[CaptainCrunch]

So I wanted to tell a bit of a story, I don't know if its helpful or not.


When I lost my job to layoffs in the recruiting field, about a couple of dozen in Canada and about 80 world wide woke up without a chair.


I decided to keep in touch with a couple of the guys I'd worked with and gotten a long with they were both based in Toronto. I thought maybe we could work to keep each other kind of sane and swap tips.



With one after I went after and got this contract, and started doing my own thing, I had a deep talk with him. He'd been recruiting for about 16 years, and he was good at it. We talked about whether or not it was something that he wanted to keep doing, and he did though the job market was soft.


So I sat down with him virtually and we worked through the benefits of starting his own thing.



- We looked at the cost of starting his own business.
- We looked at his and my contacts list and put together a list of potential people to contact.
- We looked at what he would need technology wise. For the most part there were

- excellent open source options that would be dirt cheap. He could get a quick website made up.
- He started up his own company, and just started doing a lot of basic business development.

- I worked with him on scripting and his elevator pitch and all of that stuff.
- We talked about the fact that in the recruiting field your charging pretty high fees, and as an employee you see less then a third of those fees. We worked out a goal of him doing 6 fills in his first year, which means that his share at 100% would be between $60,000 and $120,000.
- He's signed up three new clients in the first month and has closed one of them.

Thats compared to the cost of setting up a business and some other expenses.


In a ####ty job market I think there's a validity that if you're good at something and you like doing it, that it doesn't hurt to maybe look at setting up your own thing instead of trying to survive and wait in a soft job market.


With the other gentleman, he's more risk adverse and is good at taking directions and executing, but he's not that guy that will take a leap of faith, and that's ok, but in a tight job market like this, sometimes you have do do things that you normally wouldn't do.


In my current role, I can state that there are lots of support groups and communities for startups, the government has recently released new grants at a provincial and federal level.



Any ways, why am I rambling on at 11 at night about this. Because this job market and especially in this province, I can't think of a major magic bullet to get a job quickly like I could even a couple of years ago. Keep your options over.


I'm always here if you have questions.