Mary and Mike Devereaux used to spend all of their holidays in France with their three children. They dreamed of a day when they might be able to spend more time in the country they had fallen in love with and in 2002 bought a holiday home in Deux Sevres.  Four years later, they decided not to wait any longer and packed up their belongings in their home town of Birmingham in the UK and moved to live permanently in France.

Their home is in a small hamlet called La Grande Tranchée in the commune of Les Alleuds in Deux Sevres.  Mary says “when we bought this house it had not been lived in for many years but fortunately it only needed a new kitchen and bathroom, the rest of the house just needed decorating”.

Most of their efforts went on sorting out the garden because Mary is a florist and loves to grow as many flowers and evergreen shrubs as she can. “We completely restocked the garden with flowers and shrubs and are lucky enough to have four rows of vines too. Each year we pick our grapes for making into wine and in 2013 our harvest was 111kg of red grapes which are now fermenting into wine and Pineau!” laughs Mary.

How hard is it to set up as a florist in France for an expat?

Mary advises “I buy most of my supplies from the flower wholesalers in Niort. It meant learning the French names for all the flowers I order but my wholesalers are very helpful as they know I am English and still learning the language”.

Mary had already completed a college course in flower arranging in Birmingham before moving to France.  Even before making the permanent move she discussed her goals with the local Mayor and as a result has been handling all the flower arrangements for village celebrations for the past 10years – even if it meant arranging holidays around fetes!

“I’ve always thought of it as a way of giving something back to the villagers who had made us so welcome when we arrived here” says Mary. She tries to use themes for her floral arrangements, from a French flag, French painters, the seaside, the opera and even the market. “The local villagers ask ‘what is your theme this year’ but I always keep it a secret until the day.” Mary’s flower arrangements have become a talking point in the village and each year the Mayor asks if he can give the flowers to the ladies in the kitchen who have cooked for the villagers.

TOP TIP for expats in France wanting to start a business – Mayors have good networks and can really help to get a  business off the ground, don’t be shy, go and see your Mayor and talk to them about your ideas and goals.

Mary and husband Mike attended a 5 day ‘stage’ training course in Limoges on starting up a new business. The course was run by the Niort Chambre de Metiers  “it was compulsory to attend a course and obtain a certificate to start up in business” advises Mary. They chose to attend the  English language course that the Chambre de Metiers runs in Limousin.

TOP TIP: Check with your Chambre de Metiers to find out if they hold English language courses if your French is not quite perfect.

Mike and Mary also visited their Chambre de Metier to discuss their plans and were assisted throughout the process and with necessary paperwork (of which, this being France, you can be sure there is plenty!). Mary gained further experience by working at the local markets with a flower stall. This allowed her to build up a good customer base of regulars “who use my floristry services to send bouquets to friends.” Mary also has clients in the UK who have family in France and they email her their orders for birthday or anniversary flowers.

Mary’s talents are proving popular in France and she has been featured in magazines and newspapers which has led to her becoming increasingly well known for her skills with wedding flowers. Mary has managed the bridal bouquets and floral displays for many French weddings, including the Mayor’s daughter in her village. Increasingly she is being sought out by overseas brides who arrange to marry or celebrate in France. “There is a difference between French bridal flowers and what a UK bride would choose” says Mary.

“French brides like bright colours and will sometimes require the (caleche) horse and trap which is used to carry them to their ceremony to be decorated with flowers. One French bride asked me to decorate her house and staircase with flowers, it looked very beautiful. The colour of the flowers for another French bride was bright orange and brown… so different from UK brides who usually ask for more subtle colours in their bouquets and will tend to follow trends such as vintage or get inspiration from programmes such as Downton Abbey.”

Mary works in the stone barn in her garden, renovated by husband Mike and where she has her workshop. Always the perfect temperature thanks to the thick walls, she designs and creates her beautiful displays, inspired by the view over the beautiful countryside of this very lush part of France.

