You Too Can Launch Your Business Accidentally
"I am going to launch this website if it kills me." That's what I said when I started CareerJockey.org. My motto was, “Ride your career hard so it doesn’t ride you.” It was a hit.
Then I accidentally launched the business. I've been running it for over 14 years now and it was all a fluke.
Back in 2008, I headed up the IT operations for Subway Restaurant’s purchasing cooperative. I had a director title, 12 people working for me and plenty to keep me challenged. I was a programmer turned director of IT.
I was also a volunteer for Back on Track Network. It's a movement that helped out-of-work job hunters. These folks needed typical stuff: resumes and interviewing advice, but more importantly, emotional support. Anyone looking for work, can fall into a very dark funk. You don’t know how long you'll be out of work. It's easy to become obsessed checking email every minute waiting on that next step in your job hunt to arrive.
Losing a job for many people can mean loosing your identity. You lose your self-confidence and your entire self-worth. I knew that firsthand. I volunteered for Back on Track as my pay it forward. Back on Track did so much for me when I was out of work.
The program was good, but fell short in one big way. That was my thinking anyway. It could only help any job hunter that could show up in our Miami meetings. If you were somewhere else, no luck.
My tech brain, with the Internet become a thing, was how to make our in-person meetings available online some how. This was well before Zoom and Google Meet, but why not make all huge library of information and resources available to all job hunters anywhere?
I ran the idea by the BOTN board of directors and...crickets!! No one got it. I moved forward anyway. I built what I thought would be the Back on Track Network Online Library. I built a proof-of-concept and showed it to the board.
Nothing. More crickets! No one wanted it.
That's when I decided to launch it as CareerJockey.org with no affiliation to BOTN.
What I didn't expect was that Larry Jacob Internet Marketing would launch right after that. The speakers that presented to our job hunters caught wind of what I was doing and asked, "Can you build me a website?" They saw my work and wanted me to work with them.
I didn’t set out to launch my business. I just sort of happened. After years of wanting to be on my own, I fell into it.
If you've got an idea, something you've always wanted to do, take the next step. Don't wait like I did until I was 50 to take on this challenge. I've enjoyed my time and dread the thought of having to go back to a corporate job.
Please share your thoughts on how you launched your business. What would you say to others "thinking about it" to help them along in their journey?