Nine years ago, the Canadian television industry went through a major restructuring. By the end of it, the number of potential employers in the industry was substantially reduced, and my husband was out of a job.

It was a lousy year for us, just like this year is a lousy year for a lot of people. So that year we decided to cut and run. We started our own business and we relocated to the country.

The decision to cut our dependence on someone else for my husband’s paycheque was based on the following principal: What have we got to lose? We knew that my husband’s field would continue to contract for some time. A 50-year-old man looking for a senior position would get the same result, whether he mailed out his resumés or tucked them into a bottle and tossed them into Lake Ontario. He was not fun to come home to. Starting up a business, whether it turned out to be a long-term solution or not, was a better option than deep depression and watching golf on TV.

He was lucky in that I’ve been self-employed for most of my life, practicing family law. I’d already learned to tolerate the ups and downs of small business life and income to some degree, moderated always, mind you, by his steady paycheque. And while luck and a tolerant spouse are good to have, there are the other matters of capital and overhead — finding one and limiting the other.

The idea was to take the hobby (metal working) and make it the business (custom machining for the broadcast industry). The problem was to find and fund a machine shop in which to do this.

Which is why we ran. We cashed out of Toronto and moved north. Our home in Haliburton is worth half of what our place in the city was worth, even though it came with 45 acres of land. So we had a pool of cash at the end of the move to build and equip a workshop, and we had room to put the shop on our own property. Thus, appropriate accounting term for the ongoing overhead costs of our business premises is “diddly-squat.”

Our commuting costs disappeared. No transit passes, no parking, and weeks at a time pass without gas charges on the credit card. The time previously wasted in commuting has reappeared in our lives. I won’t deny that when you run a business you work long hours, but working “on the property” as we say up here, we have two extra hours, eight to nine in the morning and five to six in the evening, to devote to business instead of to the freeway or the subway. Starbucks coffee breaks and bistro lunches? Gone. It’s amazing what that alone puts back in your pocket.

Daycare costs are lower here. Many moms work on their properties, so before and after care often isn’t an issue. Kids who do need company in the morning and after school often end up with neighbours, in exchange for some fencing work or snowplowing. I myself have seen a child safely onto a schoolbus in the morning in exchange for the odd bag of free deer-feed.

There’s no need to keep up with the Joneses once you’re north of Highway 7. In fact, here, where rural values still hold, people may be a little leery of dealing with you if you look too prosperous. Too much new stuff, in the country, says “I waste money”, as opposed to “Look how successful I am.”

So why doesn’t everybody do this? I think it’s because there’s a general misconception that there are no markets in rural areas. Hardly any people, so hardly any customers, and hardly any chance of making a go of it, right? Well no. Not any more. The one good thing about this messed-up economic era is that the global economy is here. With couriers and the web, our little company supports a national client base. We ship coast to coast, every month, and beat the prices of competitors who are located in major cities.

So if times get tough, remember, you too can cut and run like I did.

Joan Barton is a former family law lawyer and current rural entrepreneur.