What's Next

 

 

I have to make an important decision in my life. I’ve always worked as an independent IT consultant. I started back in 2002. I worked regular jobs until 2011, then I went in full time as a consultant. Then after 4 years, I started to help my mother more with my grandmother until her choice to stop dialysis at age 100. She told us when she made that decision she felt she made it to her goal of making 100 and was satisfied. While my grandmother was in hospice, my mother who I realize in hindsight was having major issues, had to be hospitalized.

At that point I had to completely stop my consulting business there was no time for me to work on everything about that and take care of this. So after months of fighting to get my mother proper care. Of course thanks to people like Tanya for getting me past a really hard situation at the step-down hospital. I got her back home after her stay at the rehab. Now her full-time caregiver there was no IT consulting going on. I worked to take care of the house and her until her passing in Dec 2021.

After which I had more decisions to make. Will I go back into my business or just find work? Since during the pandemic and caring for mom I made absolutely no income. I still had hope I could restart my business as the last job I actually held before the job I had now was an independent transporter job I held until 2011.

So all of 2022 I spent on my own working with help from key my key people, Dawud and Rita, then leaned on my lawyers from LegalShield to make sure I made proper legal steps. They referred me to my probate lawyer who guided me through the process. I did most of my own footwork since I really didn’t have the money to pay my lawyer to have her contracted services do it.

Now its June 2023, and after struggling the first part of the year, getting into every program I could I pulled through and I’m one step away from finishing probate, I got a part-time job and I feel better about my prospects but this is where I had to make my decision. Do I work a part-time job and try to reopen my business or do I just work? Being 52 years old and restarting my business is far different than when I originally started this. Not only my age but the pandemic and the economic situation changed the way people spend their money. I have tried to market myself and try to start the business over but with all my new responsibilities and no backup like I had, it seems like I have no dedicated time for it. I would get someone to do it for me but with no real money to speak of how would I pay them? It's not like before when someone will work off the prospect of making it, they want cash now.

So now I’m not saying I won’t fix someone’s computer, printer, or network but I feel like unless I get help either with partners or financial help I will just be spinning my wheels and risk putting myself back in the situation I was in at the beginning of this year.

Getting work is hard, I applied to jobs all of 2022 with few interviews. A lot of the positions I saw on job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor would go in and out of being posted. I called them ghost jobs. Why? Because I found out through a business contact that some companies post jobs to raise their investor value. So investor confidence would be high, they would believe the company was growing and its value was still good. That’s why in early 2023 they were saying jobs were at this high but on the street people still were unemployed. But let me not go down that rabbit hole.

As I’m writing this now I believe I have to get full-time work to survive but I promise you my optimist side will take over at any given moment and start telling you I’m back in business. Once you work for yourself that drive to be that is hard to get rid of. So if you have some tech work for me to hesitate to call me, but I’m in survival mode right now and the only way I’ll make it past August is to make more money. August is the month that I start to pay the mortgage. Right now I make barely enough to do what I need now. With that 1300 dollar addition in August, I will be right back in my early 2023 situation. It's the reason why I have to make this decision to work over my entrepreneurial dreams.