering trips mentoring entrepreneurs) was feasible, and how we could make it work in practice.

We discovered that it was and that we could, and so we came back and spent evenings and weekends drawing up a business plan. Three months later we quit our jobs - and five months after that we both went back into part-time work because we realised that we were not going to be able to generate enough income to pay ourselves for a while - sadly still true today, three years later!

The worst and best bits...

The best part has been the sense that it feels right to be doing this, to be in charge of my own destiny, and being able to set my own agenda and priorities, despite the setbacks that hit us. In many ways, the worst part has been the flip side of the same coin - not having people to steer me (and us) in the right direction at every point.

But you get used to that! And then of course there was the credit crunch - but then if we've got through that, we should be able to get through anything...

Best advice...

Not to try and do everything at once! Both in terms of levels of ambition, but also in terms of how much you spend at the start (and therefore how much money you need to make it happen). We had an incredibly ambitious business plan that included vast amounts of money to build a 'campus' in Kenya, and we tried to get a bank loan for it.

We nearly succeeded - but luckily we didn't, because we would have been saddled with vast amounts of debt for something that we didn't need, and which we couldn't have paid for. Instead we just hire space as and when.