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  • The Employee

    It’s a strange thing to learn how to be an employee again after owning a business.

    So many self-help books that teach you how to start a business, build a business, grow your business and none of them ever cover “what if” you have to go back.

    Probably because it’s not good business. You read the whole book and the last chapter is “And if this doesn’t work…” It wouldn’t be a best-seller.

    I signed away my share of a business I built over 11 years because I felt I had to. Revenue was shrinking. The recession of 2024-2025 that the news isn’t covering but certainly exists ate away at my business like fish in The Old Man and the Sea. In different times, I could’ve weathered it. But with two small children and a mortgage I didn’t want to wait and find out.

    There’s no blame here. It happened as it happened and I made the choice.

    Now I’m learning how to work for someone else again. My brain is so used to juggling multiple departments let alone tasks, looking at everything from a 30,000 foot view. I don’t need to do that anymore. I actually got anxiety yesterday because on my first day I didn’t have a grasp of how everything worked. I had a 2 inch view.

    I had to remind myself to relax.

    But later, something incredible happened. At 5pm, I walked out the door of the office and felt euphoric. I was done for the day. Done. I didn’t have to think about work or what was happening the next day or that I had to hurry home and find something to eat before the next call that evening.

    Done.

    It was something I hadn’t felt in 11 years. When you own your own business, you’re always “on.” A customer could need something at any time. If business is down, you got to grind late at night and early in the morning. Leads. Marketing. Dig, dig, dig.

    But it was 5:01pm and the air felt great and breeze was a divine sensation on my skin. Work was finite again. The evening was my own.

    It’s amazing the strangest, most redundant things we take for granted. At 5:01pm yesterday I realized how much I had been giving up to own a business. There was no ‘off’ button.

    My work life is much smaller now. I put my time in. Learn some things. Do my part.

    I look forward to the free time now. And I look forward to what new ideas grow from this fertile soil.

    September 23, 2025

  • No More Email!

    I will be starting a new job soon. My first new job in over five years. As a requirement, I must separate from my company — the one I started — and begin anew.

    This is a mixed bag of emotions, but the strongest I feel is relief. Relief over the dumbest thing.

    When you’re the owner of a business, you’re a target.

    A target for virtual assistant emails. Cleaning service emails. Need millions of dollars in capital? How about a line of fresh credit for your business? “Steven” from Bangladesh is offering his app development services for a low, low price. A local high school yearbook is selling ad space. Am you hearing “we need AI” from my clients but don’t know where to begin? How about an introductory call?

    All emails, all the time. Delete. Delete. Delete. Flag as spam. Delete.

    You barely have time to catch your breath when the next wave begins.

    Just following up on my previous email. “I get it, you’re busy, but I don’t want you to miss out.” I haven’t heard your response, so I figured I’d gently nudge this to the top of your inbox. “Hi, totally understand if the time isn’t right, but I wanted to make sure.” Just following up to make sure my email landed in your inbox.

    Delete. Delete. Flag. Delete.

    By the time the third wave comes, you’re exhausted. The cold lead people who said they wouldn’t email you again about this limited time offer email you again. By this point you can view one of these emails and scroll down to see they’ve responded to themselves 11 times.

    The point is: I waste over an hour a day of my life cleaning these things out. And it gets incrementally worse as time goes on. It’s more than spam filters can handle. They’re overflowing. And 99% of it goes to my business emails.

    In 36 hours it all goes away. I will remove these company emails from my computer, someone will change the password, and I wont have to deal with them again.

    It seems so petty, but this is where we are in the 21st century.

    I’m looking forward to getting my hour a day back.

    September 18, 2025

  • The Choices We Make

    Making choices is hard. Sitting at a fork in the road in life, we try to see down each path as far as possible so we make the ‘right’ choice.

    So what do we do if we can’t see down either path?

    Change is hard. It’s scary. The unknown frightens us — it fires up an evolutionary flame within us that causes anxiety and fear. It’s designed to keep us alive. The choices of primitive man were: go into the cave to look for food but you might be mauled by a bear; look for food elsewhere but you might not find any and starve.

    In reality, the cave might have food and no bear. Or somewhere there might be lots of food but the bear is waiting.

