Carrot Cake - Two Weeks Later
My last post on getting fired was the most viewed thing I’ve ever published. This one is in the spirit of “whats next?” Short answer: I don’t know. Longer answer below. I’ve been here before. I’m approaching a dusty intersection in the middle of America. My brakes make a metal on metal dog whistle screech as I come to a stop. There’s no one around. This patch of ground is so flat you could watch your dog run away for three days. The breeze is dragging its fingers through brown and yellow waist high prairie grass. The intersection is T shaped; I could make a right, a left, or make a three point turn and head back in the direction that I came from. Since there’s no one around, I’ll take an extra minute to consider my options. The safest one is to make a three point turn and go back the way I came. I know what to expect on that road. Every two weeks, that road will direct deposit 3500 bucks into my checking account in addition to the possibility of lumpy commission checks. I’ll be able to pay my bills without checking my balance. Most of the risk will be eliminated from my life. I’ll even enjoy the feeling of a fresh start at a new company. Around six to nine months in, the relief will fade and I’ll start hearing the voices again. “How did we end up here again? What would have happened if we made a left or a right back at that intersection.” As I idle at the intersection of finding another job and doing work that calls to me, I’ve got some thoughts. Some light math. My monthly burn is around 8,000 bucks. I don’t know how that happened, but it feels like 8 million. I made a simple cash flow chart. Professor Tony Wain (accounting) would not be proud of this excel worksheet, but it gets the job done for now. If I was a business, I’d run out of money in 4 months. I’m trying to take a machete to that 8k number but unwinding lifestyle creep is hard. Life has gotten a little fancy and I like six dollar coffee. On the positive side of the ledger, I’m working with a small severance from my last job, some savings, a wad of cash that a friend handed me last week, unemployment, and a little project that should net 1200 bucks per month. I've got a couple months to figure this out. If I need to find a job, that process can take three months (or more). I can’t start that from a dead stop in four months. But I’m not looking for a job today. I flip to a new page in my sketchbook. At the top of the fresh page, I write “ASSETS”. These assets are skills or circumstances that I can leverage for income. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
It’s an odd list. You can’t really plug this stuff into indeed.com and have them show you a list of jobs. But I’m not looking for a job (right?), so what could I try?
Now I can take this list and apply some filters. I want to be able to test quickly and be nimble. I need something that shows hope of generating cash in weeks, not months. I want control of my schedule. I want to do creative work that matters to me. The only financial goal is to avoid going back to a corporate job.
More third grade math. 130k is 10,833.33 per month. Call it 11. That’s eleven customers paying 1000 bucks per month for a service. 110 people paying 100 bucks per month for something. 1100 people paying ten bucks per month. Or some mix of those. I don’t think it will be that clean. Maybe I’ll have 20k months and 2k months. If you visit (this website), you’ll see that I made a little one page website offering podcast services. I’ve got it priced out at 2500-5000 bucks per month. I’ve got one customer* signed up at the low end of that range. That’s the one that should net 1200 or so bucks. Five or six more customers at that number would put me on solid footing. I’ve started doing the work to find five more. Everyday for the past couple of weeks, I’ve sent out cold emails to marketing professionals at tech companies. I’m targeting people by finding companies that have open recs for content jobs. I’m thinking that if a company needs a body to generate some content, maybe they’d consider paying me 3k per month to generate podcast episodes and clips for social. So far, the response has been underwhelming. I’m not sure any of these businesses give a shit about podcasts. Podcasts are hard to tie to business results. I cannot claim that you will sell more widgets because we’ve launched a really cool show. I can only tell you that you’ll have a reliable way to churn out content on a weekly basis. I tried this idea briefly at the beginning of the pandemic with similar results. I’m going to keep sending out the touches, but the lack of replies is telling. Maybe businesses don’t care about podcasts. Maybe I’m targeting the wrong audience. Maybe I have to take this idea behind the shed and put it down. Maybe it’s a fun side project and not a real business. Lot of maybes. How did those sales leadership ideas sneak in there? I’ve worked at a handful of companies in the sales department. From the rep perspective, quality sales leadership is rare. To be fair, most sales managers are not trained (or qualified) for the job. They are figuring it out as they go. They become a mashup of the good and bad parts of the people they’ve worked for. Of the dozens of sales leaders I’ve seen, I can think of two that I didn’t dread working for. Most of sales leadership is pipeline inspection and constant deal updates and check ins. There is no development, no coaching, and no inspiration. There is no listening, empathy, or humanity. The CEO doesn’t care if his VP of Sales is a quality human if she hits the number. A huge chunk of a sales job is figuring out how to tell stories internally. Stories about why a deal might not be dead. Stories about how you’re going to back door your way to your number. Everyone has a story. Here are some things I’ve never heard from sales leaders:
I don’t think I want to be in sales leadership. I don’t think I can surf or hike on a Tuesday if I’m working for a company. Maybe I could write an E-Book or release a 29 dollar course. “Human Sales Leaders who Put Up Numbers.” So who is doing the kind of work that I want to do? There are people who have Substack newsletters (this is a Substack Newsletter) who put up paywalls and charge 5 or 10 bucks per month. Some of these folks have thousands of subscribers (examples). What a dream. I’m not aware of anyone making 11k per month writing the kind of stories I write here. If I wanted to make this a stream of income, I’d need to get a little more serious about answering the question, “Why would someone pay 5 bucks a month to read this?” I heard on a podcast yesterday that a woman made 260k by offering a “how to make caramel apples” course. Iphone camera footage, store bought caramel. 260k. A glaring weakness that I have today is no real social media presence (audience). People who profit from content typically have built large followings on Twitter or Instagram or giant email lists. I struggle with this. When I spend a lot of time on Twitter and Instagram, I get angry. There are a lot of assholes with large followings. You can’t be reasonable and attract a crowd. I snap my directional on and make a left at the intersection. It’s dark now, so I’m driving slowly with the high beams on, constantly scanning for little side roads that could hold opportunity. Life is full of suffering, yet we soldier on. Thanks for reading. *Coming soon. The project I mentioned a couple times. If you liked this post from Carrot Cake, why not share it? |
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Older messages
We're Letting You Go
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Last week closed another professional chapter for me. I've left jobs before, but this was my first firing. I wrote about my most memorable separation here: Getting fired feels shitty. Even if you
Last Day of the Season
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Throughout my 20s (and early 30s), I skied drunk. I wouldn't get on the first chair unless I had 4 beers on me. Any jacket or pants pocket with a zipper became a receptacle for as many cans as you
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Thursday, March 17, 2022
Part 3
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Tuesday, March 8, 2022
America On-Line launched “AIM” in 1997. It was one of the first text based chat programs of its kind. AIM was how all high school and college kids texted each other back then. There were no smartphones
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Thursday, March 3, 2022
When I rebooted Carrot Cake in its current version, I had just finished a couple of books that felt like they were written at me. Stephen King's “On Writing” and Anne Lamott's “Bird by Bird”.
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