I’m not one to sit around and mope about things. When life changes, I get quiet to figure out what the change means for me, to process things, and then to chart a path forward.
There were moments when I was unsure how to move ahead, but I’m always about looking forward and taking the next step.
I read law at university, but looking back, I wish I had pursued finance instead. It makes significantly more sense to me now, but at the time, I was guided down a different path – and so, it’s the one I took.
After a successful stint in corporate hospitality sales, I moved into another sales role in the training and development sector within a startup business. Eventually, I moved out and then spent 16 years building and growing a training and development business of my own. Blood, sweat, and tears, they say.
People often have this rosy idea of what it’s like to work as a business owner, responding to emails in your pyjamas and getting up whenever you want. Yes, I’ve worked in my pyjamas, but I’ve also honed my craft, hired people, grown a business, paid my taxes, and dealt with the constant mental grind that comes with running a business.
I am a proud small-business owner, through and through, and I’ve been through it all – from growing too quickly, to managing a team of 15, to expanding into the publishing business, to downsizing, and so much more.
So, here’s the question: What do you do when your business collapses?
That’s what happened to me as a result of the pandemic. No matter how hard I tried to revive, retain and reinvigorate it, I was exhausted. The writing was well and truly on the wall.
But wait, there was more to come. Now, I faced the dilemma of being a small-business owner in his 50s, wondering whether to re-enter the workforce (run that by me again) or start something new.
I chose to look inward and take stock. After what felt like a lifetime of running a business, the idea of re-entering the workforce seemed near impossible. How would I position myself? When you’re a business owner, you become a jack of all trades, after all. Even if I could muster the energy to put myself out there again, was this something that I even wanted? No, it was not.
But as they say, out of challenges spring opportunities. With my background in sales and marketing, I realised that there were problems I wanted to solve.
Pipeline management was the new frontier, and that’s exactly how I found myself transitioning into the role as an app developer.
People don’t necessarily want to reinvent themselves, and I get that. It can feel exhausting and there may be doubt and fear.
More importantly, how do you even begin to capture the essence of your life’s work in a two-page resume? We talk about change being a constant, but how many of us are truly comfortable living in that ever-churning pot of uncertainty? More of the same feels safer, doesn’t it? It feels like a known entity.
Reinventing yourself after business failure may indeed be one of the biggest challenges an individual can face. While you cannot choose the challenge, you can choose your response.
I’ve chosen to pay more attention to the things I’ve mastered and the things I enjoy doing. It’s a choice I make to look forward, to broaden my horizons, and to create a wider sphere of possibilities from which I select options and make decisions.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you’re limited by your options. To some extent, your experience and skills will influence what is available to you, but what matters far more is the decision you make about your future direction and the key outcomes you’re after.
Understanding this does not always come easy, but once you do, everything seems to fall into place.
From setback to comeback, it comes down to picking what you choose to focus on.
