How to know when it's time to move on
When your dream job becomes handcuffs and you gotta become Houdini. đȘ
In last weekâs post, I talked about creating my dream job. The event I mentioned was in February 2018. By September that same year, acquisition talks for Design Milk had begun.
If this was my dream job, then why did I sell the brand?
The honest answer: Iâd taken it as far as I could without help. There were things I wanted for Design Milk that I couldnât financially tackle on my own. I needed to figure out my next move.
Hereâs what happened:
In 2017, I was in Vancouver for a design event with a few blogger friends1 and we were having lunch. I donât recall how it came up, but we began talking about selling or moving on from our brands.
âI am feeling a little trapped. I need to figure something out. I give it five more years,â I said.
I was stagnantâand so was the brand. When youâre too stagnant, you get comfortable and things are easy, but you donât grow. I was itching to grow and needed a forcing function, but had to figure out exactly what would be best for both me and the brand.
I worked so hard for so long, and I knew I had limited bandwidth left. I was stressed all the time. My health was declining. My decision fatigue had fatigue. Iâd been tired since 2015 and was burning the candle at both ends, knowing there was a time limit.
How did I wiggle free from these handcuffs?
I considered my options:
Hire a business manager or CEO - I coudnât do this because even if I gave up most of my salary to pay this person, I still didnât have enough money left over to invest in whatever we decided to do. Weâd still have had to figure something else out.
Merge with another business - Not really an option I was interested in at the time.
Acquire another business - Who? and with what money? See #2.
Take on investors - I really didnât want to answer to other people, nor did I want to be beholden to them. Maybe this is short-sighted or egotistical or control-freakish on my part, but guess what? It ended up like this anyway.
Sell the company - The most viable option, depending on the deal.
Maybe there were other options, but I didnât have much time to think about them because EXACTLY ONE YEAR after that lunch, during THE SAME TRADE SHOW in Vancouver, I got the phone call.
And EXACTLY FIVE YEARS after I said âI give it five more years,â I departed Design Milk, freeing myself from the dream job Iâd built.
Never underestimate the power of saying what you want out loud. I also advise writing it down in an active statement, like an affirmation.2 This is some real woo-woo shit, but I canât tell you how many things have worked out once I shifted my energy in this direction.
But I canât say that any part of the process was easy. I worked my ass off to build a brand that was worth something, and I worked equally as hard to remove myself from it. It was one of the most challenging things I have ever done in my life⊠emotionally, mentally, physically.
No regrets.
Who said you can only have one dream job per lifetime?
Writing âblogger friendsâ makes me feel old but they are O.G., too, and this was my first instinct over âinfluencer,â which is what theyâre called now.
âI am" or âI haveâ vs âI willâ or âI wantâ
Totally understand, Jaime! â Amy Cuevas Schroeder