Step 1:  Update the resume.  I spent quite a bit of time defining my accomplishments over the 6+ years in my last company.  I met and completely obliterated sales quotas, had incredibly happy customers, and a team of sales reps who requested my services over most of the rest of the team.  Now narrow that down into cleverly worded bullet points and my resume was complete. Post it on Monster and a few others and wait for the flood of calls.

And wait.  And wait some more.

No calls.

Rework the resume, re-post it.  Same result. 

Resume services, job hunting services, unemployment office assistance, job hunting networking groups. 

Nothing.

So, now that I was thoroughly disenchanted, it was time to examine what I really wanted to do because IT was not going to happen.  I went to my tried and true Tony Robbins tapes.  Went through all 26 days of Personal Power and determined I had a lot of holes in my daily routines.  More on that later.  What did come out of it was a realization that I had the heart of an entrepreneur but was doing nothing toward that end. 

One day out of the blue, I got a call from a staffing company who was looking for an internal candidate who would operate as a branch manager.  Based on the description, I knew I could do the job and with nothing else on the horizon, I gratefully accepted the position.  I told my wife I would do the job for maybe a year so, then come back to IT when the market was better.  So, I was off to training.  Two full weeks of training to learn their systems, processes, procedures and ways of doing business.  It was a lot of fun.  I learned a lot.  And I really felt like I was going to be a strong player in this company.  My training was quite successful and my Director got feedback from the trainers that I was going to be very successful at this.  Cool.  Strong start.

I got to my branch and met with my staff.  I had a staff of 3 people who had been working in this staffing business for a combined 45+ years.  They started with a smaller firm who was absorbed by this larger corporation.  Their procedures were not company approved.  Their methods were unproductive.  Their reporting was useless and the worst was some of their paperwork ran counter to approved government requirements.  The staffing business is naturally regulated by the government – not in the typical sense like the banking industry – but in the sense that we deal with people’s social security numbers, employment records, W-2 forms and the like.  Typical HR stuff. 

So, here I walk in fresh from training – ready to change the world.  My staff resented me from day 1.  They liked the way they did things.  They felt they did a good job and quite frankly “This is the way we’ve always done it”, was a phrase repeated in many conversations.  I had my work cut out for me.  I worked out a plan with my Director to start on some of the worst problems in the office.  Rather than change the world all at once, it was better to nip away at it until the world didn’t realize it had changed.  So I proceeded to work at the many items on my list.  Long days; some late nights; external employee problems.  Finding work for people.  It was exciting and exhausting all at the same time.  And I felt a little like an entrepreneur.  It was my branch.  It was budgeted to lose money that year due to the many problems.  Once I addressed may of the problems, we actually made a nice profit that year.  Yeah Me.  Yeah team!  We celebrated.

The next year, we were operating more smoothly and we were budgeted to make more profit.  Another challenge.  All right, I am ready!  Oh and one more thing.  Now that the branch is running more smoothly, I need to get out and drum up some more business. 

OK.  How do I do that again?  It had been almost 9 months since training and I don’t remember our approved approach to getting new customers.  Back to the training books.  Looks easy enough.  Lets do it. 

I get my list of prospects and hit the phones. 

Holy crap.  This isn’t easy.  No one wants to talk to me and no one wants to talk to another staffing company.  It turns out that we aren’t the only staffing company out there and in reality, there are dozens of staffing companies calling on the same prospects day after day.  The gatekeepers are well versed in keeping out the staffing companies.  Some in our industry resort to trickery and deception to try to get past the gatekeepers.  I refuse to stoop to that level.  I was advised to try actually showing up at these companies to try to get in to see someone.  Well, that worked just as well as the phone.  The same gatekeepers who protect management from phone calls also protect them from walk-ins. 

What was I going to do?  We were expensive compared to our competitors due to the quality of people we provided and the checks and verifications we performed on our people.  The problem was I was going up against companies providing low-quality employees for low prices and didn’t mind the high turnover.  I was getting discouraged pretty quickly and I was definitely out of my comfort zone.  I had never had to do prospecting before.  All of my customers previously had been pre-screened and pre-qualified and invitied us in to talk with them.  Now, I was being asked to find the prospects using “tried and true” methods that weren’t working for me.  I was rapidly spiraling down.  My Director was on me to generate some new customers.  I could tell the shine was off the apple now.  The bright new kid who could turn the office around was not so bright anymore.  My successful first year was turning into a miserable 2nd year.  Something in my subconcious really started screwing with my mind.  I was having difficulty just in going out to see the companies in my list.  Some days, I would go out and sit in a parking lot and think about what a screw up I was.  I started becoming completely focused on my failure in this role and how I was not cut out for sales and how could anyone do this job and wasn’t I really just pimping out people for tasks that wasn’t prositution, but might as well have been?  The spring was gone from my step.  I struggled to get out of bed in the morning.  My hour drive to the office seemed like 3 hours.  My mind was reeling at the thought of being such a miserable failure.  I couldn’t escape the damaging thoughts that ran my head.  I was failing at a job where others succeeded and in many cases did very well.  How could I be so stupid to take on a job where I could fail?  What was I thinking?  I wasn’t thinking, I was desperate.  Desperation makes people do stupid things.  Wasn’t I desperate now?  Wasn’t I just one day away from being unemployed again?

The damaging thoughts remained in my head until my final day.  My last day was barely memorable.  I remember cleaning out my desk almost ceremoniously but it was just a show since I had been quietly cleaning it out for a couple of weeks so no one would notice I had given up. 

Holy crap I had failed at something again.  And something big.  I had a shot to be really succesful working for another company and I blew it. 

My depressive spiral didn’t end at the exit door to that company.  I was grumpy to my family and always seemed to be on the edge of breaking into yelling fits.  I wasn’t angry with them, but I was angry with myself and I find it very hard to yell at myself.

Back to the unemployment office.  Back on unemployment.  Struggling to get out of bed again.