Gainfully Unemployed

by Dennis Green

The best thing that ever happened to me was getting laid off from my job as Manager of Promotions and Market Research at Miller Freeman Publishing in San Francisco. This was when unemployment was so high under President Ronald Reagan in 1982, after I’d been with the company for about three years. I negotiated a pretty helpful buyout, three months severance pay and the freedom to apply for unemployment insurance and to continue my medical and dental care for another six months.

I was living in a tiny studio apartment at the time, one I had previously shared with my lady friend, a production editor at the company, but had lived there alone since for some time. It cost me only $300 a month in rent, including utilities. And I had just sold the house I’d bought in Walnut Creek and lived in for a year or so with my third wife, Stefanie Felix. We split the proceeds.

So I had an income, of sorts, and a bankroll, and minimal expenses. My 1976 Alfa Romeo Spyder roadster was paid for, and I rarely drove it anyway, leaving it parked on the street for days at a time and hiking on foot all over the City. And so, for the first few weeks, I didn’t even think about getting re-employed at all. I had several lady friends, and partied all over town with friends from Miller Freeman, and even though I was in my early forties, sometimes stayed out all night long.

When I felt like going back to work, not necessarily bored, but wanting to put my best skills into play, I applied for several positions listed in the Want Ads of the San Francisco Chronicle, positions vaguely like things I’d done before, where my resume had a fit with the posting. One of these was a position in marketing at Stanford University, not unlike what I had done at UC Santa Barbara, and also what I’d done at Miller Freeman.

But my enthusiasm for the process was not high. Something, some instinct nagging away inside of me said that going back to work on a staff, on payroll, reporting to some VP and having a small staff working under me, as a middle manager…YUCK! So I simply changed the consonant. “F- THAT,” I told myself. “I’m not going back to work for somebody else.”

So I paid a wonderful designer friend of mine, Fabian Cooperman, to design a business card for me. That’s the first piece of marketing for any new business, in case you didn’t know. She came up with a vertical layout, radical at the time, a light-tan, uncoated paper stock, with my initials, “DG” in gold, embossed lettering, and the tag, “Advertising Consultant” and contact info below that. Professional, yet a little flashy, promotional, as my biz would be.

And as it turned out, Fabian, who had also left Miller Freeman during their downsizing, brought me to my first client, a software developer in Marin that she had hooked up with, a woman who had designed the first ATM system for Bank of America, and her husband. They needed a copywriter, and someone who could work with the press, get them some coverage in the trades. I was their man!

I had done a lot of networking in my job at Miller Freeman, had joined the Commonwealth Club of California, the San Francisco Ad Club, and a newsletter organization, so I had lots of professional contacts to whom I could market my new consulting services. And many other middle managers who had left Miller Freeman, as it turned out, became my clients, as they started their own businesses, in database marketing and other fields I was already familiar with. Soon, I was creating brochures for them.

I even scored a few projects with old pals still on staff back at MFP, especially in Jan Donnenwirth’s Book Department. And a man who had been our overseas ad rep, Herb Stansbury, assigned me a big account creating ads for an East Bay hospital where he served as VP of Marketing. I was off and running.

Besides the business cards, and stationary, (including invoice sheets), and some mailings to my prospect list, I invested in a new electronic typewriter, similar to an IBM correcting Selectric, but smaller and lighter. That studio apartment became my first business office, and soon I was pulling in more in monthly fees than I ever earned in salary. The rest is history.

I only hope that some of those people laid off during the current recession will find their bearings, and hear that same little voice inside telling them to remain gainfully unemployed. If that same fine spark of entrepreneurship is there within them, it will come to life and open entirely new avenues to success. And they will be independent, captains of their own destinies, masters of their own fates. More power to them!

©2010 Dennis Green