One year ago today, my boss, and ironically one of my best friends (still!), asked me to meet him at Starbucks at Gaskins at 7:30. I normally worked from home on Mondays, and was about to go to the gym, so I donned my running shoes and met him there. When his car pulled up next to mine and I saw his expression, I knew.
This wasn’t a casual work discussion. This was it.
For a year prior to this meeting, we had seen the Fortune 500 company that we had helped build over the past five years begin to disintegrate: layoffs of hundreds of people at a time, offices closing, benefits slashed.
Since we were in human resources, it was even more apparent as phones rang wildly in customer service as employees received their RIF (Reduction in Force) letters and called emotionally to, among other things, ensure that their kids would be insured until they could find gainful employment. Our benefits staff was stressed; they were the unwilling participants in the game called “Try to Save our Company by Reducing the 401K Match” and were to say the least, unpopular. And the Employee Relations staff fielded calls from lawyers threatening law suits over layoffs that may have appeared to be without cause. The cause: the company was sinking deeper and deeper as the economy tanked and there were not enough buckets to bail out the big ship.
My last company trip was just four weeks prior to this fateful morning with my boss-er-friend. We had flown twenty or so of us from a large project team to Arizona to network, seek prospective clients and hear our CEO speak about our commitment as a company to market to diverse communities. Although we all knew the situation was dire, each of us felt that by continuing our sales efforts into these untapped communities was one way that we could help dig ourselves out and start to rebuild revenue creatively.
It wasn’t to be so. Just a mere four weeks later, here we were, standing outside, leaning on our respective cars in the cold in the Starbucks parking lot; he holding a large manilla envelope containing my severance package. Funny, I’d seen tons of these letters, but never quite believed I’d be holding my own. “At least buy me a latte,” I insisted, half-jokingly. We meandered inside, ordered and sat down. I found myself trying to cheer him up since after he was to leave me, he’d be having the same conversation with about thirty others, then he’d clear off his own desk.
This wasn’t the first time that we’d had this encounter. Almost ten years prior, with another company, he’d had to cut my position due to lagging sales. That time it was over the phone, since I traveled most of the time in that position. I never ended up leaving the company as they were able to create another position for me; I’d been “saved.”
This time, there would be no salvation for any employees. The company was filing Chapter 11 and portions of the company were being sold to a competitor. All that we had built was either disappearing or transferring to someone else’s leadership in Florida; none of us would be there to see the seeds we’d planted grow.
Over the next days and weeks of trying to determine how to stretch a small severance (before Santa was about to arrrive), file for unemployment and look for another position in a tight market, something amazing began to unfurl. I realized while doing all of these things that I already had a job–and a good one–right under my nose. My new position launched as CEO of Richmondmom.com. The monetary pay wasn’t nearly what I’d been accustomed to, but the rewards were plentiful.
The best of these new-found gifts? My 1st-grader saying, “Mama, now you get to pick me up off the bus every day! How cool is that?!”
