My Son Was 23 Days Old When I Got Laid Off
An origin story
“Hey, can you talk? It’s important.”
The text came through on a late Sunday afternoon in early December. I put my phone down.
I knew that text. I’d sent that text.
Our newborn son was 23 days old. The last 3 weeks had been some of the most emotionally draining weeks of my life. Our little dude arrived just early enough for a mandatory NICU stay to help his little lungs finish developing. For 8 days, Michelle and I were ships passing in the night. Instead of bringing baby brother home to his eager older brothers, we were alternating shifts at the hospital during visiting hours. The non-NICU parent would be at home with two toddlers and two ailing dogs, running operations to try to keep the home life “normal.”
Now, the night before I was supposed to return to work, “normal” was about to be on the receiving end of a hand grenade.
What I Thought I Was Building
My time at this company had been the most successful arc of my career. Following 3 unsuccessful stints, making me question whether I had “lost it” as a recruiter, I joined this organization as an individual contributor in an attempt to rebuild.
I knocked it out of the park.
4 promotions in 5 years. I started as an Enterprise Sales Recruiter, then moved to Executive Recruiter, helping the CEO reshape the executive team. From there, I led a small Corporate Recruiting function, then moved into the Director seat. That’s when things got wild.
These were the early-COVID hyper-growth times. As a remote-first company, we had a massive competitive advantage in the market. We scaled rapidly, and my team had to scale to match. We grew from 15 to 58 in 18 months. I had 6 leaders reporting up to me. Somewhere in the chaos, I was promoted to VP (skipping AVP entirely, which my boss had to pause to tell me, “This doesn’t happen”).
The peak was a full-team offsite in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where I had nearly 60 people from 13 countries together for a few days of work and fun with King’s Landing as a backdrop. One night, we chartered an old pirate ship and cruised around the beautiful harbors of the Adriatic Sea at sunset. Stepping back onto land, I remember how light I felt. I was proud of what we’d built.
But unease was growing. It had started with that VP promotion. I should have felt like I “made it.” Instead, I looked above me and saw the end of the line - my boss’s job, the Chief People Officer gig. And I knew there was no way in hell I’d ever take that job. I’m not really an “HR-intervention” guy.
And so, at 37 years old, I had to ask myself, “Is this as good as it gets? Is this what I’m going to be doing for the next couple of decades?”
I’d seen this happen to candidates for years. Guys in their 50s coming in for meetings, and 10 minutes into the conversation, I’d be thinking, “You’re going to have to change so much for anyone to even sniff at your background.” The road ahead was clear.
And my exit strategy? Well, the “rock star” dream had been squashed a few years earlier with an album release that went nowhere. The current project was writing a fiction novel - something that was a ton of fun to learn, but pretty dicey to call a “career back-up plan.”
The Slow Dismantling
Five months after Croatia, I arrived in Napa for a People Leadership Team offsite. Within moments of checking into the little hotel, my boss pulled me aside.
“We’re going to have to do a layoff. And it’s going to hit your team hard.”
Huh? The CEO had prided himself on never having done a layoff in the 8 years the company had been in business.
But a week later, I was saying goodbye to a third of the team that I had built. Good people. People who, as they were losing their jobs, were asking ME how I was feeling, acknowledging how hard it had to be for me.
That was fucking brutal.
Round two came a few months later and was even worse than the first. These were people I really didn’t want to lose. As I went through those rounds of Zoom calls, the dialogues already committed to memory, I started to feel what these actions were costing me. Friendships (because who’s returning calls from the guy who takes away your livelihood?), but also pieces of me. I remember every face, every conversation...but I was having to numb the part of me that felt deeply about these people.
Round three brought the team down to the size it was when I became director. I was fed up. This amazing thing we had built had been stripped and sold for parts, and had nothing to do with our performance. Life was unfair. My disdain for the job was through the roof.
My text came before the fourth wave.
Day 23
I don’t have any complaints about the way it all went down. My boss, always my biggest supporter (and toughest critic), sat in her bed while I sat in my office. We chatted like we had thousands of times over the last 5 years together. The strategic work had dried up. I was expensive. My #2 was more than capable of running the team. It wasn’t personal. The package was fair. We were parting as friends.
The next morning, I joined a Zoom call with the team to say goodbye. The people I’d been in the trenches with through the build, the crazy requests from the founder CEO, the last-minute offers for “mission-critical hires” that broke all of our processes, the tech implementations, the brainstorming sessions, the life events we celebrated together. 17 little boxes on a screen. I didn’t cry. But I felt it all.
Then I closed the laptop...and the longest professional chapter of my life.
The prevailing thought in the curtained-off NICU square was always “I want to get him home now.” But once that chatter cleared, my thoughts turned to big-picture stuff. The instability at work. The lack of any meaningful backup plan.
That came into clear focus on day 1 of unemployment. Yes, there was relief: no calendar notifications, no red dots on Slack, the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to tell anyone else that their paycheck was gone. But I’d stand above my son in his bassinet, watching him sleep, and the thoughts were anything but relief:
Look at this little guy.
What did you just bring him into?
You could lose the house because you never built a fucking backup plan. What kind of father does that?
