We had known for two or three years that our biggest client was leaving us for a competitor in the fall. And by “biggest” I mean around a third of our income. If the sales people were out there trying to sell our service to make up for it you couldn’t tell… all they brought back was the one new client and they had been promised the kinds of “give you the moon” extras that experience showed we could not fully deliver and resulted in the client being upset and leaving after a few years when their contract was up. Then two more clients decided not to renew, bringing the total to 40% of our income going bye-bye. So management did what they always do. They cut staff. Fortunately, I made the cut but they axed seven out of about forty employees*. They intended to replace some of the loss by selling more products to one of our other clients and a second client had two of their five divisions with us and there had been talks (seemingly for years) about bringing over the other three divisions.
Then we got client satisfaction surveys back. One of the two clients gave us a neutral score and the other one gave us a negative score. I’m not thinking either of them is jumping at the chance to give my former employer more money.
To summarize, I felt stuck on a sinking ship.
God to the rescue! I don’t take credit for any of this, other than trying to follow through on the nudges that certainly came from Him.
At this time it’s early summer. My wife had just been in the hospital for almost a week with sepsis (she’s fine now, thank you for asking) and had to have two surgeries to remove kidney stones. Our health insurance deductible was obviously met and if I switched jobs we would start over again, costing about $5000 to $7000 or whatever the deductible was of the new employer. And that’s assuming I could find a job quickly. My plan was for me to start working on my resume and looking around. Hopefully I would land a job in the fall or early the following year. It has been nearly two decades since I interviewed and my resume was definitely in need of a good dusting off.
My other, and perhaps biggest issue, was that because my company builds everything in-house and has their own idiotic names for things (one program is actually called “Tom Cruise”… fun but impractical) I didn’t even know what kind of job I should be looking for. I definitely wasn’t a DBA or a C++ programmer, so what was I? After a decade of barely receiving more than a dripple of positive feedback** what was I good at? It occurred to me (or the Holy Spirit whispered) that I should ask former co-workers I knew who had moved on, people who had worked in a lot of different companies.
My first thought was someone I knew only slightly but who had been the head of an IT department. But how to contact him? LinkedIn seemed the best choice, a platform I rarely used. So I opened it up for the first time in months and in the feed saw that a former co-worker, Scott G, was leaving a job at Brotherhood Mutual. Yeah! Scott was exactly the kind of guy I should talk to! I hadn’t talked to him in probably a dozen years but had enjoyed working with him. I reached out and amazingly he was willing to meet me for lunch. I told him my plight and he asked what I did and what I liked to do. He suggested that I look for a Data Analyst position but later when I looked at job requirements it seemed like this was something completely out of my experience. He also told about the job we was leaving and had some very good things to say about Brotherhood Mutual, a 100 year old company that provides insurance for churches and church-type ministries. It’s strange that even though my first decade of working was in an insurance company I had not even considered Brotherhood Mutual as an employer. Overall it was good to catch up with Scott and I felt encouraged.
The next person I “lunched” with was a guy who had been a contractor. I was a bit wary because I remembered this guy as a negative Nelly but he’d survived four decades in IT so he should be able to give me some direction. He didn’t. He said that at my age (50) I should just stay put or else I’d be the old guy in a young mans world, constantly having to prove myself. Since I knew he was a downer I wasn’t too discouraged but it did let a little wind out of my sail. But it was very early in my job quest and my wife had two surgeries that my employer had to pay for so I knew I had time.
Ya know, I never did meet with the original guy I thought of.
In any case, at least now I had some direction.
* Including a guy in my department that they hired just six months earlier. This just seems suspicious and rotten to me… my manager knew our biggest client was leaving, that the other two were probably leaving and that employee cuts were likely to happen. And yet he hired the guy anyway knowing (or at least I strongly suspect) that he was going to let him go. But hey, it’s just business. That’s exactly what I thought as I realized that I owed Broadridge nothing more than the current days work and that I was free to move on.
** I’ll admit that I wasn’t a perfect employee but I was pretty dang good. B+ perhaps? I took initiative in working on issues and owned processes. The number of things I did right in a month far outweighed things I did wrong. For the most part I kept the wheels greased on that machine, a task that isn’t usually given much notice until the grease is no longer there and the wheels seize up. My biggest issue is that I was under employed in a job that didn’t utilize my strengths. Plus I was performing almost identical tasks over and over. For fifteen years (the first two years were a hodge podge of different jobs until they formalized the Production Support department). I was doing this work because, over time as it accumulated, I would see maintenance type things that needed done but no one was doing them. Did I get sloppy? I certainly did. I had tried over the years to get to be able to do something different but what always happened is that any new person hired would be moved to a much-needed role and I’d still be there greasing the wheels. My level of caring ebbed and flowed over the years but most of the time I wanted to do a good job and make the client happy.
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