Unlimited - The discomfort zone

So, you got a life over summer. But now you’re back in the office, reading the same emails, listening to the same gossip round the same water cooler. Does it have to be like this? Could this be the year you finally decide on that long dreamed of career change?

If you are seriously thinking about reinventing yourself work-wise, take heart. You are not alone. And it’s not too late.

Until recently, career specialists talked about the urge for a dramatic career shift surfacing after 15 years in the workforce. Not any more. Technology, says Chris Taylor of Frog Recruitment, is offering people a lot more choice at an earlier stage of their careers. “We’re seeing younger people who are becoming a lot more entrepreneurial.”

Lee Brodie of Career Dynamics is seeing many people returning to New Zealand, who have made money offshore and can afford to make different choices when they return. “The marketplace has changed. There are people returning who go into corporations because it pays the bills and then think, ‘Oh my God, what do I want to do?’ I had a guy in yesterday who paid off his house while he was overseas and now wants something to make him zing.”

Charles Handy, one of the more influential British thinkers on organisational change, promotes the concept of "portfolio work". He believes that a working life is not about taking one job and sticking with it, but having several income streams and therefore more choice and more control.

So, should you pack in the old job tomorrow? Not according to Mark Rainier, a career counsellor and head of student counselling at Massey University’s Palmerston North campus. It may seem obvious, but don’t make a radical career shift when your emotions are high (read: when you’ve just come back from a great holiday and are fed up with your job, your boss and the wall colour of your office), Rainier says. “People can get resentful and feel trapped by their job, and then leave in a huff. It’s not a good break. You need to think about it, go back to fundamentals, work out what makes you really come alive.”

The following five New Zealanders did just that, opting for a dramatic career change. They all left successful but, in some way, unsatisfactory careers to pursue more successful — and more satisfying — business opportunities. Most of them abandoned the corporate world for the life of an entrepreneur. Some, like David Slack, were forced (in his case by ill health) to change direction. Others, like Debra Knox, followed a burning desire.

Sophie Mills,
sponsorship manager to recruitment consultant

The business card says: Jump Recruitment, Sophie Mills, director. What it doesn’t tell you is that Sophie Mills is 29, pregnant, and seven months into her first business venture as the country’s only recruitment consultant for the fitness industry. And that she does personal training on the side for the cash flow.

It’s incredibly stressful, says Mills, but she couldn’t be happier. Much happier than when she had a job as marketing and sponsorship manager for The Edge, the organisation that runs the Aotea Centre, Auckland Town Hall and the Civic for the Auckland City Council.

Though back then, Mills thought she had arrived. She had a degree in marketing and The Edge was a plum job.

“That was my ideal job. I’d always wanted to be in the corporate world. I loved the theatre. I’d moved from the South Island to Auckland, it was a step up the ladder, well paid, in a dynamic environment, and it just seemed like what I’d always wanted to do.”
So what made Mills leave it all behind for $12 an hour as a personal trainer?

A little voice in her head that started to question whether it was really what she wanted in life. She began some part-time papers in fitness training, then chucked in the big salary and went personal training full time. “When you get to the point where you’re prepared to drop your salary, that’s when you know it’s serious. It was terrifying leaving that comfort zone, but I love personal training and working with people.”

The idea of a recruitment agency to service the fitness industry was one of those inspired leaps, though one backed by research. Mills spotted a niche in the market where she could set up a business that combined her marketing skills, experience as a personal trainer, and desire to help people. She rang around gyms and got the same story everywhere. The pay was appalling and staff turnover high. That gave her the confidence to start Jump Recruitment, originally called Absolute Fitness Recruitment.
At first she worked from home, terrified of paying rent on an office. Now she shares space with Frog Recruitment in downtown Auckland and has mentors in the form of Frog director Jane Kennelly and recruitment manager Chris Robson. Their support is vital, says Mills.

