You may have heard or read the news this week, that during a budget dispute between the mayor and city council of Scranton, Pennsylvania (the fictional home of "The Office") the mayor has unilaterally lowered the wages of 300+ city employees to the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
To do what he did, he has violated contract terms with a number of unions and he will soon be sued for doing so.
Now, one would like to view this situation as a political "pissing match" with hope that an acceptable compromise will be worked out soon.
My intent in writing about this is to tell my 50+ boomer peers who are still grasping the intent of continued corporate work with both arms - you'd better wise up and realize that THERE IS NO JOB SECURITY in the U.S. anymore.
The closest we used to come to a lock on job tenure was in state and city jobs. But, over the past four years, more than 500,000 municipal workers have lost their jobs...so there doesnt appear to be very much job security in government jobs anymore either.
Now, I don't want you think that my story today is all "gloom and doom".
Rather I'd like to drawn upon the age old philosophy that "necessity is the mother of invention".
Today when we are faced with the necessity of finding continued work income without a corporate or government job, then we need to re-invent our work lives as what is being called "an independent worker".
An independent worker identifies a skill, talent or experience that can be used to solve an important problem for a large enough group of people to promise attractive and continuous income. You create a compelling selling story, identify a group of prospective customers, and make your sales pitch, often through what you write on your business website with a bit of email marketing thrown in.
Now, I'm the first to tell you that running your own business is full of ups and downs. But, here's the key as I see it.
When you work a job, your continued employment may well ride with the opinion of one superior, sometimes one that doesnt know you real well.
But when you run your own business, your continued income production depends upon keeping a group of customers happy. To end up with no income at all (such as you do when downsized) you'd have to be "fired" by all of your customers at once. And I dont know any successful business owner who is stupid enough to let this happen.
So, the key difference between the "security of a job and the "security of selling yourself" is your level of control. Most corporate employees (and now government employees) have very little control over keeping their jobs. But, as the owner of several companies for the past twenty-four years, I sure as hell do have control over my financial destiny.
It is this sense of control that gives me the zip to start each new work day, to continually create new ideas and follow up on them and to know that I help people each day, while helping my family by producing income.
I'd rather depend upon my wits and wisdom any day to keep money flowing into my bank account, than to hope that I can "brown up" a superior sufficiently to keep my job one more day.
Till we speak again...
Jeff Williams
Tuesday, July 10, 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.