I help run a job club in the Chicago area for unemployed folks over 50.
As you can imagine, the size of the group has been continually growing over the past three years.
After previous recessions, we would see the same people for maybe three or four months and then they would dissapear as they found new jobs.
But, in our current job club we've been seeing the same people month after month for a year or more.
I often wish that I had a magic wand I could wave to get each and every one of these people successfully placed once again in a corporate job.
I unfortuantely don't have this ability.
Because of my entrepreneurial personality I have been telling the members of the job club for some time to think seriously about how to sell their talent and experience as independent contractors or as small business owners.
But, only a few seem to be taking to heart what I say...they are still convinced that somehow they will find an attractive replacement corporate job, even at age 58 and even after being out of work for a year or more.
To these folks and to some of my blog readers, I feel compelled in today's entry to tell you this: "It's time to wake and smell the coffee here!".
By this I mean that they need to look at some basic employment numbers.
The U.S. economy is adding fewer than 200,000 new jobs per month and has been at this level or worse for more than three years. It takes at least 175,000 new jobs just to absorb new entrants into the workforce (many of whom are under age 30).
This means that FEW NEW REPLACEMENT JOBS are really being created. And so, a panel of top economists last week predicted that we will continue to face an unemployment rate of 7%-8% for two or more additional years. This means that by the time the unemployment rate starts to get closer to the traditional 6% that the members of our job club will have been out of work for five years or more!
Learn more about the economic projection...
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/story/2012-01-30/cutting-the-jobless-rate/53390626/1
Despite all the campaign rhetoric, the reality is that any U.S. President has scant power to create massive job growth.
Employers must feel confident before they will hire and right now order volume is declining once again for many companies which is their barometer to hire. Lowering taxes will not create massive job creation - most Fortune 500 companies already pay well under 5% of their profit in income tax. And health care costs will continue to rise regardless of whether the Affordable Care Act is fully implementend or not, so on this point large employers already know the expense landscape.
The truth is: Why would a company take on the financial responsibility of a new full time employee when they can buy all the talent they want through temporary help agencies or by placing more jobs overseas.?
The reality: They will continue NOT HIRING.
But, guess what they will continue to do?
They will continue to buy billions of dollars of goods and services from small suppliers and independent contractors and consultants!
I often remind the members of our job club of the following truism in the U.S. workplace:
"Customers don't care what the age is of the CEOs of their suppliers - they only care that they deliver what they promised".
For many under age 40 hiring managers, an unemployed boomer over 50 can NEVER deliver enough to overcome his relative unattractiveness as an employee!
For millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans over 50, it's time to wake up and realize that "You're retired from the corporate world and just don't know it yet!"
It's time to move on to find an entrepreneurial way to turn your talent into income.
Till we talk again...
Jeff Williams
Saturday, July 7, 2012
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I think it is my duty to share the experience I had with Jeff Williams from Bizstarters.com and his book “Earn Big”. I will try not to make any judgement; I will just put the facts on the table and leave it up to the readers to make their own judgement.
ReplyDeleteLast December I read a reference about Jeff’s e-Book “Earn Big” in a Start Up community similar to this one and clicked on the link to find out more about it. In his site (www.bizstarters.com), Jeff says that, with this book you will “Learn 175 ways to turn your knowledge and experience into a great business. Guaranteed!”. Sounds like a magical formula as many others you find out there to which I don’t normally give much credit. Additionally, it was a quite an expensive purchase, US$ 49, especially for an e-Book (it is now being marketed for US$ 19 – a 60% drop in two months!). But, as the site had a “100% satisfaction guarantee or your money back” statement, I decided to have a look, bought and downloaded it. The book has 45 pages, of which 28 are tables with blank spaces to be filled-in. It has a total of 7,165 words and 38K characters. As one can see, quite a hollow document, especially for the price. Anyway, I read it in its entirety in a mere one hour, including filling in the questionnaires and, at the end, I confirmed that, as feared, what I found was not exactly what I was looking for and it did not add much to my knowledge or my ability to create a new business.
Not to worry, I said to myself, I will write back to them, thank for the opportunity for having had a look into their book, explain it was not to my satisfaction and request the refund. Which I did.
On December 4th Jeff Williams himself answered to my email saying that my credit card would be credited “in the next couple of days”. In the same e-mail he offered to arrange a short chat with me to discuss my business ideas, for free. I found it, at the same time nice and strange but, again, as it was offered for free, I decided to give him a credit and have a go. In reply on December 6th, he said that, as I was located in the UK, instead of a chat, he proposed that I put my ideas down in an e-mail and promised to reply back to me with his “appraisal, with usually includes some thought-provoking questions” in a couple of days. I then took time to write him a comprehensive view of my ideas, without going into too much detail which could give away some competitive details.
After a month without any reply from them about the refund and the offered appraisal, I wrote back to him on January 4th asking what the situation was. Jeff replied on the next day saying that he could not offer any appraisal on my ideas because they didn’t have much detail. One can wonder why someone would offer free appraisals for business ideas that need to be described in detail. He also said in this email that he would have another look at the refund question.
Another month passed without any news from him or about the refund. On January 25th I wrote a more assertive email giving him 72 hours to process the refund or run the risk of further actions I could take to pursue my rights. Only then he offered to expedite the refund but not without saying that I should “pat yourself on the back for being the first one in browbeating us into doing it”.
I leave any judgement up to you.