The post A British Florist in France appeared first on The Good Life France.

People move to France for many different reasons – retirement, to work, to play, to follow a dream… Steve Sykes’ move to France from the UK follows the latter path. A keen cyclist for many years he decided to take his passion to France, to the lovely area of Midi-Pyrénées.

Steve and his partner Jill moved from Hampshire at the end of January to La Fouillade in the heart of the Aveyron Valley. They live in a renovated barn with stunning valley views in a village and region that has welcomed them in.  Steve describes the area as “traffic free roads, lush valley lanes, designated purpose built mountain bike tracks, safe cycling….all of this the perfect recipe for the cyclist”. He knew that this would be the perfect opportunity for setting up a cycle hire business and although as he says, that was not without its challenges he still found it fun. Steve’s mantra is “Life does not start until you leave your comfort zone and I have had to do that many times during my life!”

We asked Steve why France is such a great place for cycling and what setting up a business in France is like…

TGLF: What was the life path that brought you to France?

Wow, where do I start! In my younger days I did a gap year in Southern Africa and it was this that gave me the dreaded travel bug, which you just never ever get rid of! Work wise, well I was in the Police for a long time before the specialised work I was doing got the better of me and I had to retire on medical grounds.

And so began a very long rebuilding of life programme for me.

My passion for cycling has been with me throughout my life, from the days of attaching a playing card and peg to make your bike sound so cool, through the early Raleigh choppers, progressing into racers with 5 gears, onto 10 gears, then along came mountain bikes……so  I had to have one of each!

I have cycled in many different countries, from South America to Europe, Australia to Portsmouth, in all sorts of weather and various conditions and it is a dream come true to make living from my passion. They always say if you want to make a small fortune in bikes, start with a big one! But I suppose my previous career and subsequent illness had taught me that quality of life is so important.

When we arrived at our new home in January it was the coldest winter in living memory and we had a huge deluge of snow!

I can remember my first cycle ride after I arrived here, I struggled in wind chill temperatures of –17°C and realised that the Midi-Pyrenees is named that for a reason….the hills.

I ventured into the village on my bike during the snow to go to the boulangerie.  There were no cars about, in fact nothing but me on the road and I was riding on snow and ice covered roads! There was a small queue for the fresh cooked baguettes, everyone turned their eyes on this strange English guy wrapped up in cycling gear.  ‘Monsieur , sur le velo?’ came the murmur from the queue…..’Ah oui.’ came the response ‘Je suis Anglais!’.  Thus I had broken the ice with many in the village and I do believe they were amazed that anyone could be foolish enough to ride in such conditions!

TGLF: Why is France such a great place for cyclists?

France is cycle friendly. I never get the feeling that I am in the way of a motorist, an inconvenience. Motorists in France actually give you space, unlike many times in the UK where people are so in a rush that you can end up sitting on their wing mirrors they pass. Cycle tracks are built off road; people are encouraged to use bikes.

TGLF: What is it about Midi-Pyrénées that you find particularly great for cycling?

The Midi-Pyrénées region is simply absolutely stunning. Hilltop towns, lush valleys and historical architecture, we have many of the most beautiful villages in France (as voted), surrounded by some incredible countryside. Centrally located in the south it is easy to travel further afield from here if you want to explore France further or foray into Spain or Italy. The people of the region are some of the most welcoming I have ever met, greeting you with a smile and politeness wherever you go. The bike is a wonderful conversation breaker with them and they show a great interest in people who are riding, offering a variety of tips and advice! Believe me the roads are traffic free in comparison to the UK. Yes the towns can get relatively busy at times, but get out onto the country roads and you will find total freedom. Local tourist areas have designed and built mountain bike tracks for all abilities and with great transport links, the area is so easy to get to and any cyclist, whatever age or ability, would find it heaven!

TGLF: What is your cycling background?

