To all of you that are struggling, I want to I want to i want to tell you a story it's a
it's a few minutes bear with me but i i i think it's it it's a little less of a how-to and more
about mindset and what an inspiration and i hope that you take this out with you i
i sent you an email yesterday and it was about march and i don't know when you're watching this
recording or replay or whatever but march generally is the burnout month for almost
anything that we do new goals new businesses job searching you know a lot of people start
in the fall or in the beginning of the year and by march you know we're 8 10 12 weeks into this
and and and then there's people who want to quit like i want to be a career changer but
it's just it's too hard or there's people who are just stuck it's like i i i've tried everything
i'm just i'm not sure what to do i'm not sure what my options are are these my only choices and then
there's those that are just like flat out burnt out like they don't know what to do they're frozen
just smoked and i sent you this message that this is very common and i want you to hang in there
but i hope that you're seeing from these messages from these people right machi who moved countries
didn't have a network right didn't know all that stuff had probably many more challenges than most
people and most job seekers prasad 65 000 raise raises galore this week there's people that are
winning and i want to tell you why and i want to i want to give you this story and i've never told
this story out loud so if you are listening to me right now this is the first time i have ever told
this story publicly i have emailed it maybe to my community some time ago um but i've never actually
said this out loud and i i was thinking about this as i rolled out of bed this morning and i thought
i i need to share this today so it was november 19 2004 and i had been working at a company that
i would call a mediocre consulting company and we offered it conserve consulting services
and i started there in january 2004 and here we are about 10 months later almost 11 months later
and my job was to create the products the consulting services products that we would
market and sell except that when i got to this organization i thought i was going to be a sales
person uh and and run some different things but when i got in there and i started looking
around the first week and i got to to learn more about the company i realized that what
this company really needed was a marketing engine that there was no way it would scale
it they there's no way you're going to grow with hand-to-hand combat in sales and and and trying to
get a half a dozen sales people to comb the earth trying to sell these consulting services of which
the message was we're good problem solvers this isn't going to work so i without going into all
the detail i create these products i package them and i run a marketing engine to basically bring
us leads it's i we ended up selling millions of dollars of consulting services and and it was
highly successful and that's about all you need to know about this so fast forward to november
19th and the ceo called me into his office and i was going in there i had no idea what he wanted
and i'm thinking to myself no he doesn't call me much i don't really deal with him all
all that much um i deal with the chief operating officer mostly and he he he says sit down and um
i'll never forget this he says you know we need to make some changes now i don't know about you
but has any good conversation come from we need to make some changes it's kind of like
you know the boyfriend or the girlfriend's like we need to talk i mean has anything
could ever come in the wake of that of those words so i said oh okay he said well um we need
to make some changes and we need to change your role i'm thinking oh oh my goodness okay um and
now i'm like is it possible he's gonna elevate me like thinking oh i just crushed it and he said um
and i have two two choices for you two two options i said oh oh okay he says well
we'd like you to go and either be a bad carrying salesperson so basically go out and sell like
these other guys are doing he said and if you if you want that option um you make a hundred
thousand dollars more in salary than we pay our sales people so we would lock the hundred off
and you could earn it back in commissions and now i'm thinking okay now i now i'm really not liking
where this is going i'm thinking huh but what's option two if that's option one he says well um we
you could go out and actually sell the consulting services and run the project because you're
equipped to do that too and then the clients would be would pay for you and then we would generate
money that way and you could manage these these accounts because we're kind of short-handed but
we would also want you to take a thirty thousand dollar pay cut on your on your salary on that
and you you know the bonus potential isn't as high as thinking i'm now i'm stunned right
i'm thinking what the hell right like this makes no sense and after i collect myself
i'm thinking all right well life's not fair i get it but i have no idea where this is coming from
so like i'm literally like stunned like i just got smashed in the face and and then he says to
me and i need to know by monday and this is friday november 19th i need to know by monday so now now
the one thing that i do know about situations like this is you need to stop talking and get
away from it as quickly as possible okay this is not a discussion he was not a man long on words
and this is not a discussion i wanted to be in and it certainly is not a discussion i wanted to be in
when i had no moments to process it and i'm a fast processor so i get up i walk out the door i say a
few little things under my breath kind of thing but i know i need to get the hell out of there
so i'm walking back to my office and i'm not my office my office my office my cubicle that at a
wall this high was as far away from his office as possible on the floor and along the way
my best friend tony he i actually referred him into the company i helped him get his job there
he actually managed the consulting resources basically the organization of where all our
consulting resources were on which projects and i knew that my commission checks were
kind of light these past number of months based on the the work that i had helped sell
and i went into his office and i said i said v's that is his nickname to me and he swirls around
his chair i said um hey i i gotta ask you um you know i i know we've got new clients where we're
not we have we've delayed the start of projects because we don't have consulting resources
available and we have existing clients who want additional resources that we don't have available
how much money each month are we losing basically the opportunity to get
each month because we don't have butts in the seats that's what we called it right it's like
having a consulting resource to go out and work it we didn't have the product to give to the customer
so he says it's big it's big how big i know it's big like can you tell me down to the dot he swirls
around his chair pulls up his spreadsheet he looks at it and he says uh i can hear him like you know
