Melanie and Ed McGaugh, Expat Expo
Ed and Melanie McGaugh sold fine French antiques for over 20 years, traveling up and down from Miami to Boston, making a good living, but leading a frenetic life. "We were living in Florida and we hit the end of the season - everything stops when you come to the end of winter," he recalls. "I turned 38. And one day we just woke up and said 'Enough.' It was burn-out. We'd made a bunch of money but we said, let's get rid of the house, so we packed two suitcases and Scooter [their big old orange cat] and left for Europe on a big experiment."
Seven years later they are still in Switzerland, where they landed, having rented a temporary apartment, tentatively bought some furniture, done a little business then set up a couple new businesses. They became expats. Ed was born in Paris and he grew up in the United States, the Middle East and Switzerland. There were many trips back and forth to Europe since his mother is Swiss, so the expat role fit from birth.
The McGaughs know well from personal experience what it is to move to another country and put down roots, to recreate yourself and open a new business. They've rolled these experiences into a project that got off the ground in early 2006 called Expat Expo. It's a project that was started online, at SwissEntrepreneur, where Ed asked if anyone thought this was a good idea. They did.
Sunday, 8 October, Expat Expo hits Geneva. By all pre-event accounts it should be a success. The first such expo, in Zurich in February, attracted 50 exhibitors. This was followed by one in May in Zug, where the McGaughs are based, with another 50 exhibitors and one in Zurich in September. The last one had 70 exhibitors and a waiting list.
The Geneva Expat Expo has 123 tables lined up and a waiting list of 20. "We could have taken another room, but," and Ed McGaugh laughs, "it's just my wife and me and it would have been too much!"
The McGaughs's project may have grown out of expat experiences like yours and mine, but they are serious professionals and their plans for the future are big, given the excitement the fairs are generating. The future, says Ed, holds bigger sponsors, for a start.
"There really is no other forum like this. A woman, another expat, told me that she'd been thinking of setting up a business here and after she came to our first one she realized she could do it. It really gave me a kick in the pants to realize that what I'm doing helped her make this decision."
Prices for exhibitors are reasonable, from SFr100-300 for table space, which makes the event affordable for small companies. The range of companies who will be there runs from schools, such as Webster University, to organizations like the English Speaking Cancer Association, and small companies and consulting firms, such as CSF Communication and Blackden Financial.
The McGaughs see Expat Expo as one more thread in their personal expat tapestry which includes things for fun, like Ed McGaugh's personal Swiss Chef foodie blog, their slightly more serious wine import business, Bacchus Wines, which focuses on excellent Piedmont wines, and the completely crazy rebuilding project of a tumbledown house among the Asti vineyards.
Being an expat can have it ups and downs. Things are going well now, but early in their Swiss life, the McGaughs carried on in the antiques business, working with a partner in the US and, shipping containers of expensive antiques every few months. "And then 911 hit and afterwards they started strip-searching many of the containers," says Ed. That's hard on 18th century antiques, he notes drily, adding that it hurt to have to pay for the searches, in addition to the damage to the goods. "It became a nightmare, more and more complicated. Our partner decided to stop."
At times like this you have to reinvent yourself, he says, not always an easy thing to do when you are an expat. The McGaughs set up a new business, called Expat Assist. "I'd always been in antiques and I didn't really have any other marketable skills. So I used my export skills to set up a very economical way for people to ship things. I had one guy who got an estimate to ship his stuff back to the US for SFr29,000. He did it himself, with us, and it cost him SFr7,000!"
Ed McGaugh is an energetic, creative man who likes to swap expat experiences but he says apologetically that he should go - the other phone in Zug is ringing off the hook in the background with last-minute details for Expat Expo in Geneva. He needs to check on security at Palexpo and tie up other loose ends.
And the roofers are coming soon, in Asti.