But it was a few weeks before Christmas. I had a decent package to carry me into the new year. I decided to lean into the unexpected surplus of family time, confident that I’d find something in February or March.
Then Michelle got laid off 5 days later.
158 Applications. 3 Interviews.
The next few months were difficult. The holidays were a great family time, but when you’re unemployed, every moment has a shadow hanging over it. I’d see my kids’ faces light up as they unwrapped Christmas presents, as I mentally calculated the cost of each gift. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, and your brain does it anyway.
Shortly after Christmas, we had to put one of our dogs down. It wasn’t wholly unexpected - he was diabetic, blind, and most daily actions were a struggle. Our most emotionally-intuitive pet, we assumed he stuck around to meet the baby, then said his goodbyes.
A month later, our second dog went, too. Surprise kidney failure.
In 60 days, we’d lost 2 jobs, 2 dogs, and 100% of our income stream.
This was about the time I started panicking.
The market had been shit when I went into it, but I still held onto the confidence that I had a hell of a success story to tell. Meanwhile, the voice in the back of my head was already jawing at me: “What? Do more of the same? You already hit that mountaintop, remember?” But when I looked at the dwindling numbers in my bank account, it was easy to shut that voice up.
As my applications without interviews hit triple-digits, I started having a different thought:
“Nobody is coming to save you.”
Fuck.
I’ve been giving the same advice for job searches for as long as I can remember:
“Do it for an hour or two a day and then stop. Go do something else, or you’ll drive yourself crazy.”
For once in my life, I actually followed my own advice. In the hours that weren’t spent job-seeking, bottle-feeding, diaper-changing, or serving as the nap station for our newest addition (one I didn’t mind, since I got to hold him without tubes and wires attached), I was thinking about what else I could do to earn a living.
I had spent the last couple of years learning how to write fiction. And I saw plenty of people writing online, brands that needed help telling their stories, and books with famous names and smooth prose that didn’t match the intellect of their subjects.
Maybe I could become a ghostwriter.
I’ve found that, when you open your mind to a new possibility, the universe tends to answer. A couple of guys I followed on LinkedIn, Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole, were teaching people to write online. Cole had even written a book on The Art and Business of Ghostwriting. It seemed straightforward enough.
They had a cohort-based course teaching how to build a solo ghostwriting agency. I said, “fuck it,” and booked a call with their sales team.
The Cruel Joke - And The Never Again
How I ended up enrolling in the cohort and becoming a ghostwriter is the subject of an upcoming article, so we’re going to fast-forward through that scene for now. The TL;DR - while continuing to clock an hour a day on a job search I expected to yield nothing, the rest of my time was spent learning how to become a ghostwriter and building a business.
By mid-February, I had “the conversation” with Michelle - that I was fucking done with the job search and was going all-in on ghostwriting. I’d do whatever it took to be successful. She backed me. I got the LLC, stopped the bullshit LinkedIn applications and coffee-meeting requests, and declared to the universe, “I’m an entrepreneur.”
The universe does what it usually does in those moments: it laughed in my face. “Like hell you are.”
The next Monday, I got a note that turned into a coffee date. An old CMO pal told me her company was contemplating a confidential TA leadership change. That afternoon (no shit), I got a cold outreach from a recruiter about a global head of TA job. The coup de grâce was the Wednesday text from a tech founder whose software I’ve relied on for years - and the best networker I know. “So and so is looking for a TA leader,” he tells me. “She’s awesome. You’re awesome. You two need to know each other.”
3 months of dead airtime. Then 3 viable opportunities in as many days.
Writers don’t put shit like this into movies, because real life tends to be too unbelievable for fiction.
I went through all of the interview processes—still building my ghostwriting business, but suddenly looking at the prospect of replacing my paycheck by next month instead of (maybe, if I was lucky) Halloween. Job offers came in.
Three kids under 4, one of them a newborn. A wife mired in the same job-search muck I had been in; lots of effort, zero prospects.
It wasn’t a question. I signed with my current company. While I filled out the DocuSign, I heard two words repeating in my mind:
“Never again.”
In April, I rejoined the corporate ranks and put the ghostwriting business on ice as I ramped up in the role. But this experience had altered the way I thought about my career. Gone were the thoughts of company loyalty. I no longer believed that I was indispensable. I didn’t look for my job to provide me meaning.
Once I had things in a stable place at work, I resumed building. Evolving. Refining. I saw ghostwriting as an awesome skill to have, and I’ve been able to help out a few clients... but it’s not all I’m meant to do.
What I’m doing today—helping people build their 2nd Acts without burning down their first—is.
Because we’re all at risk. We’re all one phone call away from having our livelihood taken from us. Every parent hovering over a bassinet, wondering if they’ve done enough.
We can either bury our heads in the sand and pray it won’t happen to us.
Or we can build our life raft while we’re still on the boat.
I know my answer. It’s summed up in two words:
Never again.
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P.S. If this landed, later this week, I’m opening 5 spots for the founding group of the 2nd Act Launchpad - an 8-week, 1:1 coaching, AI-powered approach to figuring out what and how to build something that can’t be taken from you. If you’re interested, reply. If you’re curious, stay tuned.