William Shakespeare said, “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” I have often said if I had a time machine, I would go back in time to the late 1500s to early 1600s and throat-punch Shakespeare for talking so weirdly. I went to too many school plays where I didn’t know what the hell they were saying…but I digress.
The dude’s point is spot on; no one should not blame God or some other uncontrollable force for how their life turns out. You have a certain amount of power to make your life better. There are ways to work for a better future. And while it may be hard and sometimes feel impossible, if you want a perfect job for yourself, why not try to create it?
In an earlier post, I talked about how you can make money from sales without even having a job. That might be too scary. You may like the peace of mind and social aspects that come with working for a company as opposed to working for yourself. Well, there is a way to create your own job that doesn’t currently exist with your chosen company!
It’s true! I’ve done it multiple times in my career. You too can go full Build-a-Bear and create the job of your dreams from scratch and then be the one to fill it. Let me tell you how I did it.
Back in the 90s, when I was in the middle of the radio sales portion of my career, I focused on non-traditional revenue. Instead of calling on the typical radio advertisers like car dealers and furniture stores, I sold advertising programs to package good companies and partnered with local outlets like grocery and hardware stores.
The local outlets got free advertising from their suppliers; the suppliers received extra display space and marketing considerations to help them move more product. It was a win-win situation for everyone. Ultimately, I landed in Tulsa to do this work for a radio group and soon added ‘recruitment advertising’ to the list of programs I developed.
Each commercial started out with a specific message, i.e., “Are you or someone you know a nurse?” Boom, if you were a nurse or knew one, you were going to pay attention to that radio ad!
I loved the direct response aspect of recruitment advertising and the accountability that went with it. Each recruitment commercial had its own phone number to reply to. You knew whether or not the campaign worked simply by seeing if there were any phone calls.
I also created some cool events like drive-thru job fairs where you could drive through a parking lot on the way home to pick up selected job information and virtual job fairs where you could call in one number and hear descriptions about open opportunities with both direct companies and staffing firms.
After a while, it dawned on me that I had not met most of my clients in person. Most of the business was done over the phone (the beginning of virtual selling). The company I worked for owned radio stations nationwide, so I proposed we create a ‘recruitment advertising division’ to create coast-to-coast campaigns.
My current company passed on my idea, so I contacted a senior VP of Clear Channel Radio—at the time, one of the biggest media companies in the world. I met the VP at a little cafe near his home and proposed a new division that would create a new revenue stream and client base his stations were not currently tapping into. He said yes immediately!
While this ‘division’ was basically just my starting salary and home office setup, It allowed me to develop campaigns across the country and train other salespeople at sister radio stations how to go out and get recruitment advertising dollars.
This job didn’t exist at Clear Channel. They had no plans at that moment to go after recruitment advertising, but this dope (me), with no college degree and a little chutzpah, had a plan to make them money, and they bought into my idea.
Later on, I partnered with several computing training companies and ran numerous joint recruiting and training events. Two years after I created that job out of thin air, I moved to IT sales because I was hooked on the training industry.
Go for a walk, leave the headphones at home, and think about what job you would like to have that doesn’t currently exist at a company. Then go pitch it.
Happy Selling!