I’ve cycled all my life! Never made it to the Tour or Giro, never got to cycle with Indurain or Armstrong, never been a great fan of lycra… but always loved bikes and cycling. I have taken part in triathlons, charity cycle rides and cycling holidays in some amazing places in both western and third world areas. Although I never really settled on one style of bike, I mainly use a mountain bike these days – including road cycling. My philosophy behind that is that if I train and use a mountain bike then when I get on the road bike I should fly!

TGLF: Was it difficult to set up your business in France? Do you have any tips for anyone wanting to set up a business in France?

You know it really is not that difficult to set up the business, if you account for the French bureaucracy and systems of taxation etc.  I decided to do it slowly and just take the time. I took advice from other bike hire companies in France, visited various bike dealers and sent lots of emails to find the best way to set up the business. It is still in its infancy but it is really important to go at it slowly and not run before walking. This is really important given it is a foreign country with different rules and regulations. My advice whatever business you set up is to take advice, don’t try and beat the system and do take it slowly. Whatever you do, don’t shy away from it because it may be a bit challenging… it really can be done!

The post A French Life: Briton rides to a new life in France appeared first on The Good Life France.

We talk to Dave Ashton of SnapCar Paris who is from Phoenix, Arizona. Dave, his wife Stasha and their four children came to France in 2007 on a one year home exchange with a family from Provence. At the end of the year they had fallen in love with France and wanted to stay longer.

Five years later Dave has set up his own company in Paris: SnapCar, a mobile app that ensures you’ll find a high quality taxi or chauffeured vehicle whenever you want one. He spends his working week in Paris and free time back home with the family in Mougins where they are renovating their house.

The family home is a 19th century stone farmhouse in a quiet village in the hills of the Cote d’Azur, near Cannes. Dave laughs when he tells how the family house in Phoenix was 4200 square feet with 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms, a massive kitchen, a pool and jacuzzi in a huge yard with fruit trees, and a three car garage in a house where everything was new and just worked. In contrast, the house in Mougins is 1300 square feet with three bedrooms and one full bathroom (for six people), a leaking roof, dirty stone walls, a hideous kitchen, tiny bedrooms, power that works most of the time, no garage and a yard that “needs a lot of help”. The renovation work on the Mougins house is laborious and slow and Dave may not be kidding when he says that if anything makes he and Stasha just give up and leave it will probably be that house.

We asked him more about what made him stay…

TGLF: Can you tell us more about who you are and where you are from?

I moved around a lot as a child, and so perhaps discovering new places got in my blood from those experiences. As a family, we moved every few years when I was growing up: Illinois, Ohio, Missouri (where I became a lifelong St Louis Cardinals’ baseball fan), Arizona, Maryland, Minnesota, Utah (where I met Stasha) and ultimately California (San Francisco), where I started my first job after college and then went to graduate school. I also spent two years living in Hong Kong in the early 1990’s, an experience that deeply impacted my perspective on the world and my place in it.

TGLF: What made you decide to go to France for a year and why a home exchange scheme?

It was perhaps one of those things where luck, timing and perseverance all came together at the same time. In 2003 I was working for a software company based in Phoenix that sent us to live in London for a year. We had an amazing experience and were very sad to leave at the end of the year. It’s not that we didn’t want to go back to the US – in many ways we did: we’ll always be full-blooded Americans (!) – but we loved England immediately and one year just wasn’t long enough. In the several years that followed, Stasha and I said to ourselves many times that we would move back to Europe at the drop of a hat if given the chance, and that the only thing that could perhaps be better than England was a place just like it but with better weather, food, more Medieval culture and a different language. Apologies to our English friends, but for us that was France (although not necessarily Paris, which has dreadful weather). Early in 2007 the company I’d been working for was sold and I decided to take some time off. At the same time we received a request from a family in Mougins asking if we were interested to exchange houses for a year (I had joined the site www.homeexchange.com a few months before – the site really works!). The timing was so serendipitous that we couldn’t resist. I think we knew that – with four children, if we said “No” then we would be unlikely to ever get the chance again – life becomes pretty complicated as the kids gets older. So, as frightened as we were to leave everything we loved and go to a place where we knew no one  and couldn’t speak a word, we decided to throw caution to the wind, said “Yes!” and off we went.

