Create Your Own Job Security (eBook)

Plan to Start Your Own Business At Midlife

Wm. Hovey Smith (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018 | 1. Auflage
210 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9780916565138 (ISBN)

Infos

Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife is a step by step guide through the entire business-starting process from selecting a name, deciding on the type of businesses you wish to start, when to start them along with nuts and bolts chapters on how to get trademarks, patents, partners and money for your business.

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Create Your Own Job Security: Plan to Start Your Own Business at Midlife teaches now to select, start, and run a series of businesses throughout your lifetime to raise immediate cash when needed, plan for longer term certifications through college or other means, with the ultimate aim of having your own businesses running in the background while you work for others. The ultimate objective is for you to discover work that you enjoy doing so much that you would do it even if no one paid you for it. Once this work is found, find a way to make it profitable and go through the necessary steps of getting a business name, licenses, trademarks, patents, partners, etc. while you are still employed. That way when you get a pink slip instead of a gold watch, you already have your business running and instead of crawling down the dark alley of depression, you can turn the key on your business, stomp on the accelerator and roar down the highway towards a future where you, not someone else, controls your destiny.

Textauszug

Chapter 1.

Almost each day I hear of a new way how workers are being displaced by changes in technology or business models. For example on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition there was a program explaining how once large retail stores were being displaced by smaller storefronts stocked with demonstration products, but there was nothing for sale in the store.

Customers could try out the products in the smaller-format store and order them online for delivery to their door a few days later. Where perhaps 20 workers manned the old-technology retail establishment, only two lesser-skilled salespersons were needed for the smaller storefront.

What’s Happening Today

Time was when things were different. I had a cousin, Dean Leonard, who was a decade older than me. He went to Georgia Tech, earned an engineering degree, and after he pulled his two years of service time in the Army, he started work at General Electric in the Jet Engine Division and remained with that company his entire working life. He was a “company man” who might have a reasonable expectation of starting and finishing his working career with the same company.

Dean worked his way up the corporate ladder following a series of in-house company training and advancement programs designed to insure that a maximum amount of his intellectual output was directed towards company activities. It was forbidden, for example, for him to do work outside of the company.

Sure, he could have his hobbies, enjoy aspects of his leisure time, and support charitable causes; but anything that even sniffed of commercial activities was strictly prohibited. The company had bought, paid for and demanded his complete attention. In return they offered health benefits, retirement, challenging working conditions and, implied through the example of his peers, job security.

My Work Experiences

A decade later after obtaining geology degrees, I had a different experience. My choices were to attempt to gain employment with one of the large mining companies as a Mine Geologist or go into the more risky field of exploration geology where I was trying to find and develop new mineral deposits, rather than work extracting old ones.

For the first few years after graduation I worked for an exploration company headquartered in Minnesota, but my work took me to Montana, Texas, Maine and the Carolinas, among other places. When those jobs ran out, I became a Senior Geologist for a company in Tucson and did months-long consulting jobs in Nevada, northern Mexico and Montana as well as worked in Arizona. For a time, I pulled lines and dug holes in the Arizona desert in temperatures that ran over 100 degrees.

Following this I began a nearly decade-long relationship with an Alaskan exploration company and worked in remote areas of Alaska, including on the Alaska Peninsula, the Brooks Range, and several locations in interior Alaska.

None of this did much for my social life. It was only after I returned home to Sandersville did I meet the lady that would become my wife. I had relationships in the past, but these usually ended with a comment like, “What do I need you for? You are never here – always off doing who knows what with whom. Don’t bother to call when you get back, I have found someone else.” This was exactly the same situation that many in the military were facing. Just as our war vets’ spouses and girlfriends were walking away, so were mine.

My work experiences as a contract consultant are typical of today’s work environment where a work crew is gathered to do a job and then dispersed when it is over. If you were a good employee you might be called on again and again. If the economic climate changes your job might disappear as quickly as it came. If you have worked in any aspect of the construction industry you know exactly what I am talking about. Specialists, such as those in the nuclear industry, may make very good money indeed; but if no new plants are being built, they need to quickly switch fields.

How You Are Likely to Lose Your Job

Mergers and acquisitions are also facts of everyday life in the corporate world. Very often economies are sought by removing duplicate staffs, closing competing retail outlets and consolidating product lines. This may mean relocating factories from relatively expensive places like New England to the deep South where land prices, workers’ wages, and taxes place less of a financial burden on the company. States are offering very large tax incentives to lure relocating companies to the southern U.S. They may even donate the site and provide a years-long tax holiday after the company opens.

Stay and Lose Your Job or Move

If you don’t wish to relocate or can’t because of family care responsibilities, you are left in a lurch. If you do not go with the company, there is often no other local work to be had. You are stuck. When you are laid off I want you to be prepared to immediately start your own business to obtain some income after your unemployment runs out. This book is designed to take you through the necessary steps of selecting and starting new business ventures.

Losing Your Job to a Younger Worker

Even if you are willing to relocate, the first to be cut among the company’s workforce are those who have risen to administrative and management functions who are in their 50s or older. Your job will be eliminated or you may be replaced by those holding similar jobs in the acquiring company or by younger talent who can bring a more modern skill set to the company at a less expensive rate.

The cruelest cut of all is to scratch you off the payroll just before you become fully vested in the company’s retirement program.

There are periodic moves in Congress to make retirement investments portable from company to company, but this has not occurred. The best that can be hoped for is a 401K program where you invested in a stock portfolio with a portion of their investments being matched by the company.

This account belongs to the employee, even if he is terminated. The company matching part of this 401 K may be of questionable value if it had been in stock that was valued at $50 while you were working but dropped to $5.00 at the time you retired, as was the case with Delta Airlines before they declared bankruptcy in 2005.

Downsizing’s Psychological Trauma

Sometimes mergers and their aftereffects may be stewed about for months, which can give you a period of agonizing psychological trauma. An organization that you once regarded as extended family can degrade to a group of cutthroat pirates as each employee seeks to enhance his chances of being retained, at the expense of his fellow workers and perhaps yourself.

Even those who have the power to make the decisions as to who goes and who stays are not immune. One person in the company I worked for was delegated to decide which employees would be terminated to meet a payroll-reduction goal and did what was demanded of him.

He took his own life, apparently over regrets that he saw himself as the person who had ruined what was once a closely-bonded group of friends and coworkers by breaking the social contract between the company and its employees. Knowing the harm he had done, he could not live with himself. More than 1,000 people, including myself, attended his funeral.

Being forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement where you agree not to divulge proprietary company information or go to work for a company competing in the same market is nothing less than a “stab in the back.” You have the choice of either accepting the agreement or getting nothing. I am at a loss to think of a polite word to describe such contracts.

This is a huge psychological blow. It implies that the knowledge that you have worked so hard to learn and put into practical application is now worthless. No wonder that you are discouraged about your future job prospects.

Pulling Yourself Out of Depression and Mourning

For some being “a consultant” is synonymous to being unemployed. For a time that might be so. The challenge is to start marketing yourself either doing something similar to the job that you did with your former employer or taking an altogether different path.

If you are willing to look outside of your immediate experiences in your past job, there are unlimited possibilities of forming a successful company. The task is to select the new venture that best fits your physical abilities, finances, and interests that has a sufficiently large pay-out to fit your needs.

It Happened to Me

It was during such a downsizing event that I lost my job, although my wife continued to work with the company until she died of pancreatic cancer five years later. During our marriage we had alternated being the breadwinners in the family, as when she had undergone a month-long rehabilitation after a horrific automobile accident.

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.6.2018
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Personalwesen
• ISBN-13: 9780916565138 / 9780916565138