Some Lessons We Learned

Renae Hart­son shares her story

Renae Hart­son, Out of the Box Web Solutions

We are all taught at a young age to go to school, get good grades, get into a good col­lege and then grad­u­ate and take the world by storm when you land the per­fect job. Hap­pily ever after, right? Unfor­tu­nately, life doesn’t always work out that way. Some­one for­got to tell our employ­ers that they can’t change those rules.

When you hear the garage door open at 9 a.m. on a Thurs­day morn­ing, it’s never a good sign. And, when you see your hus­band car­ry­ing a small box, it’s even more omi­nous. Iron­i­cally, just days before we were com­ment­ing on how sad it was that our neigh­bor was let go the week prior to Christ­mas. We never thought it would hap­pen to us. After all, Steve got the com­pany to a very sig­nif­i­cant level of achieve­ment the year before. He has an M.B.A. and was a hard worker, ded­i­cated to the com­pany to the point of relo­cat­ing to another state only 9 months after start­ing with the com­pany at their request. I was a work from home designer/​manufacturer in my own busi­ness and was strug­gling. The long hours, the stress of busi­ness own­er­ship and the debt was tak­ing its toll. Bou­tiques and brick and mor­tar stores weren’t buy­ing, plan­ning for another sea­son was out of the ques­tion and Steve’s salary was the only thing keep­ing us afloat.

Our first reac­tion to our down­siz­ing was a sick feel­ing in the pit of our stom­ach, and then came the fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of what to do next, and fear of every­thing that wasn’t in our con­trol. When you don’t have to think about a Plan B, it’s easy to for­get to make one. This dreary day in Jan­u­ary was the day that we had to decide to take our future into our hands. The rules had changed, the econ­omy changed and the way of doing busi­ness changed. This was the time to think out­side the box and open our­selves to dif­fer­ent ways of earn­ing a liv­ing as well as liv­ing the way we deter­mined – not the way an employer dictated.

Some lessons we learned:

Step 1: Before you can take a step for­ward, you need to digest what just hap­pened to you. Real­ize that this was not about “you” but about the com­pany. It was a busi­ness deci­sion and not a per­sonal deci­sion, and don’t take it personally.

Step 2: Get out a pen and paper and think about those things you never had time to think about before. Write down what you would do if money was not the object. What do you love? What do you believe in? What are your hob­bies, inter­ests, and goals? Not career goals, but per­sonal goals. What is your passion?

Step 3: Make a real­is­tic plan to get to those goals. With­out a guide, it’s easy to get off track and floun­der. Keep a jour­nal of what you are think­ing, feel­ing and the steps you are tak­ing to get where you want to go.

Step 4: Use this as an oppor­tu­nity. You can never con­nect the dots going for­ward only back­ward. Start plan­ning your dots. When you are done, you’ll see the big pic­ture and how you got there. Look­ing back it’s always easy to see the “why” behind major changes in our lives and often times it’s usu­ally a much more beau­ti­ful por­trait when com­plete than when you focus on a small sec­tion of the masterpiece.

Steve’s pas­sion was not in the field he was in, my pas­sion was not fash­ion. The first thing we did was breathe. With both of our per­son­al­i­ties, we often tend to put our­selves in a “react” mode instead of tak­ing a few min­utes to just breathe. We took our fam­ily on a week­end road trip a few hours away and used this oppor­tu­nity to clear our minds and recon­nect with our girls. Steve applied for var­i­ous jobs, went on inter­views through­out the US and was blessed to find a posi­tion within a few months. It’s with a fan­tas­tic com­pany, a much less stress­ful posi­tion, a warmer cli­mate and, closer to our extended fam­ily. This change has allowed me to re-​evaluate what I wanted to do with my day. I knew that work­ing with small busi­nesses help­ing them achieve their goals and avoid the pit­falls was some­thing I was excited about. I part­nered with the multi-​million dol­lar com­pany who orig­i­nally pro­vided the web­site for my cloth­ing com­pany. Steve and I became Unfran­chise own­ers with an Inter­net bro­ker­age and one to one mar­ket­ing com­pany. I get to take my love of tech­nol­ogy and all things “geeky” and pas­sion for help­ing small busi­ness own­ers – and earn a liv­ing hav­ing fun work­ing at home in my pajamas.

We found our Plan B and are work­ing on cre­at­ing a future that we con­trol, instead of an employer con­trol­ling us and in the mean­time, we are enjoy­ing the ride. Our fam­ily is still con­nect­ing our dots, but right now the pic­ture is look­ing pretty darn good.

• If you would like more detailed infor­ma­tion about our Plan B, please email me and I’d be glad to tell you all about it!

Renae Hart­son
Out of the Box Web Solu­tions
Visit my blog: www​.oot​box​.me