Istanbul to London: What Transfers and What Doesn't

Starting the year in one country and ending it in another

I spent most of this year in an unplanned gap: no job, a closed market, and a decision I'd made in February that the world immediately complicated.

I'm ending it somewhere else entirely. That's a strange sentence to write, and the process of getting here taught me more than any single role has.

What follows isn't relocation advice. It's the honest accounting of what came with me and what I had to leave.

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What transfers completely: the work itself

The mechanics of growth marketing are portable in a way I underestimated.

Funnel maths doesn't change across borders. Neither does the logic of segmentation, the structure of a good experiment, or the reason a lead scoring model drifts out of date. A pipeline review in Istanbul and a pipeline review in London are the same meeting with different accents.

This is more reassuring than it sounds, because in the middle of a move you start doubting whether any of it counts. It does. The technical core of what you know is the most transferable asset you have.

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What transfers partially: your track record

Your results travel. The context that made them legible does not.

At Vodafone, saying "I ran lifecycle for the growth tribe" landed instantly with anyone in the room, because everyone knew the company, the scale, and roughly what that job involved. In a new market, the same sentence needs three sentences of scaffolding before it means anything.

The practical fix is unglamorous: stop naming companies and start naming problems. "I ran retention and upsell campaigns across a customer base of several million, and cut cost per activation by X" works anywhere. "I was at [company]" only works where people already know [company].

I rewrote every line of my CV around this and the difference in response was immediate.

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What doesn't transfer: your network's shape

This is the one that actually hurts, and the one I'd most want to warn people about.

My professional network in Istanbul was eight years deep. Not just contacts — people who had seen me work, who would vouch without being asked, who thought of me when something came up. That's not a list of names. It's an accumulated reputation held in other people's heads.

None of it crosses the border. Not because those people stopped valuing my work, but because their networks and my new market barely overlap. The recommendation only travels as far as the recommender's reach.

You don't rebuild that in six months. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. What you can do is start earlier than feels necessary, and accept that for the first year you are working without the safety net that made your last few years feel easy.

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What doesn't transfer: assumed context in conversations

Small, constant, and cumulatively exhausting.

How direct you're expected to be in a first meeting. Whether a follow-up email two days later reads as diligent or pushy. Whether "let's keep in touch" is a real invitation or a polite ending. What a client expects to see before they'll commit to a paid engagement.

None of this is in any guide, and getting it wrong doesn't produce a clear error message — it just produces silence, and you can't tell whether the silence was about your pricing, your positioning, or your timing.

The only thing that helped was asking directly. "Is this the normal way this works here?" is a slightly uncomfortable question that saves months.

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What I didn't expect to gain

Two things.

First, being the outsider makes you explain yourself properly. I can no longer rely on shared context, so I have to be specific about what I do and why it works. That specificity has made me better at the actual job, not just at describing it.

Second, a genuinely fresh start lets you drop the parts of your professional identity you'd outgrown. In a market where nobody knows your history, you are not the person who ran that one campaign in 2018. You get to be whoever your current work says you are — which is uncomfortable and also a rare kind of freedom.

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Where this goes next

I'm starting independent consulting in January. B2B SaaS, early stage, demand generation and growth systems — the direction I landed on during the gap and have been testing in small pieces since summer.

I don't know how the first year goes. But I know considerably more about what I'm building than I did in February, and the year that looked like it was costing me time turns out to have been the thing that clarified it.