As you consider a self-directed career, look again at the internal and external factors in your situation and plans. Internal motivations for a self-directed career include:
- You've always wanted to be in business for yourself
- You want to work on your own schedule
- You want to take a chance on a potentially lucrative business opportunity.
- You've lost your job or had your salary cut
- You're blocked from further advancement in your present job
- Your spouse has taken a job in a new location.
Career information specialist Kathryn Diggs of Farming-ton, Michigan, created such a fit when she started her own business. The primary motivation was external: a need to relocate to Farmington to care for her parents. Therefore, "I had three criteria," Kathryn recalls. "First, I wanted to base my work on knowledge I'd already gained since I wanted to stay in my field. Second, it had to be something I could do with virtually no regular schedule, so I could be available at all times to provide care and transportation to my parents. Third, it had to be a business that could be moved anywhere as circumstances change. I don't want to live in Farmington forever." She met these criteria by launching a newsletter, Career Savvy.
Sometimes it's possible to find the fit simply by doing exactly what you did before but for yourself instead of someone else. Reid Robbins was a court reporter who, due to a bout with cancer, was unable to keep to a schedule. So he started his own court reporting and transcription business from his home in Philadelphia, employing others as needed, especially to gather tapes and deliver transcripts. It's working. In three years, his business has grown from revenues of about $5,000 per month to between $50,000 and $80,000 per month.
"I didn't really work toward going out on my own," says Reid. But he responded well to the situation that made it necessary.
On the other hand, if you find yourself primarily motivated internally-you know that you want to "do your own thing"- are the external factors cooperating sufficiently? Do you have support from your family?
Earl Robinson wanted to stay in Phoenix. At 29, with a business degree from Wharton and several years of experience in financial reporting and auditing at Ford and Citibank, Earl had moved to Arizona with his new bride to accept an opportunity with Envirotest, an environmental testing company. The future looked fabulous: Envirotest's revenues had skyrocketed from $10 million in 1991 to $90 million in 1993 and were projected to hit $250 million in 1995-until the congressional election of 1994 changed government policy and stifled the market for Envirotest's services. Soon Earl and about 20 other hotshots who'd been recruited from Fortune 50 organizations were unemployed.
There was no shortage of opportunity for Earl. He could easily have returned to New York or Detroit and landed another corporate post. But Earl and his wife loved Phoenix and wanted to stay. So he teamed up with four other colleagues from Envirotest and formed two companies: Emily Christopher Associates, a management consulting practice aimed at growing $2 million companies into $10 million companies through better operations and financial management; and Constant Communications, which sells pagers and air time for pagers, which Robinson said offers 70 percent gross margins and is growing rapidly. (During our interview, Earl received a call that told him Emily Christopher had won its first big contract: a $200,000 job for the City of Phoenix.)
Earl's new efforts show a good balance between the external and internal forces driving his career: He picked a secondary market for his skills but played to his functional strength: finance. He loves his new setup: "In management of a large organization, you spend a lot of time worrying about someone else's money. In a smaller company, you worry about the employees and their families. But on your own, you just have to worry about yourself, and concentrate on doing what you do best."
