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Relocation season peaks in the summer. To avoid unemployment, spouses are building businesses that travel with them.

By Sue Shellenbarger, From The Wall Street Journal Online

July 27, 2007 - When Vera Davison packs up her household to move to Greece from Washington, D.C., next week for her husband's job, she'll be taking along a hard-won new asset: her language-translation business.

While moving five times throughout Asia and South America for her husband's career as a foreign-service officer, Ms. Davison gave up her own career as an attorney to create a portable job for herself. Her clients, she says, stick with her via the Internet.

As the relocation season peaks this summer, more transferees' spouses are avoiding their traditional fate -- unemployment or underemployment -- by building virtual businesses that can move right along with them. Experts on so-called trailing spouses say these entrepreneurs are multiplying fast, ranging from accountants and Web site designers to administrative "virtual assistants." Their stories show what it takes to build a business that is portable, but also financially and psychologically rewarding.

Some 12.1% of sole proprietors are engaging in e-commerce, up from 9.4% in 2005, says a survey of 1,235 businesses this year by IDC, a Framingham, Mass., market-research concern. For many, says IDC analyst Ray Boggs, the Internet "is what's making it possible for them to do business."

These itinerant entrepreneurs must have all the usual assets for starting a business -- a profitable niche, risk tolerance and marketing and financial skills. Beyond that, they also need to be unusually nimble and persistent in marketing, savvy with technology and skillful at building relationships online. They also must be able to comply with local immigration, tax, visa and work-permit requirements for international transfers, and with varying state professional-licensing requirements for moves within the U.S.

After three moves with his wife, a U.S. embassy employee, attorney George Angelov turned a trading hobby into Citdates, a trading and technical market-analysis business, which he runs from Rome. Between trading profits and subscriptions to his Web site, he has replaced his lost income as an attorney.

And he loves the flexibility. His 3:30 p.m.-to-10 p.m. workday corresponds to U.S. stock-exchange hours. He uses his mornings for personal pursuits or caring for his two children, six and nine.

More traditional businesses are embracing virtual client-service techniques too. Bonnie Bagley, who is moving to Las Vegas from Seattle for her fiancé's job, is straddling both cities with her interior-design business, partly by emailing drawings. In anticipation of the move, she refurbished her Web site and began networking long in advance with professional groups in Las Vegas.

To make a virtual setup work, many entrepreneurs need above-average technology, including Internet phone and fax service and meeting and file-sharing software, says Christine Durst, CEO of StaffCentrix, a Woodstock, Conn., training concern, who runs entrepreneurship-training programs for trailing spouses for the State and Defense departments. And they must do all this without breaking the family budget.

One Washington, D.C., woman racked up $17,000 in credit-card debt for her business as a virtual assistant before confessing the losses to her spouse. "She didn't want to tell him that the business was failing," Ms. Durst says. (Virtual assistants handle secretarial, administrative, bookkeeping or project-management tasks for remote clients.) Good communication between spouses, and ground rules on limiting risk capital, are essential.

Amid obstacles to growth and diversification, many portable businesses produce little profit. And surviving a move takes nimble marketing. But the potential payoff is great. For some spouses, losing an old career opens the door to doing something they enjoy, says Laura Herring, CEO of Impact Group, St. Louis, a relocation-services concern.

After moving to Argentina, back to the U.S. and then to St. Petersburg, Russia, for her husband's career as a foreign-service officer, Margarita Gokun Silver, a former international development consultant, started a life- and executive-coaching business for expatriates. "As long as you have the Internet, you can have clients anywhere," she says. Working from St. Petersburg, she recently ran a video workshop for clients in Botswana.

But each move demands a new marketing push. While she does much of her coaching by phone, she also runs live workshops that arise from word-of-mouth referrals where she's living; she spends up to 80% of her time marketing that service and others.

"Once you know where you're going," Ms. Silver says, "you start establishing connections with people before you even go."

Email your comments to sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com.