    I’m personally dealing with this right now. I’m at a crossroads, looking at my choices. Agonizing over them. Playing “what ifs” in my head over and over like bad reruns on a TV channel with a lack of programming. It wakes me up in the middle of the night. Consumes my brain at the grocery story. What if…what if…

    Albert Camus said “Life is the sum of all your choices.” Every step we take in life, from getting out of bed to staying in bed, forms our path.

    Regardless, the choice you make is up to you. Take the moment or day to think about it but act. The only “bad” choice is to not act at all.

    Make the choice. Move on to the next one. That’s living.

    September 3, 2025

  • Welcome to Job Club

    I want you to hire me, as hard as you can

    Working on a new idea. I’ve been baking this one in my head for the past month since I’ve begun looking for jobs. Several people I know have been looking for months and struggling with frustration, rejection, anxiety, and the whole bevy of things associated with a desperate search for meaning and income.

    The truth is, the job market sucks. It’s been warped post-COVID and there’s a soft recession on. I want to start something — a support group or community — for job seekers. Seekers need to know it’s going to be ok (myself included!), there’s endless others like them, and we can help each other spiritually, emotionally, and logically. We can share job postings. Refer each other. Write recommendations on each other’s LinkedIns. Critique resumes.

    I’m happy to run seminars on cleaning up your LinkedIn to make you more appealing to recruiters. How to combat ATS with a sharp resume optimized with keywords. To let others vent. To show it’s okay to be afraid. To be anxious. To worry about the future. As long as we’re doing it together, we’ll make it.

    People who struggled and made it out can come and speak. I can publish videos on YouTube, hold seminars, courses, write e-Books. It should feel inclusive and safe. Do I allow recruiters in? Maybe we have ambassadors to recruiters.

    I don’t like what’s happening on LinkedIn — it’s become a podium for moping and begging, with people looking (unintentionally) sloppy while begging for someone to introduce them to a recruiter. We need to off-ramp that to a safe space and let LinkedIn be the professional billboard. It’s not the place for commiserating.

    So does it start as a website? A discord? A closed Facebook group? All the above?

    The first rule of Job Club — you TALK about Job Club.

    Maybe I should just asking around: would people join? How would they want to interact?

    Before I even finished this blog post I created a subreddit community. I guess we’ll start there. Job Club is alive in it’s first form: https://www.reddit.com/r/job_club/

    August 30, 2025

  • Cracking the Job Market Code

    I think I’m on to something.

    For the past 4 weeks, I’ve been applying to jobs. At first, it felt it was going nowhere.

    Resume > Apply > Wait > Rejection > Repeat.

    My resume was a meaty two pages, jammed with lots of bravado, two degrees, personal and professional achievements, awards, shopping lists of skills. There wasn’t much white space left. I was also listing myself as the current COO (Chief Operating Officer) of my company — which is true, I am. I’ve built and run everything operations for ten years.

    Yet, it got me nowhere.

    What annoyed me most was because of my dilettante-like career, my resume didn’t tell my story very well. I had clearly done a lot, had management experience, technical know-how…but there was no progression or growth over the years from looking at my resume.

    Two weeks ago I decided to A/B test and begun retooling my resume. I stripped it down. Simplified it. Removed the stuff that I thought was impressive. (Maybe others wouldn’t care so much even if I did).

    I began utilizing ChatGPT for ATS (Applicant Tracking System) optimization. I marveled at how sparse my resume got. Huge swaths of white on the page. Simple bullet points. Core skills. I knocked one of my degrees (History) off the resume altogether since it wouldn’t play any part in my job hunt. ATS optimization via AI made my resume lean, mean, and packing a punch. Best of all, my story emerged out of the simplicity. Suddenly, I could look at my resume and say “Oh, I see how I got from A to B to C.” A career trajectory appeared.

    The last bit of secret sauce was changing my job title. I took it down from LinkedIn and put up a generic Operations Manager (which was still true, I am the Operations Manager for Digital Fix Consulting) but in it’s vagueness, allowed me to mould it to each individual resume. The trick for ATS is that when applying for a job, ATS wants you to already have that role somewhere else (it sounds so stupid and unfair, but if you think of it like a machine that grades applicants, wouldn’t someone who already has that job somewhere else be a better candidate than someone who doesn’t and needs to learn it?).