the numbers coming out like the balloons coming out of his mouth it's like a quarter mil it's
like turns around it's like 249 and change so a quarter of a million dollars a month
that we are not getting because we don't have the consulting resources we're unable to recruit
them fast enough this quarter like every month he's like last three four months been like this
okay it's like a million bucks just in the last quarter give or take
okay now the motors run right and what have i always told you your greatest opportunities
can be found in the sounds of other people's complaints or pain right you solve their problem
you're their hero and while ceo probably didn't love me all that much i didn't really care for him
i'm sure he hated the fact that he wasn't getting that money each month and i went back to my office
i kind of collected myself i thought about it for a few minutes i went home that night
shook myself a totally bruised martini poured it sat at my condo table and i wrote out a list of
the 23 things that i wanted in my life out of work so i i sat down i thought about what i wanted and
this wasn't it so i decided that i was not going to choose from his options and i went back to his
office on monday and i said to him you know early in the morning i tapped on the door i said hey
you want a quick talk you i'm happy to give you my answer he said oh great come on in would you
would which one of those options did you pick i said neither he says are you leaving right i'm
sure he was hoping that too i said well not not so fast i said do you know how much so i didn't
go right into my proposal do you know how much money we're not getting each month because we
don't have the resources he says i don't know i'm assuming it's it's significant this is 250 000
and i let the words hang there and his eyes started to light up i said a month a month
i want you to wrap your mind around that so he said well i didn't know it was that big i said
well okay which leads me to my proposal uh we've got one recruiter and and should barely keep up
and rarely knows what she's doing and even if she did it would be very difficult to actually recruit
all these people and you got unhappy clients because you you know their projects are being
delayed you got people you're selling to that you can't staff these projects so i'll tell you what
i'm gonna give you a couple options i could either quit outright or the option i would prefer is i'm
gonna i'm gonna quit and i'm gonna open up my own recruitment firm and you could be my first client
and he said do you know anything about recruiting what do you care what do you care you don't you're
not going to pay me unless you actually hire somebody so you got an extra pair of hands you
got somebody who knows the space who knows your company better than anybody else who's ever gonna
recruit for you is gonna know it so it's a you know i hate the expression but it's a win-win
he said okay so by thanksgiving this is monday right by wednesday before i
left work we had a contract signed and i had a company that didn't have a name i had a client
that i didn't particularly love but was all client and now i had a shingle that i put out where
i don't know 80 90 hours before i had no idea that that was going to happen and the point that i want
you to know is while you might not know you might remember how you found me and you might
you might know why you went to the internets and looked up the problem that you were having
but this reason this is the reason why i was even available for you to find and the reason
i wanted to share it with you is i want you to know that on that day on november 19th i decided
that absolutely nobody in this world ever and no one has since was ever going to give me choices
right i choose i create them life is not multiple choice okay it's not a series of multiple choice
questions you could check none of the above any time you want but that means you gotta go get up
and go after it and if you can't see what those options are then you need to step back and you
need to keep stepping back until you can see them or you can create them but either which way don't
think that you are limited in any fashion i've talked to you about just because a job is posted
it 20 of of jobs in this world are posted that means 80 percent aren't but he gave me two choices
i didn't like them either of them so i gave him a choice and he didn't have to choose that but he
did so i want you to know when you're feeling down you're feeling burnt out the options are there you
just you're you're so close and in its face that you can't actually see it you gotta step back
and so so i know march is burnout month i know all that but that's how the recruiter was born that's
what put me in motion to do this now so i hope you take that and you go out and you get after it
because whatever you think however closed off you think this world is about how no one's
hiring or how they're discriminating against you or i'm too old or i'm the wrong color or
i'm the wrongness or that that's total [ __ ] all right and you got to own that
because there are choices out there you need to either find different ones or create your own
either way is okay with me and i'm here to help you and the tools are out there to do it
but you gotta but you gotta chase it you can't you can't just live in the box that you know this
world has given you you got to create your own stuff okay so i hope i hope that helps i hope it
inspires you it's along the lines of the messages that i or the message that i sent you yesterday
about don't get burped out step back look at it there are options there are tools there are tools
that can help you there are people that can help you there are people that can help you think it
through so i've been on this because i sent you that message i i've been getting i got a lot of
emails back from the email i i got a lot of email responses back from the email i sent you yesterday
about this being job search burnout month okay and and it kind of leading into uh you know i
mentioned a time or two that you know the job search bootcamp we put it on sale for a day
and uh and through tomorrow you can jump in if you if you want to join us
so maybe a little later you know in the session i'll i'll show you the program but i just i wanted
to share that story with you because i want you to remember that right if i would have accepted
his options this would not be happening right now all right it wouldn't it wouldn't have
been possible i opened up a recruiting firm and i never recruited a day in my life if i can do that
you certainly can get a job where you're slightly pivoting or you're heading into a new industry
and taking well-qualified skills that you've built through other things you sold this go sell that
you've marketed for this go market for that you've accounted for the books for those types
of companies you can go do it for another one believe me there's more options than you think
there really is all right i hope you enjoyed that as much as i enjoyed sharing it and that's the
first time i can ever do that a first time but i i hope it inspires you i really do