Laid off...

[ladydelaluna]

Okay... call it venting or call it a strange sort of joy...

Yesterday my boss laid off 3 of us, including me, and he's gone down from a small web design/seo/internet marketing company of 10 employees to now having only 3 employees in less than a month.

The man has terrible business skills... he's brilliant with certain things, but he's got NO aptitude for managing money in a business. He let us all go because he couldn't afford to pay us basically. Although he did say he's going to outsource work if it comes along... I just don't think he's going to be looking for things to outsource to us.

But in a strange way, I'm not all that upset. Neither are the others.

I've been wanting to leave and work from home full time, and now I have no real choice but to do that...

I'm going to post my resumes later on... Hopefully I can find some more things to add to my portfolio!!

Thanks for reading... I guess I just needed to figure out if I was really upset by this or not. And I think the only thing that scares me is the fact that I've been living paycheck to paycheck for so long, and I have BILLS that need to be paid! :cry:

[dreuby]

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say! So what will your new business be?

[ladydelaluna]

Well since I've been teaching myself web design for about 6 years now, I feel I'm pretty skilled with that. And I have to say that my boss was brilliant with internet marketing and SEO, and taught me A LOT about it. I mean things that those scamming "we'll submit you to the top search engines for $99" jerks won't tell you because they don't even know. Our company's website has consistently been in the top 3 for all our keywords and phrases (like "internet marketing" and "website designer" for example) in google, yahoo, hotbot, and alta vista... and there's a lot more to it than just going to the site and doing the free submission thing too. I learned a lot with that, so I feel I could be pretty successful in site optimization AS WELL AS design...

So that's that for now I think... it's just a matter of getting things up and running I suppose!

Thanks for responding... I'm sure there's a silver lining here somewhere! :)

[jesiwins]

I'm a firm believer that when one doo closes another one opens. Only sometimes that door is down a hallway you may not have gone down before or didn't even know existed. Good luck in your new venture whatever it maybe!

[Anonymous]

I was working for a Dot Com company that stopped getting invester money after 9/11. I worked without pay for a month. Each week, my boss would tell me that he'd pay me next week....all month. I finally had to go to the unemployment office and they wouldn't help me until I filed a complaint with the Dept. of Labor against my boss because he didn't fire me or lay me off. He just expected me to work for free indefinately. He layed off 5 other workers and kept me and another girl; but we had to work for nothing until he had the money to pay us. Being layed off would have been better.
While I was working for him, I took a course in Visual Basic and I already knew html; but he hired some friend of his wife's to do the webpage and she didn't have a clue how to do it. She kept asking me.
Since that job, I've had to take temporary jobs for much less pay. Finally, I just stopped looking. My husband makes enough money to keep the family comfortable; but I don't feel like I'm doing my part. I really wish I could do the kind of work I'm capable of and still be there for my son. At this point, I'm considering taking any minimum wage job just to get mother's hours and feel like I'm contributing. It's unfair because I have skills that I don't think I'll ever have the opportunity to use.

[ladydelaluna]

Mary - Although it's been a year and a half since my first post here, the funny thing is that I had started working for one of his competitors (and a far more superior company) shortly after the "layoff". I worked for HER for over a year, and then got laid off from there.

I guess I needed the conviction and support (believe it or not, from HER) that I can do this myself.

But what I'd like to say is that I'd like to stay in touch with you, Mary. Since I'm a startup, it's going to be hard to say if and when I would be able to really hire anyone for regular work, but it appears to me that you might know some things I dont, and you might be able to help me down the road.

Can you please drop me an email at: lara@anubismarketing.com with a list of your training and such? I might be able to pay you on at least a per-project basis if there's stuff you can help me with!

Thanks for posting, Mary!