Still, it’s a slow process establishing a completely new concept and convincing the fitness industry it needs her services. “The challenge is in changing the culture of the industry. But I get up every day and think, this is my business. It’s terrifying but incredibly cool. And everyone has been really encouraging. That’s what you need when you go from secure employment to self employment — to surround yourself with positive people.”

David Slack,
young management gun to speechwriter, online entrepreneur

David Slack was 23 when his new masters at brewers DB offered him what seemed like a dream job. “They said, ‘go up to Auckland, check out all the hotels, come back and write a report, and take as long as you like’.”

And so he set out, armed with a company car and a credit card, on an intense, fun four years as an aspiring young DB management gun, until, on his 27th birthday, he keeled over in the reception of Dargaville Hospital.

He’d had a heart attack, at a ridiculously young age. Slack remembers lying in a hospital bed that night, watching a set of traffic lights change colour, terrified he would go to sleep and never wake up again.

“I drifted through that first week. I remember a doctor telling me what had happened was catastrophic. He was right. This was a huge convulsion in my life and it was time to take stock.”

These days Slack, 44, is fit and healthy, with a young daughter, a large villa in Devonport, and a lucrative online speechwriting business. He could have returned to corporate life at DB, but life would never seem the same. “I could see that career path was drifting into a siding. There was no sense in hanging around. So I went to see some headhunters and they offered me a job. I lasted three months.”

Slack set up for himself as a liquor licensing consultant. Then one day he saw an ad in the paper for a speechwriter for the minister of justice, who just happened to be his old law lecturer, Geoffrey Palmer. He applied, got the job and the next thing he knew, David Lange had resigned, Palmer was prime minister and he was the prime minister’s chief speechwriter.

“It was one of the most fascinating experiences I’d had in my life. I relished it, even though the polls were running the wrong way and there was no way they would hold on to office. There was still a lot of work going on. I also found that writing speeches was a fascinating way to spend the day.”

When the Labour government was turfed out, Slack and his wife moved to Auckland, where he worked for the North Shore City Council, and then for PR firm Raynish & Partners, while still building his speechwriting business. In 1994 he reached the point where he felt he couldn’t juggle two jobs any longer.

It was also around then that the internet started to take off. Slack thought the net would be handy for research, later he realised having a website would give him access to a much bigger global market for his speeches. His brainwave was automated speeches: you go to the website, answer a few questions and, hey presto, you get a basic speech — for a fee. Slack taught himself basic programming, developed the speech writer, and clients started coming.

“A lot of people know they have to give a speech, and have a vague idea of what they want to say, but no idea how to structure it. The programme takes the agony away. It’s a very satisfying process and once you have loaded up the database, it just goes on generating material and revenue.”

Slack was also crafting individual speeches, mainly for US clients. Three years ago he realised he would have to cut down on that side of the business if he wanted to keep expanding the automated service. To keep his hand in, Slack writes a blog called Island Life on www.publicaddress.net, which last year resulted in a book, Bullshit, Backlash and Bleeding Hearts: A Confused Person’s Guide to the Great Race Row. Bullshit made it to number two on the local bestseller list and he’s now working on a sequel.

He has a bad habit of never refusing work, he says. But he gets to go running every day, work from home, and pick his young daughter up from school. “I’m having a ball. I don’t regret for a moment having taken the risk or having to worry through some of the problems along the way.”

Slack has a couple of career philosophies. First: don’t fall into the first job you’re offered. He left Victoria University with a law degree and drifted into advertising for two years until he got the job with DB. Second: “If there is something that interests you and that you find fulfilling, then if you try hard enough, you will figure out a way to turn it into a business prospect.”

Debra Knox,
financial wizard to executive coach

It wasn’t an epiphany as such, but after Debra Knox had been working in the financial services sector for 26 years, she began to think of her workaholic father, who died when he was 45.

“I’m a workaholic and I realised I had some similar trends.” It wasn’t an easy choice. The bank was still a good job and there were lots of opportunities. She was getting an attractive salary and had a reasonable amount of independence at work. But, Knox reasoned, she’d been there since school and there were other aspects of my talents I wasn’t using”.

