The past six months have brought about interesting changes in my life.
I posted before about leaving the job I was at for thirteen years for…greener pastures. In many ways it has been greener pastures. I talked about the positive impacts this has brought about in that post.
It has been a slightly bumpy transition in that the income was lacking – at least compared to what I was used to earning.
The income potential was there. And after my first month of sales, which was a partial month, I mapped out what the year would look like if things continued on the same path (and at the same rate). And it looked promising.
The next few months things were going good.
The company was testing different platforms for filling the funnel and ultimately my calendar. Email sequences to their house file at large and to previous buyers of the higher end offerings, Facebook advertising, LinkedIn strategies, “cold” email sequences, etc.
Some weeks were filled with unqualified leads, some weeks had very qualified leads…the team was working to make the whole endeavor work – based on what the mission/goal was.
My income was slowly going up. I could see that a major breakthrough was in the near future. Or at least two to three months down the road.
OK, so we had to be careful about personal expenditures. But I’m always pretty good at this. I had to make some different financial decisions. At first, these were less than desirable decisions, but I could see (maybe too optimistically) that it would soon all take an upswing and things would get better.
All in all, it was a good experience. Only this one area, this one thing was lacking. Some would say this is the most important thing. I talked before about the other benefits I realized with this transition, so a little creative budgeting wasn’t too critical…but the reality was/is – the income needed to increase or I would have to explore additional ways to “bring home the bacon.”
Then beginning about the first of May, the traffic dropped off of a cliff. Looking back at things now, this could be like a personal “May-Day”.
The leadership made major decisions based on goals and outcomes that the rest of the team was not fully aware of.
I have mixed emotions about the last six months. I’m not bitter or angry or resentful or anything like that at all.
Here are some observations on the past six months.
I was bought on to help boost sales of the company’s highest end product offering. This was positioned as a long-term contract position. The company didn’t want someone to come in, learn a bunch of stuff and leave a few months later.
At the same time the company brought on a tech person to help support the team.
This brought the total company team members to ten as of the end of December
By the end of March, three of the team members were gone. The reasons given all made sense. The company had certain goals and objectives, and changes had to be made to accomplish these.
By June the tech guy they brought on was gone too. No reason was given (to me at least as to what happened there – a brief mention, but nothing explicit).
Since December I have had three different compensation arrangements. The last of which I gave some pushback (interpreted – reasons for not changing).
June 3, 2022 the remaining team members had a team meeting about the future of the company. Three options were discussed with only two being seriously considered. One of which was to shut the whole company down. The other being the three non-leadership team members to take over with the founder retaining 25% of the company and profits.
Over the next few weeks there were a lot of information exchanges, questions, answers, plans, meetings etc.
June 20, 2022 the non-leadership team was given information (via email and a team meeting) that it was no longer an option for us to enter into the partnership arrangement. The decision was made that the higher end offerings that I was brought on to help grow would be shut down and discontinued on July 1. And July 1 would be the last payment to us for services rendered.
So where does this leave me?
What do I do now?
What have I done since this new information has been presented?
To be continued…