 On this New Year, having been through many changes in my focus on how to make a living, I look back on my career and realize that the choices I’ve made up to this point were usually not choices at all.In fact, now that I really take a hard look, I mostly just went with the flow over the years rather than making any conscious decisions, but today I’m trusting my instincts to make a substantive change in direction.
Have you been guilty (not assuming it’s a bad thing, mind you) of letting circumstances make your decisions for you? It’s certainly easier – and you don’t have to take the responsibility for the outcome. A REALLY QUICK LOOK: The only real employer at the time for Statistical Analysis was with the government and I didn’t want to move to DC, so I moved to Little Rock to live with family and took a job as a business programmer. I had a boyfriend from graduate school who was going back to Boston, so I followed him up there by transferring to another branch of my company. This lead to doing consulting (contract programming) for 8 years and making a lot of money at it. When I realized that the relationship wasn’t going anywhere and I wasn’t getting any younger, I decided to the Research Triangle Park (NC) where I continued to do consulting for another 15 years at companies like IBM, Square D and Caterpillar. I met my husband while in NC and we had a son who was autistic. I had actually faded out of the contract scene the last couple of years there because I needed to take care of my son. Then my husband got a promotion to move to St. Louis. He was making great money, so we moved and I continued to learn web technologies and do pickup work that I got from networking and LinkedIn. I began creating a base system that I could use for any tracking purpose based on the fact that all my years of consulting was either developing tracking systems or modifying other tracking systems (JD Edwards, SAS, etc.) I should include here that tracking systems, by definition, include CRMs and Business Systems, Call Centers, Customer Help Desks and Portals, Scheduling applications, Training Systems, etc. That’s how 1-Box Business Solutions was born. I’ve also spent the last 6 years learning internet marketing, from Social Media to SEO to Ads. Creating 1-Box and learning IM was a conscious decision – an actual plan, so that I’d have a future working for myself.
More importantly, being a technical person AND understanding business and marketing, I’ve developed a plan AND the tools to integrate the three, saving time and money while providing better data for analysis. I have so much information and training that these 5 will be getting a bargain that will never be seen again! Answer this: Do you feel like you’ve been letting yourself be blown from job to job by circumstances or are you ready to make a change?
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This is where my story actual takes a turn. After 30 years of developing software for both large and small companies, I realized I had gathered the knowledge to help SMB’s that are starting (or floundering) make a successful kickstart.