What to Do When You Lose Your Job

I have a lot of good friends that have lost their jobs recently. Most of these guys are good workers, not at the bottom of the food chain, respectable guys with families and mortgages. They are middle managers, sales managers, warehouse managers, and they weren’t the only ones that went down with the ship - all the people under them lost their jobs as well - but now they’re in varying amounts of trouble and jobs are very, very hard to come by.

Additionally, I know a goodly number of people in my industry that are underemployed now, with the real estate market in disarray. Mortgage guys, title guys, Realtors, lots of us find ourselves with stretches of time and nothing in particular to do with them.

I have a suggestion. You lost your job. But you haven’t lost your ability. You can still work. Right now, there’s a lot of work out there. Why not do some of it?

First, let’s split jobs from work, so that this will make sense. A job I’ll define as something someone pays you to do. Obviously, we need to eat and we have mortgages to pay, so jobs are definitely attractive. I’m not disputing that. Work is anything you do that is productive, whether it pays or not. It therefore includes things like gardening and playing with children.

Second, let’s think about this a bit. We have no job. Nobody is going to pay us today to do anything. We’re going to apply for some jobs, send out our resumes, make some calls to our networks, try to find an open position. Guess what? There aren’t any. If there were open positions, we wouldn’t have had ours get eliminated (simplistic, obviously, but in general terms, when large chunks of the economy are firing, there aren’t going to be any open positions by definition). So resume fairs and Monster.com will only be so effective. It’s unlikely that we’ll find anything immediately, and even less likely that we’ll immediately find a job we want.

But we can still work. The economy is shrinking. Why is this? Do people need less food than they once did? Fewer cars? They only wear clothes half the time now? No, of course not. But there are two ways to stimulate the economy. One is to have people out there with money, looking to buy things. That’s where we once were, but the debt fairy has come for payment now, and the days of lots of free cash are over. The other is to supply things to the market that people will decide to re-task their money to buy. This is called supply-side economics, and it works a bit differently than we’re used to. But it still works.

Look, nobody stood around trying to figure out if there was something like a Rubik’s Cube to buy. Erno Rubik produced it, and people said “hey, that’s cool” and bought them up. What I’m suggesting is something like that. You want a job. There are no jobs. But if businesses were doing better, there would be jobs. So what you need is for businesses to be doing better.

How do businesses do better? They sell more things, produce more things. To do that, they need more workers, more ideas. They’re cutting costs to try to stay in business, but what they desperately need is a reason to hire people. They need work done, and they can’t pay for it until they get some money.

So make them some money.

We have incredible expertise. If you’ve been in management anywhere, you know how to do things, how to sell, how to buy, how to get people working together. Lots of the guys I know that are out of work are salesmen and marketers. They have huge amounts of experience, probably a lot more than most businesses could afford to pay them for.

So we don’t have jobs. We can still do work.

I work with a small group of people called the Main Street Gang, for want of a better name. What we do is go from business to business, mostly on Main Street in Lehi Utah, meeting the proprietors, looking for ways we can help. Sometimes we write reviews of their businesses and post them around on local sites, doing some web marketing. Sometimes the help we offer is more substantive. With the local bookstore, we had an idea that has now grown into a large enterprise, and has, it appears, some real potential. It should be very good for the struggling bookstore, and for several other related businesses.

There’s a local organic market. They need help. There’s a barbershop. It needs help. An appraisal management company. An insurance agency. My mortgage branch. A sign company. A restaurant. All these businesses could profit tremendously from the expertise that we can bring to the table. We can organize campaigns, consult, see areas where things could be improved. We come in as a consulting company and we do what we can to help. And we do it for free, because someone needs to do it, and the people that need it the most can afford it the least.

It doesn’t pay. It is, however, productive work. It makes us better. It keeps us sharp. It brings us into contact with dozens of small businessmen and women, the very people that are most likely to feel the returning surge of power in the economy and look to hire someone to help them to exploit it. Who are they most likely to look at first? Some of us have gotten jobs in the meantime, and still return to help out once in a while. When a job comes open where one of us is working, who are we most likely to recommend to the HR people? Right - someone we’ve worked with before, that we know and trust, and that has already demonstrated his willingness to work even when the payoff was pretty obscure.

We supply work and expertise and energy. We still have those things. We try to push the flywheel of the economy a bit faster on every turn. And we find that we’re happier. We’re having fun. We’re stopping a few people from joining us in the ranks of the un- and under-employed. So if you’re out there, having trouble finding a job, how about joining us? We could use you.

Now that you don’t have a job, why not do the work you always wanted to do? It just might be the best career move you ever made.