Accidental Entrepreneur- My Second Big Break and It Was BIG!
I swear I didn’t really WANT to start my own firm, I didn’t have any ego issues egging me on to be THE BOSS.
Editor’s note: This is part two of a three-part series
Prior to being an entrepreneur in San Diego I got the second big break through a connection from Berkeley, I landed a job with a teensy start-up in a new field, Hispanic marketing research.
Never heard of it, never had any exposure to the ins and outs of marketing much less marketing research, but my visionary boss, Loretta Adams, picked me to be her first full time employee over people with more experience, because she thought it would be easier to teach someone research than to teach them Hispanic language and culture. She sent me to a series of professional training programs (the Burke Institute) so I learned from the best. It turns out Loretta was right, but what she could not have known was how all my quirks, manias and obsessions fell right into place.
In this field attention to detail, punctuality, writing skills, abhorrence of typos, an innate appreciation for and general understanding of statistics (I used to think I was terrible at math, but I would get the process right and screw up the arithmetic this was before calculators, so after portable calculators, the process was the issue). I loved research, and it loved me. So, I was at this firm in San Diego for seven years, finally leaving for a whole host of personal reasons.
BTW, while I was working full time in San Diego, I went back to school for my MBA at a school for working adults called National University. The best aspect of the program was that the classes were one month long, and you only took one class at a time. It was intense, but survivable while my wife and I were both working full time with a small child and working on a fixer house.
Aside from the actual instruction and learning, more than anything else I was working on my fear and self-doubts.
Sticking to It
I didn’t see it that way at the time, but my next big break came when my personal life obliged me to move to LA to follow my son after our divorce.
It took a couple of months to find a job, but in the interim, I was made a very tempting offer to take a job at an advertising agency, but my gut was to stick with research, as un-sexy as it might be, because I loved it. I knew it, was good at it and it felt better to keep a sense of continuity with what to me was a career, not a series of jobs, rather than pursue a bright shiny object that might not suit me as well. So, I eventually found a good job with a solid national General Market firm that saw the need for a Hispanic specialist. I gave it a year, but it was not a good fit, and I wasn’t able to thrive. So, I left to another Hispanic market specialist firm.
Call me dogged I was sticking with my thing. At this new firm, the brilliant guy who hired me left after two weeks, having sold his company to the person who I thought was his business manager. This guy wasn’t Hispanic and he wasn’t a marketer or a researcher.I had no idea what he was doing in this field, but I was elevated to Research Director, had a decent salary, so here we went. I was determined to try to make the best of it. We did well, but most of our money was going into paying off the former owner (it was a leveraged buy-out), so it was tough to grow, tough to keep staff, tough to spend anything on marketing.So, frustration finally led me, two years later, after ten total years in the industry, to take the leap and start my own firm.
I swear I didn’t really WANT to start my own firm. I didn’t have any ego issues egging me on to be THE BOSS.I didn’t want to order people around; I didn’t need people looking up to me. I needed a space where the point was the work. I wanted to focus on what the research project needed, not on company policy, not to appease anyone’s ego, not to impress anyone, just to do solid research in my community.
In my next piece we’ll look at 8 Lessons along the way as I was preparing to launch my entrepreneurial life.
Related articles:
An Accidental Entrepreneurial Journey
7 Successful Hispanic Vineyards Making an Impact