    Suddenly, I started getting responses. I was booking job interviews. It was working.

    Unfortunately, this is the age that we live in. With technology and automation, you have to optimize your single tool for job searching to be seen by robot eyes before they get to human ones.

    The key was to not give up when the rejections piled up immediately. I’m bummed there were some good jobs I had a lot of interest in that I was rejected for because my ugly, bloated, probably confusing resume was submitted and puked out by ATS. It’s like approaching an extremely pretty girl while wearing clothes that don’t fit and then tripping and falling as you try to say “Hi.”

    The last bit I’ll add is that even though I’m booking interviews, I’m still applying for jobs. I haven’t landed a job yet, so I’m hedging my bets. But I’m also taking as many interviews as I can get so I can practice those too. I want to hone my interview skills. In interviews my first question to the hiring manager is “what about my resume drew you in the most?” I want to do more research, get more feedback. Refine. Hone. Improve.

    I’m becoming addicted to applying for jobs. I just hope I still land one.

    August 26, 2025

  • Subscribed to Death

    I went to install a plug-in for this blog’s WordPress and I found out I need to upgrade to a business subscription. This made me pause and think of all the other subscriptions that are each taking a tiny bite out me every month.

    I recently subscribed to the AI tool Cursor so I could keep working on projects. That’s $20/month.

    There is, of course, the streaming services I use.

    Disney+ that’s $19.99/mo.

    HBO Max runs me $16.99/mo.

    Peacock for pretty much just The Office is $16.99/mo.

    I pay $2.99/mo for expanded iCloud+ storage.

    The list goes on and on. Food services, sports packages, software, business tools…it’s a rent-to-never-own world.

    It’s important to spring clean your subscriptions from time to time. Make sure you take ten minutes at some point today and review all your subscriptions. I bet you’ve got a few you can cut loose and save yourself a couple of bucks.

    August 24, 2025

  • Catastrophizing

    We tend to go to the extreme when we begin thinking negative.

    Someone says something negative about you becomes “no one likes me.”

    A business fails or a job lost turns into “I’m going to lose everything I have.”

    We catastrophize things as an evolutionary response. We psychically project in our minds to the extreme end — the worst case scenario — as a method of making preparations to prevent it. The problem is, it has a tendency to run away from us and stick us in a negative space.

    It feeds anxiety and fear. It feels like inevitable prophecy, this worst thing that could happen is going to no matter what.

    The truth is, it won’t. How do I know this? Because it assumes everything will be static between now and then. It assumes you wont exert any force or have any force exerted on you. There’s eight billion people in the world; the odds of you not being impacted by a single one of them in any way, shape, or form is beyond unlikely.

    Early man developed imagination as a way to not be surprised by an animal jumping out from hiding at him. It’s really a defensive mechanism. It exists to protect you — to help you plan, prepare, or be ready.

    And these are exactly the things you need to do when you’re catastrophizing. Exert force. Act.

    It’s not easy and it takes some work. I still work on it every day. And I’m still here.

    August 22, 2025

  • Does It Move The Needle?

    What does it take to move the needle? I recently discovered this concept in business. My company is an IT managed services provider and reseller. We sell Apple, Dell, HP, etc products and we offer them below the competition. The simple thought here was: sell them for less and customers will buy from us. Makes sense, right? I mean, why wouldn’t a business (small or large) want to buy the same hardware they’re buying for less?

    Turns out, this simple theory is flawed.

    We had a lead on a very large Pennsylvania-based company this past spring. They wanted to purchase 5,000 iPhones. We were up against several big box sellers (which the customer was unhappy with), and the customer had never done business with us. In an attempt to win the bid, we came in low — below Apple’s cost. There was no way the big box companies would sell for that low because the hit to profit was too great. We wanted the business, we were willing to sacrifice a large part of our profit to win. If the customer went with us it would have saved them tens of thousands of dollars.

    We lost. The reps from the customer didn’t feel like filing the paperwork to add us as a new vendor. It wasn’t worth tens of thousands of dollars in savings. It didn’t move the needle.

