I never thought that I’d be the kind of person who started my own business. I believed startups were only for tech nerds or tech bros. (Somehow we are never shown anyone inbetween. Like for once could we get a feisty nun who starts a unicorn biz? Even in a Netflix show?)
Anyway, my perspective changed a lot over the past few years, because I was exposed to a lot of people who started their own businesses. I worked for an entrepreneur who started their own company for education. As part of that gig, we consulted with a lot of companies and met a lot of founders.
Friends…these people ARE NUTS.
Like, don’t get me wrong, they are all really bright, talented people, but sometimes we’d have a meeting and…it was like speaking to aliens.
We consulted with one company where the founder wouldn’t even meet with us. We presented to the HR team and it was like Game of Thrones.
“He won’t speak to you. He also won’t like any of these ideas.”
“Okay, so…”
“So, what we have to do is create a strategy whereby we make him think that he created this strategy that you made so that he thinks it’s worth executing.”
“You can’t…like talk to him and give him the cost/benefit analysis?”
“No. He only responds to ideas that he thinks he thought up.”
*Cut to blank stares from me and my boss*
It wasn’t just Machiavellian HR teams, though, we had founders who only hired one type of guy: LITERALLY white guys who liked football. I think one was a soccer fan. That was their diversity.
Sometimes we’d be in meetings and the ENTIRE C-SUITE would be sitting there debating how to make their employees’ lives better. (Like, at this point they’d already paid a consultancy fee to get us in the room.)
My boss would say, “Well, did you ask them?”
And they would sit in silence because NO ONE ACTUALLY ASKED ANY FRONT-LINE EMPLOYEES WHAT THEY NEEDED. BUT THEY STRESSED ENOUGH TO BRING IN AN OUTSIDE CONSULTANT.
This personal experience, of course, was also happening at the same time we saw the explosion in psychotic Silicon Valley startup founders.
Peter Thiel was like draining blood from young people so he could live longer?
Elizabeth Holmes created a BILLION-dollar business based on absolutely nothing. She literally was like “Wouldn’t it be cool if a machine could test blood for everything?” Then people gave her all the money to make Lego prototypes that never worked.
The WeWorks guy was also just a total fraud scammer. He somehow his back? And people are still giving him money?
When I was growing up in the 80s my parents always taught me about the value of hard work. My grandparents were farmers and worked their butts off to find success, so, naturally, everyone in my family thought that’s just what you did.
Even when I was unemployed last fall, my mom was like “You gotta print out your resume and pound the pavement!” I’m hoping she meant metaphorically because COVID was still a thing, and I can only imagine if I showed up to an office with a paper resume in a pandemic what that would do for my job prospects.
So, at 35, I was a hard-working, high-achiever with no job. I’d never moved up the corporate ladder, and I had just taken a job where we were paid to tell really rich people in the c-suite common sense things.
It was a paradigm shift.
I thought, “Well, if anyone I’ve met in the past year can start a business, then I can, too! And so can most house cats!”
So, I started googling stuff online and found a certification program to help writers. If there was ever anything I was even remotely passionate about, this was it. I love books. I love people who write books. I’m really skilled at writing. LEZ DO IT!
This blog post doesn’t have an inspiring ending. Now I am simply one of the nut cases who chose to start their own business, only I’m not even successful enough to pay someone to tell me common sense things. I mean that would be #goals.
But it’s kind of fun. And if I ever have an idea that absolutely bonkers, I just remember Elizabeth Holmes got rich people to give her millions of dollars based on absolutely nothing. And the WeWorks guy drove a business completely into the ground and gets to do it all over again.
So worst case, I fail and then, so what? The house cats and I will bounce back. And, if anything, this entire adventure has taught me that any idiot can do anything.
And that’s great for me. Because me. I am idiot.