A Working Man...finally ⇒

November 1st, 2014 by

I left InTouch at the end of April after much thought. My plan was give ample notice (2 months), take a few months off in the summer, and start work when the kids went back to school. Life, however, did not work out that way.

Instead, I was asked to leave a few days after I gave notice. The good news was that I could be very active in meeting cool companies. The bad news is that I was expecting a tad more income to tide us over for the summer.

My challenge in finding a job was that I was quite picky:

industry I was passionate about (health & wellness/education/energy)
small, fun, downtown company with neat tech
needs a senior sales person

I spent a great deal of time focussed on finding this unicorn of a company but was eventually told either, "we are not ready for sales" or "we'd rather hire a junior sales person", which was very frustrating.

To keep myself busy, I got two contracts:

First contract was helping out my friend Paul improve his amazing site Pain Science:
Second contract was helping SocialIQ's with their sales strategy.

I also created one event and worked to bring two others to Vancouver:

Vancouver Sales Meetup - a monthly meeting where we gather and help each other get better at sales. I've done 2 so far, and people have gotten great value both times (they say).
Sales Hacker - this one didn't succeed unfortunately due to lack of cohesive marketing, though I learned a ton about putting on an event that I will use when we try again in the new year.
Sales4Startups - I met Bennett via Twitter and actually drove down to Seattle to meet him in person. We are talking about bringing their first lab to Vancouver in the new year as well...it will be great!

When the teacher's strike happened, it was actually good I wasn't working again and could deal with the children as Christine started her PDP program. However, by now I was really ready to get back to work and started look for "normal" jobs, like at Mobify, Hootsuite, Clio and other great Vancouver companies. None of those turned out; however, I found this position on AngelList and said I was interested. It wasn't in the industries I was looking for, but it fit all the other requirements.

And and I happy to say that I just completed my first week there and I love it! We are going to take over the eCommerce world.