Employee Crisis Sparks Bonfire Under Bottom, Leads to 2 New Business Ideas - and Freedom!
Sometimes it takes a crisis to launch you into creating your own business.
I was a webmaster at a growing computer certification training company. I accepted the job at a very low base salary with big bonuses in place for maxing out their search engine ranking.
I wasn't sure I could optimize all five of their websites and grab the bonuses that were hanging out of reach like a gigantic teasing carrot. Yet I knew I had to try.
After four months of hard work I hit payday! I'd put 250+ keywords at the top of the search engines! My monthly pay tripled! The accountant told me I was the 2nd highest paid in the company. That was exciting and life was especially sweet!
Four months later, rankings were holding and the owner stopped the bonus program and cut my pay to half of what I was making. When I protested she said they couldn't pay me more.
Hmm... she had the Google and Yahoo rankings she wanted. Money was pouring into the business.
What would you say?
Well, it wasn't OK. What was I going to do? I realized working for another company and not being completely in control of my time, my income, my stability wasn't OK with me anymore either.
I was angry and I felt cheated.
My options were these:
1. Go to court over it and fight it.
2. Destroy their sites and rankings with a few keystrokes.
3. Use the bad situation to my advantage.
Then a neuron or two fired off in my head. Then a bunch of them, which led to... an idea!
Their training programs were selling very well. Everyone wanted MCSE, MCP, and other computer training certifications from Microsoft, CompTIA, Novell, and CISCO.
I had a meeting with the owner to ask if I could be a reseller for their training programs. She agreed.
I built a certification training web site as fast as I could - optimizing it for the search engines, mainly Google and Yahoo.
I knew I should incorporate. I went to the official Florida State website to incorporate online and was shocked! The process was so convoluted & frustrating it took me hours to figure out what I needed to do. In fact, I began work immediately on another website to help people like me incorporate quickly, easily, and with a better user experience.
Long story short, I put hundreds of hours of effort into those two websites and 3 months later sold both through EBay to a helicopter pilot in Hawaii for a nice 5-figure sum. This allowed me to focus on what I really wanted to do - Internet Marketing Consulting, which I'm still doing today.
There's good and bad to be found in every situation.
Keep your mind open and look for the positives even when you're neck-deep in anger and frustration. Keep your eyes open, always looking for opportunity. Good things come out of good things, but if you're looking for them - good things also come out of bad things.
Life is what you make it - "Aim for Awesome!" and you can always make it better!
That story was awesome. I had a similiar thing happen recently, and to be honest, I have been thinking of.... should I say it?? Okay, sabotage. I am still really ticked off about it. You've given me some food for thought, man. I have often heard people saying that instead of getting angry and letting it get you down, you should turn it to your advantage.... I don't know. I might do that.