When the World as You Know It Stops and Plans Evaporate

Beginning in November 2017, Cindy and I had both stepped away from full-time employment. Less than 18 months prior, our combined salaries were nearly triple what we had earned as recently as 2012. When Cindy stepped away from her position and into the world of self-employment, it was based on a significant values-disconnect. When I followed her just over a year later, it was more about being able to fully dedicate our time to pursue bigger opportunities. The challenges we faced just prior to that in hosting an event despite institutional conflicts were indeed tough to navigate but mainly served as lessons for how we could avoid similar issues later on.

Around the time I submitted my resignation that included the offer to stick around for two full months in hopes of identifying and training my replacement, I had a conversation with a client I had supported intermittently for about a year at that point. In several conversations, this client had made comments about me considering an everyday role with them. I had kindly deflected that each time, saying that they didn’t need me all day, every day - because they didn’t. They had between 25 and 30 employees, and it just wouldn’t make sense to take on the salary I would have needed for it to work. But when I chose to step away from my HR & Safety Manager position into our business, I floated a part-time W2 idea with them that would give them the support they really needed and provide us with some steady income while we pushed forward in our business. As I mentioned before, November of 2017 ended up being tied more to those two businesses than building our own. I juggled 15-20 hours each week in that new part-time capacity while supporting my previous employer through partial days for most of the month, all while maintaining the plates we already had spinning for ourselves and juggling the family situations I mentioned before.

If I’m being honest, 2018 and 2019 were a blur. We invested heavily into certifications and licensing, we hosted events, and we did everything we could think of to be top-of-mind with our existing clients and to get in front of every business we thought we could add value to; and as far as I was concerned, that was every business within a two-hour radius. We had been dialed in on Hill’s sixth leadership attribute, The Habit of Doing More Than Paid For, for so long that we were putting the law of sowing and reaping to the test - and we were indeed beginning to see potential for a harvest in our business. In 2018, our full-day leadership event was at capacity. The 2019 event sold out six full weeks in advance. Through all that, we built strong relationships with our existing clients and we were landing on the radar of some we never thought would know our names.

In early 2019, we had the chance to submit a proposal for providing multiple weeks of leadership development training for a major petroleum company on one of their oil platforms in the North Atlantic. We didn’t get the gig, and that’s a story I shared in detail in Leveraging Leadership Growth so I won’t rehash it here, but it was something we had never even considered just a few months prior. Later that spring, we were invited to be contributing authors in a collaborative book on effective business communication. I nearly blew it off because I didn’t think I was qualified; I had barely graduated high school and stopped enrolling in college courses more than 20 years earlier when I was faced with English Comp. Instead, though, we gave it whirl. While overcoming just the idea of producing something that would be published was indeed an adversity, we pulled so many seeds from the process, and each of those have led to far greater benefits since. Not only did I learn the behind-the-scenes work required for compiling and publishing a book, it was our first time landing on a best-seller’s list - something we’ve been blessed to visit multiple times since.

As we flipped the calendar to 2020, we had some amazing opportunities booked and new potential clients reaching out each week. The momentum was nothing short of amazing! By early March, we were rolling and couldn’t wait to see what the rest of the year would hold. But even after all the independence we had reclaimed and all we had done to clarify the values driving us, bad situations can arrive as total external disruption - opportunities and revenue streams vanishing overnight with no warning or control. I’d bet you know the timeline all too well, and I’ll map out how it unfolded for us in detail next. Now, though, I want you to reflect on a time when an external force - whatever that may have been - restricted what you could control. Think about your immediate emotions and one early sign of the larger disruption.