It has been several weeks now since I landed in Las Palmas, and the experience has settled into something that feels less like a programme and more like a period of life I will probably think back on for a while.
The city has been good to me. I started beach volleyball, which was not in the plan but ended up being one of the better things I did here. I have met people, built a small routine, and the initial strangeness of being somewhere new has faded into something more comfortable.
The work with Matteo has changed shape since the beginning. We spent the first weeks restructuring how Kimerica manages its projects internally, introducing clearer workflows and tools to track tasks and deadlines across an international team. That went well and is still running. Matteo has noticed the difference too, internal communication is more organised now and the delivery side is easier to track. But more recently I have been pulled into the actual projects, and that is where things got more interesting and also more demanding.
Kimerica works on product design and 3D modeling, with collaborators in different countries. I join the weekly team meetings and sometimes client calls too. Managing technically complex projects without a design background means learning fast, asking the right questions, understanding enough to be useful without pretending to know more than you do. It is not always easy but it is the part where I am growing the most.
For the remaining weeks I want to focus more on the commercial side of how Matteo runs the business. Part of what I am working on for myself is understanding how to adapt my consultancy to different types of clients, creative studios like Kimerica, but also agencies, small businesses, sports organisations. Seeing how Matteo manages relationships and prices his work is giving me a more concrete picture of what that actually looks like in practice. The work is challenging but in a way that makes sense. There is something about being away from your usual context that makes you think more clearly about what you actually want to do.