So she rewrote the book, leaving her job as a change manager for the Bank of New Zealand and becoming an executive coach. The way to go, she decided, was cold turkey, “like when I gave up smoking. It was pretty radical — I think I shocked the living daylights out of my mum.”

To create the impetus for reinvention, Knox felt she needed to clear her head, get away from the security of her salary at the bank, and go out into the world to figure out what she didn’t know. She has, she says, “spent loads” on personal development. In the process, and through discussions with her sister-in-law, Knox realised she had a talent for executive coaching. Now as head of her own coaching business, Solutions in Action, she works with companies and individuals to help them to be more successful in their careers.

Ironically, Knox, now 46, advises her clients that reinventing yourself doesn’t always mean leaving your job. “Sometimes people will just try and run away from where they’re at. Before I made my career change, I made sure my decision was based on something I really did want to do, rather than running away from something I really didn’t want to do.”

Thomas Subritzky,
mailman to direct marketer

Thomas Subritzky didn’t give tertiary study a second thought when he was in the seventh form. No one in his year did. “People didn’t really think about it at that time in Whangarei, so I left school and just cruised for the next 12 years.”

When he did eventually find his way to university, he completed a degree in geography for the simple reason that it appealed to him the most out of his first year subjects. But there weren’t a lot of jobs around for someone with a geography degree. So it was back to school, leaving two years later with a master’s degree in town planning.

He landed a job with a consultancy, but it quickly became obvious that the road to the top in town planning was long and winding. Anyway, every day brought a fight, usually with local government. “I didn’t want to go to work and argue every day,” he says.

When a mate was made the boss of a Wellington mail house and offered Subritzky a job as operations manager, he didn’t hesitate. Business seemed more dynamic than town planning, plus he got to move to a different city. It wasn’t so much the particular industry that appealed, says Subritzky, because he didn’t have a clue what a mail house was. It was the opportunity to do something completely different.

“I didn’t know what was happening for the first two weeks and it probably took me a couple of months to learn the industry. It was pretty quick because it’s such a full-on industry that you have to get really involved, really quickly.” He stayed for five years, then took some time off to consider his next move — which turned out to be a
Wellington-based direct marketing company called Orangebox, set up by Subritzky and business partner Stephen Bennett in August 2003.

He and Bennett had worked together, before Bennett headed off to the UK to be client services manager for one of Britain’s largest print and direct mail groups. And the pair had identified a niche in the market for a boutique company that would focus on direct mail campaigns for clients from go to whoa, while also offering a mail house service.

The experience of moving from employee to boss has turned him into a fervent advocate for setting up in business. The key, says Subritzky, is to start with a comprehensive business plan, and always watch the cash flow. He and Bennett began Orangebox with their own money. He won’t say how much except to say it was, “a six-figure sum between us, but it wasn’t a huge capital investment”. And they ploughed all their cash back into the business.

Never mind that the pair spent the first six months sitting around looking at each other, surviving on a trickle of work. When the orders did come in, growth was exponential. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, Subritzky worked a 90-hour week on average — he has no children, which helps.

“The good thing was that we learnt at someone else’s business and made mistakes there and learnt from them. We’d also made a lot of contacts, because Wellington is really relationship-based, probably more so than Auckland. And we’ve been really measured about it. Rather than stick a ton of money in to start with, we’ve done it progressively. But it’s so much fun being in business for yourself. We actually feel less stress running our own business than we did working for other people.”

Colin Ross,
firefighter to law student

Probably the worst moment for Colin Ross since quitting his job as a senior firefighter to study law happened not long ago. Ross was sitting in a university lecture theatre when a young man plumped himself down beside him. “Gidday Mr Ross, how are you?” the young man said, and Ross found himself looking into the amused face of one of his son’s friends and feeling like the oldest geezer on campus.

