The Write Solution

In the last of a month-long series of guest posts (including mine) on G. L. Hoffman’s What Would Dad Say? blog, Seth Godin closes out the month with some RADICAL job search advice: “Don’t Try to Get a Job.” Run over there, check it out (GREAT READ!!), then come back and find out why this resume writer whole-heartedly agrees.

You’re back? Good. Here’s my story …

In 2000, I left a “safe, secure” corporate position to try my hand at recruiting. By June of 2002, I realized professional recruiting was going to be the first “major failure” I’d experience in a career spanning more than two-and a-half-decades.

Well. Let’s see. I left a good job, with a large company and a good salary for the potential to make big money recruiting and found out I didn’t have what it took to ride the roller coaster of the hiring / recruiting process. I was too attached to my clients, spent too much time coaching and spiffing up rezs and not enough time doing the work of recruiting. Anyway …

Bewildered, and always an animal lover, I took a part-time office management position in a local veterinary hospital for … I won’t even tell you the hourly wage … so I could sort out what to do with me, and my career. Well, answering that vet’s office phone day in and day out, giving out phone numbers for kennels and knowing most rural clients had more than one animal – yard dogs, barn cats, pot-bellied pigs, chickens, etc. – sparked an idea. One client led to another and my pet sitting business quickly grew: “Snug as a Bug – In-home pet sitting services”. (The “Start a dog poop shoveling business” line caught my eye in the Godin article.)

Shortly after I stopped recruiting, the idea to use resume writing skills, to make some extra money also surfaced. “The Write Solution” started with the referral of a friend of a friend. I continued working the part-time position (chicken entrepreneur) while I grew both businesses and earned my Certified Professional Resume Writer credential. In June of 2007, I quit the part-time job, taking both my pet sitting and resume writing businesses full time.

Today, I have more than 40 core pet sitting clients calling on me regularly to care for their animals and check on their homes while they’re away. In between pet sit rounds, I write a resume for someone almost every day. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t get a referral or hear back from former rez clients. Last year, my first full calendar year running two full-time businesses, I surpassed what I earned when I left my customer service manager position in corporate America.

Was it/is it easy? No. Do I work entirely too many hours? Yes. Can I take a nap in the afternoon? Not often enough. Did I wrestle, at the beginning, with losing a corporate identity and the part of my self-worth that came from my job title? Abso-freakin’-lutely. Would I change my decision to NOT to go back to the corporate world? Never in a hundred-ba-jillion-million years.

Mr. Godin is right about the opportunities out there. Shut your mouth. Stop whining about … well, everything. Stop expecting someone else to do it for you and open your eyes. Know what you’ll see? Opportunity a-plenty. It may not be in a cushy, corner office and you many not need a three-piece suit, but the money you earn will be by you, for you.

Absolutely, don’t get a job. If you’ve got the guts and the willingness to explore a whole different side of you, go for it. My mantra: “Leap and the net will appear.”

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