Goodbye Self-employment?

Written by Gerard on Monday 7 September 2009

Well, dear readers, it seems recession, parental deaths and a series of other little factors are pushing me back toward a desk job.

It was almost a year ago that we took the decision to concentrate completely on the business, and I quit my job. For about six months, we were plodding along merrily, the effects of the recession not giving us any cause for concern. Then two things happened:

1. My father took ill in Lourdes, was diagnosed with cancer and died within about three months. It completely took me away from developing our business and into a world of family issues I’d distanced myself from for years. Even after the funeral, my head was fuzzy with grief and I was totally unfocused.
2. The dreaded alliterative nightmare that is the credit crunch visited us. Despite no worrying signs at all, in June advertising revenue from our sites took a massive downturn. Suddenly relying on the great passive-income generator that is Google AdSense (and other advertising schemes) didn’t seem like a great idea anymore.

Now, the summer time is a bad time for ad revenue anyway: people go on holiday or spend more time outdoors. You can feel the general quieting of the Internet for the holiday period. Plus, Big Brother was bleeding viewers, the showbiz world decided to have a slow-news summer and the only thing to write about was the Katie and Peter split. Yawnnnn.

I have another admission: it was hell trying to work during the summer with the kids off school. It’s an unpleasant truth, but it must be recorded: the doorbell rings almost constantly. When our kids call at their friends’ houses, they’re denied entry. “They’re not dressed yet,” or “They’re eating their breakfast,” come the excuses from the shrewd housewives. But their kids are knocking our door begging to come in five minutes later.

No parent wants their house full of rampaging, holiday-bored schoolkids.

But, since our door policy is so much more relaxed (football colours allowed), every brat in the street is tearing through our gaffe at breakneck speed, hollering and whooping as if we weren’t trying to run a business from it. Maybe we need to hire a knuckle-dragging doorman to refuse them entry/scare them away. Maybe we need to rig the doorbell up with an electric charge. I’m not even against the idea of a trapdoor leading to a crocodile pit to replace the front doorstep.

But the bottom line is, I’ve gotta start looking for jobs. I thought I’d be more despondent about it, but secretly I’ll be glad of having colleagues again. People to chat to or be annoyed by. Yes, I’ll definitely miss leaving the kids to school and the slightly more relaxed mornings we have at the moment, but it’s not a totally depressing turn of events.

Certainly, if the old man was about today, he’d be smugly reminding me that ‘he told me so’. “You need a full time job, son. You have children to feed.” But I’d be sniping back at him that my working from home gave me a chance to spend some good time with him in hospital!

So, CV’s have been dusted off and updated. I’m racking my brains to remember what my skills are. Do I have any left? Of course, but do I want to go back to the IT Manager type roles, or do I want to branch off in another direction? Do I avoid being fussy and take a job now to get my feet back on the ladder, looking for better positions later? I like the idea of playing the career game a little bit more aggressively for a while, knowing that I’m not totally dependent on a job, either. These could be interesting times for us, but we’ll definitely pull through.