Battered ego notwithstanding, Ross graduated from Auckland University with a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the beginning of 2004, and by the end of this year he’ll have a law degree as well. And actually Ross, on the upside of 45, fits in more easily with his fellow law students than those in commerce. A lot of mature students seem to do law, he says. Fellow students include a guy who used to be chief executive of a power company, a theatre nurse and an architect.

Ross will be close to 50 when he graduates. He figures he has around two decades of a law career in front of him, specialising in employment and family law — the two areas he feels fit best with his life experience.

Ross spent 26 years as a firefighter in the Auckland region, including 15 years on the front line. He then moved into management where, among other things, he set up and ran the northern communications centre. Towards the end of that time, the Fire Service underwent a highly contentious restructuring and Ross found himself developing skills in change and relationship management. It was stressful and exciting but, at the same time, he felt he was growing away from the Fire Service.

“I’d always been a career person. I had ambitions of reaching a senior level, and I was on track for that, but I looked around at some of my colleagues and realised I didn’t want to be there in ten years’ time.” The impetus for Ross’s decision to try a totally different path came with a personnel incident, for which he took responsibility, but about which he’s reluctant to talk. Enough said that he felt he was “hung out to dry”. He resigned and went off to see consultant Lee Brodie of Career Dynamics. It was a fortuitous choice.

“She suggested I should do law, which was a very powerful suggestion as I’d always been interested in it but didn’t think I could become qualified. This was fairly early on in our session. I’d had it in mind to finish my MBA and Lee told me I’d be wasting my time and said, ‘Why don’t you try law? You’d suit it’. I still remember that conversation.”

Luckily Ross had enough from his superannuation to pay off the mortgage, using the balance to supplement his wife’s salary. But going to university has cost a lot more than he expected and he will have a $20,000 student debt when he finishes this year. And studying law is hard work: “Much harder than commerce. I know a lot of my fellow students feel the same way. But I treat university like a job — I’m in there from 7.30 in the morning until 6 at night.

Is it worth it? In a word, yes. He’s already had several articles published and contributed a chapter to a book on the Employment Relations Act. “I remember when I left school, I had plenty of opportunities and just wasted them. I mucked around. Now I have so much admiration for the kids I see who are working so hard, at an age when all I wanted to do was party. And they’re so positive. I just love the environment.”

Reinventing your wheel:
Tips for a new beginning

Sit down and decide what values are important to you. See a career counsellor. “Most often the people who come to see me are what Stephen Covey (author of the best-selling The 7 Habits for Highly Effective People) calls people with their ladders against the wrong wall,” says Kaye Avery of recruitment consultants Pohlen Kean. “That can happen at any time. I take them through a process which helps them define what is important to them, what their values are, what’s going wrong, what they like or dislike about the job.”
Decide if you need a career change, or if it would be simpler to redefine the career you have. The term career doesn’t just mean the work you do from nine to five, says Mark Rainier, a career counsellor and head of student counselling at Massey University’s Palmerston North campus. It’s the balance of work to the rest of your life. Perhaps you don’t need a new job, you just need to recognise you get fulfilment from voluntary work, or the time you spend with your family.
Take your time. Changing jobs can be quick, says Jane Kennelly of Frog Recruitment, but career change requires far more planning and depth of thinking. Sometimes it’s better to dabble your toes in the work you think you might want to do by working part-time in the industry to start with. perhaps it’s easier to study part-time while retaining an income from your current job. But for some people, their personalities demand that they leap.
Consider the impact on your family, both in terms of time and money. Often a career change means you have to step back and take a drop in salary to begin with. An entrepreneurial venture may chew through personal savings as well as take up evenings and weekends. If you are starting your own business, make sure you draw up a comprehensive business plan so there are no financial surprises six months down the track.
Still, don’t be daunted by the financial aspect. Starting a new business doesn’t always require truckloads of cash. To begin with it may just require a computer and a space at home.
Surround yourself with positive people. Find a mentor, someone who’s done it before.
Take the advice of change guru Charles Handy and consider a portfolio of work, suggests Lee Brodie. “He talks about meeting someone and expecting to get three or four business cards. He also talks about doing some work for no financial return.” At the same time, says Brodie, be pragmatic. If you have a skill that earns a decent living, keep that as part of your portfolio.
And don’t be afraid to fail.