TGLF: What made you stay in France after the year was up?

A life is only as interesting as we make it. That first year was the most amazing, scary, life-changing, frightening experience we could have had. And it becomes addictive – after a certain amount of time it became hard to imagine going back to the old life in Phoenix. It’s odd because we really loved that old life and longed for it throughout our first year (and still often do!). Where we could understand people, had our own house and cars, stores were open all the time, we weren’t afraid to answer the phone for fear of not being able to understand people, we were near family and old friends and familiar surroundings and where it’s easy to watch the St Louis Cardinals. But the joy of learning something new every day, the challenge of overcoming one obstacle after another on the way to conquering a new culture and language, watching our kids become so fluent in the language that others didn’t know they weren’t French: we just felt like we couldn’t give it up after only one year. So we talked it over, Stasha cried a lot (we knew we were going to really miss the US), we registered the kids for another school year in Mougins and starting looking for rentals, put our house in Phoenix up for rent and that was that.

TGLF: Your kids weren’t too keen to move here at first – but how do they find it now?

They were afraid of the change, and when we first got here they were really unhappy because we took the “immersion” approach despite them not even knowing what France was – much less speaking the language – we just took them to the village school our first day in Mougins and said “This is where you go to school now. You’re not going to understand anything for a while but if you’re patient and – most of all – kind to others, you’ll eventually start to understand and it will get easier.” And it did. Their progress was incredible to watch. I’ll probably go to my grave with a smile on my face remembering the story of how they learned, and how it transformed them – and all of us. Put in the same situation, any child would do the same thing, which was to learn and then embrace.

TGLF: Is the move to France permanent now?

Nothing in life is permanent. Like every couple, we still lay awake in bed at night wondering if we made the right choice and talking about “when we go back to the US”. The kids still beg us to move back to the US  probably because now they equate the US with vacations and France with daily life). But the time frame for that seems elongated now. Rather than discussing if we’ll go back at the end of this school year, we talk about it in terms of life events: maybe our oldest daughter will finish high school in the US; maybe we’ll move back after we’ve completely renovated our house and then lived in it for a couple of years; or maybe we’ll go back once SnapCar has become a huge success (or a massive failure!). [Ed’s note – surely a success – everyone knows how difficult it is to get a taxi in Paris, especially when it rains!] All of these things are probably years away. There is a song that’s been popular this year in both the US and France : “Somebody I Used to Know” by Gotye, in which he laments that, as time passes, a girl he once loved has now become a stranger to him and is no longer anyone important anymore. We may not spend the rest of our lives here, but France has become such an important part of our lives that it’s hard to ever imagine it just becoming “some place I used to know.” Just like Thanksgiving, Target, and the St Louis Cardinals are an important part of who we are, France’s language, customs, and culture are in our blood too, now. I just wish it had the NFL…

TGLF: What gave you the inspiration for SnapCar?

After our home exchange year, when we decided to stay in France, I got a job with KDS, a software company in Paris (600 miles away), because that was the best place in the software industry to work in France. KDS owns a successful software application that enables people to book and manage their business travel costs in a carefully-controlled way. While working there I realized that there was a big hole in the market for better managing taxi/ground transportation services. This epiphany came from two things:

Airline tickets, hotels and car rentals are bookable online and all carefully managed, but taxi bookings were a big problem: totally unmanaged by software and a nightmare for users to manage themselves. It’s incredible that the old method of standing on a street corner in an unfamiliar city, hoping an empty taxi will pass by, is still the prevailing method of getting a taxi. It hasn’t really changed since the invention of the “modern taxi” more than a hundred years ago. Every other method of travel has been transformed in the last twenty years, so the fact that ground transport remains stuck in the Stone Age is really odd.

