Jenny Bhatt @jenny_bhatt Engineers New Business Opportunities

Though trained as a manufacturing engineer with a long and distinguished career in Corporate America, Jenny Bhatt found her calling as a small business person while seeking answers about her own personal finance.

With an honors degree from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, Bhatt has worked and lived in six countries including India, England, Germany, Scotland, France, and the U.S., most recently finding herself in California’s Silicon Valley.

Though she had worked up until 2012 in a variety of different industry sectors, not only in engineering but as a marketer and strategy consultant, a growing interest in how to help others like herself who occasionally worked as “self-employed free agents” would change the direction of her career.

“My interest in personal finance grew after hiring my first financial adviser a number of years ago,” Bhatt remembers. “Back then, having moved from the UK to the US, I needed professional help to figure out how to manage my investments and taxes across 2 countries. The more I learned and read about personal finance, the more questions I had.”

The experience eventually led Bhatt to even more research on the subject and culminated in her decision to leave her executive position at a Fortune 500 Tech Firm in early 2012 to launch her own independent financial advisory firm.

“While each person’s journey to and through self-employment is unique, I believe that there are a few things that each free-agent-in-the-making must master for success,” Bhatt explains.

Specifically, Bhatt says these areas of mastery fall into the following broad categories:

• Aligning interests, talents and rewards to drive achievable goals
• Mastering money, time and knowledge challenges to overcome roadblocks
• Navigating social, political and macro-economic factors to sustain momentum
• Refining one’s value system and identity to gain personal satisfaction

Though Bhatt won’t officially launch her new firm AchieVitas Financial Advisory LLC for some months yet, pending incorporation, certifications, and licenses, she has been an active participant in the BizSugar community in the meantime.

Bhatt says she discovered BizSugar through sister site Small Business Trends, and was immediately impressed with what she found.

“For a few months, I just read the different articles posted by others like me,” Bhatt recalls. “I continue to be amazed with the breadth and depth of a diverse and global contributor base, the amount of useful how-to information and really appreciate the warm community aspect of contributors/moderators helping each other out.”

When she launched her own blog Free Agent Economics in November 2012, she also became a regular contributor and has been enjoying the wider exposure, community feedback, and occasional requests for opinions and guidance ever since.

“These are all very morale-boosting for a newly-self-employed person,” Bhatt says. “I look forward to continue making deeper connections with the BizSugar community through more participation and contribution. It’s beginning to feel like home.”

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