Talking you down
Okay, so what can you expect when you see a career counsellor? We sent Bette Flagler to find out

I was so keen to begin career planning that I showed up to my first appointment a week early. When I finally met Kaye Avery, senior career management counsellor at Pohlen Kean, I tripped over myself explaining that I am not unhappy in my job or desperate to get out. On the contrary, I love my work. But I wanted to think about the next step before I get bored or miserable. Kind of like going to a marriage counsellor before resorting to divorce.

First up, Avery gave me a Career Transitions workbook and explained we’d use it as a general guide over the next six sessions. The process would be split into three general components: looking inwards; looking outwards; and looking forwards. By the end, I’d have a plan covering the next seven (or so) years. It would set out goals and what I needed to do to achieve them.

My first assignment, to write an autobiography, was mammoth. Thankfully, Kaye wasn’t as interested in childhood dramas as the education and career sections. Next, I charted significant life events, their importance and how I felt about them, then worked through principles I considered important personally, at work and within an organisation.

I didn’t uncover too many surprises, but it was helpful to put things on paper and notice trends in my life. And it was quickly becoming apparent that Avery was not going to do the work for me: career counselling, I learned, is not someone else telling you what job to apply for next.
Things started getting exciting when I completed a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) — an assessment that identified my personality type after I answered dozens of questions (“Do you find being around a lot of people 1. gives you more energy or 2. is often draining?”). Zealously, I found myself secretly analysing my colleagues: did they fall into extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving? I was beginning to see how I fit into the organisation and what types of people I need to balance my preferences (and to recognise why habits of others can be so damned annoying).

The ghastly-sounding “gap analysis wheel” was even more fun than the MBTI. Kaye drew a circle and around it wrote a dozen work values I find important — such as stimulating assignments and room to be creative. Imagine a dart board with zero in the bull’s eye and ten on the edge — on the spokes that pointed to each value, I assigned a numerical ‘ideal’ and a ‘current reality’ rating. Connecting the ‘ideal’ ratings and the ‘reality’ ratings showed gaps where attention is needed — a sort of happiness/frustration graphic.
Most of Kaye’s clients are sent by their employer and, as I gained a clear picture of my ideal work situation, I wondered why anyone would send their staff. Isn’t it encouraging them to find something better?
By building a strategic career plan, Kaye explained, an employee may figure out they don’t need to leave their present position — sure, they might need to polish up their job description, or adjust some responsibilities, but when people are excited and engaged they perform better. And yep, they may decide to leave, but they’ll be “positive and on good terms” — not bitter and twisted, poisoning the team as they walk out the door.

The introspection continued with my completing a career drivers workbook (what life values really drive me?) and ended with third-party feedback. People who know me well completed a questionnaire with objective, thoughtful comments on my strengths and weaknesses and Avery presented me with a compilation of their answers. I was a bit nervous, opening the envelope that revealed what my peers and supervisors had to say, but nothing was really a surprise (in part because my editor broke the rules and sent her response to me. Did I read it? You bet — it would be rude not to).
Then, for the final week, Kaye sent me home with a big outward-looking task: to create my long-term vision. “Think mission,” she said, “Ask yourself: how can I leave a legacy?” This was, of course, great fun — establishing big, brave goals for myself, like turning into a female Bill Bryson and heading up National Geographic in my spare time.

Considering my mission and looking back through the skills and qualities I identified in the early sessions, Avery and I then set out to complete my plan, listing not only personal and professional goals, but the qualities I need to achieve them and the steps to get me there.
At the end of six sessions, I wasn’t ready to hand in my notice. For the most part, I’m on track with my career goals, but now I’ve got a much clearer roadmap of how to reach them.

The discomfort zone

A new year, a new you? Mark Revington profiles five Kiwis who radically changed their careers and never looked back