Because Paris is 600 miles from Mougins I would fly to my office every week and spend the work week there going home at weekends. My options getting taxis at the airport were pretty bad: either stand in long lines, get refused service by the drivers, get in a car that was falling apart, always have to pay in cash and perhaps lose the receipt (creating expense report problems), or I could order a limousine to pick me up, which cost up to five times as much as a taxi. So I just had to deal with the possibility of bad taxi experiences: every… single…week.

Ugh. It’s not that this happened every time – it didn’t – but it occurred often enough that I was always afraid of the possibility. And it’s the anxiety of not knowing that creates negative experiences for people. It’s not that taxi experiences are so bad – they’re not necessarily so at all – but the problem is that you can’t know. When you take a plane ride, you know what you’re going to get. When you book a Hilton hotel, you know what you’re going to get. When you go to McDonald’s, you know what you’re going to get. But taxis are often like life – and a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get. And with travel that is a bad thing.

I finally just thought “I can’t be the only person who has these experiences, and it just can’t stay this way. If KDS manages other business travel so well, and Home Exchange can transform home exchanging using software, then surely we can change how the world accesses ground transportation, no?” So I started SnapCar. And now we’re doing it.

TGLF: How was it setting up a business in France? Were there many hurdles to overcome?

Like with most things in life, it’s better if you experience it with a great partner. In 2011 I started working on the project alone. I generally knew what I wanted to build and just set about doing it. But owning/managing all development, all distribution, technical infrastructure and all administrative aspects of a business that you want to grow quickly is just too much for one person, especially a foreigner in France. The administrative and technical infrastructure aspects of a business don’t ever make you any money, and they were a mystery to me anyway, so I just ignored those things when setting up my company. Instead I focused on just building a product and finding people to use it. The right priority, right?

But deep down I knew that you can’t function effectively in France (or anywhere) without addressing the administrative and technical infrastructure sides of your business, and that if I kept ignoring those things it would become a real problem. But in a stroke of luck, I ultimately found a partner who is not only great at the administrative elements of French business (I’m not saying he loves those things, just that he’s good at them!), but is also a co-founder in every operational sense of the word. He’s an incredibly successful French entrepreneur who sees the need for this technology the same way I do, and was anxious to solve the same problem. So in early 2012 we founded SnapCar together. We move faster, make better decisions (two heads are five times better than one), aren’t hindered by the endless administrative hurdles, and were able to set up the kind of technical infrastructure that has created a nimble but significantly scalable start-up. It’s exactly what I envisioned when I first had the idea way back in late 2009. We still have a long way to go but we’re on our way.

TGLF: Would you say that France is a good place for non-French entrepreneurs such as yourself?

I think that depends more on where you’re focused and what customers you’re serving, as well as how you feel about France. If you want to start a B&B, a tour business or if you’re a trained lawyer offering advice to ex-pats here in France.  I think it can be very doable. But software has high start up costs and is administratively complex. So if you’re building software and don’t speak the language or appreciate the culture then you have two strikes against you already. But even if you do speak and understand and love the country, it can still be hard. It’s hard everywhere – competitors don’t just lay down and let you walk all over them.

What we’re doing at SnapCar is very unique and people really love it. But I wouldn’t have got this far without the right co-founder and team. As with most things in life, success is in large part a function of those you surround yourself with. So no matter what business you want to start, begin with a love of all the things that are great about France, including its language and culture, and then surround yourself with good people. Everything else will follow from there. It will most likely be hard, but that is because you’re starting a business, not necessarily because you’re in France. Then go out and enjoy the ride!

The post A French life: SnapCar Paris, Dave Ashton reveals how France is addictive appeared first on The Good Life France.