    Think about it the next time you post on social media, pitch whatever you’re selling online, or wanting to get someone else to act on — are you moving the needle? Is the value proposition given to someone enough for them to act?

    Moving the needle is the only way to win business in the age of company procurement people buying with a few clicks of a button from Amazon or CDW or other established vendors. If a request comes to their desk, there’s a well-worn rut of clicking a few familiar links and placing the order. No real thought expended. No effort required. Short and sweet. To disrupt that, you have to move the needle. You have to register with such force they can’t ignore you.

    The value proposition has to be so good it’s worth trying something new.

    August 20, 2025

  • First Roadblock

    Today is the first day I sat down to blog and just couldn’t do it. Two and half weeks in isn’t bad, and I knew this point would come. Blogging every day isn’t easy.

    But this is part of the growth. Writing when you don’t want to. Keeping the momentum going. Keeping the streak alive. What’s the saying? 21 days to form a habit, 90 days to form a lifestyle? That might not be correct, but you get the idea.

    I’ve been obsessed with Rick Rubin lately — how have I not listened to this guy talk before? He brings up how important the ‘doing’ is in art and creativity. Let the creativity flow from the universe through you. Staring at the blank page is just part of the process.

    Steven Pressfield reiterates this in The War of Art. The sitting down and facing the blank canvas is just part of the process. Staring at it for hours is OK. It’s the getting yourself to move over to the chair, sit down, and face it over and over and over that is the creative process.

    It feels like we don’t have anything to say, but we always do. Look at the amount of information overload going on in contemporary life. Social media, news, YouTube, ads, billboards, bumper stickers, road signs, phone calls, notification sounds, vibrating phones, more ads, video calls, radio, music, more ads, Duolingo notifications, knocks on the door, car horns…

    Input overload.

    The noise can be deafening. Especially when you want to just start writing about a single thing. It’s not that we don’t have anything to say, it’s our brain is struggling to pick one thing.

    And just like that, I have today’s post.

    August 19, 2025

  • A Procession Out of the Past

    Currently listening to: “The Dead Flag Blues” by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

    It’s been an odd year. I’ve felt like I’ve been on walkabout in 2025. Business has been tough and I’m left wondering about the future. This year has been all about looking: looking for business; looking for customers; looking for answers; looking for a job; looking for spiritual guidance.

    What I found to be immensely fascinating is that by being always in a state of ‘looking’ I’m much more open to reaching out to people. My walkabout this year has led me to so many people from my past -people I haven’t talked to in a decade or more – either intentionally or inadvertently. People I hadn’t thought of since high school were suddenly appearing in the flesh before me.

    I was scrolling LinkedIn one day and saw an old friend of mine and former co-worker at Apple was now the CIO of Palantir, the hottest AI company on the planet. Completely gobsmacked, I messaged him on LinkedIn, expecting a 50% or less chance of getting a response. He responded. That led to a phone call and catching up.

    I was leaving the house one day with my family. I pulled out of the driveway and stopped as a UPS driver was walking up from the street. He handed me a package and said “Did you go to Union High School?”

    “Uh, yeah.”

    Now the universe was speaking directly to me. More people popped up. Emails, texts, DMs. I had the local news on one morning during breakfast and I looked up to see someone I knew had been hit by a car on his bicycle. I sent him a message on LinkedIn wishing him a speedy recovery and he responded. As I began exploring the job market I started working my network. Texts led to phone calls with people I hadn’t spoken to in over a decade. Some people had changed dramatically. Others not a bit. It even happened in business: while digging for leads, I discovered a former co-worker (again from Apple) was now in charge of IT procurement for a large Pittsburgh business. A shot off an email and we connected after 18 years.

    And the experience is still going. It feels like I’m occupying the past and present at the same time with all this happening. It’s a transcendental feeling and I hope it keeps going. I can control me reaching out to people, but so many have just materialized this year without any prompting from me that I can only conclude the universe is behind it all.

    Maybe is Jung’s Synchronicity at work. This moment in time, in my life, is meant to be a nexus of past and present.

    I encourage everyone to do this. Stop the “I’m too busy” in your head long enough to message someone you haven’t talked to in forever. Then do it again and again. Soon, the universe will have you reconnecting all over the place. It’s an awesome experience.

    August 18, 2025