A Layoff Isn’t a Gift—But It Does Give You Something
The email arrived at 6:47 AM on a Tuesday, sent to my personal address. I knew what it was about before I opened it. Why else would my employer email my personal address?
The subject line was something corporate and bloodless—”Regarding Your Position”—and the body was three paragraphs of HR-approved faux sympathy that boiled down to: you’re done here, thanks for everything, sign your severance paperwork, and we’re keeping the laptop.
The severance package was just enough for them to feel like they’d done the right thing, but not nearly enough to position my family and me for success. In short order, the direct deposit that had funded everything from the mortgage to the grocery budget to the kids’ activities was shut off. So I did what any rational person does when their income disappears: I started applying for jobs en masse.
I did exactly what I’d done every other time I was looking for work. And why wouldn’t I? Every time before, it landed me a role.
So I applied for hundreds of jobs.
And received no offers.
That was the moment I knew I needed to do something different. I started looking for other ways to support my family.
I applied to be a cashier, a stock clerk, really anything, at my local grocery store; apparently I am not as qualified as the teenagers who work there
I applied to be a membership clerk at Costco; same crickets
I even considered going back into law enforcement—a life I’d left behind years ago, and one I never expected to be desperate enough to revisit
When none of it panned out, I decided to stop putting my fate in the hands of others and start doing the things within my control.
I was going to earn money without working for someone else. This wasn’t such a stretch. My wife and I had been running a successful farmer’s market business—part of what I’ve come to think of as the handshake economy, where you look your customer in the eye and they hand you cash—selling double entendre, sexual innuendo candles. Things like Blue Balls (blueberry cheesecake), Whiskey Dick (Kentucky bourbon), Whips and Chains (sandalwood and suede), and Down to Pound (lemon pound cake).
The candle business was profitable, but it never crushed it. It made a few hundred dollars a week. A great hobby business when I was employed; not so great when I needed to replace a comfy six-figure knowledge worker salary.
I needed something bigger. So I started hunting for business ideas on Facebook Marketplace. I considered:
Car detailing
A food truck
Window washing
Horse arena dragging
Vending and ATM machines
And a host of other stuff.
But we kept coming back to the same thing. While we were selling candles at farmer’s markets, we would watch the food vendors make thousands of dollars while we made hundreds.
It raised the obvious question: could we start a food business and do the same?
So we went all in (I wouldn’t recommend doing this). We took our life savings and my retirement, bought equipment, and started selling hot, fresh, made-to-order mini donuts.
And with that move, we took the power back. We were no longer asking for a job; we gave ourselves one.
Once the decision was made, we jumped in headfirst. First farmer’s markets, then high school athletic events, and now collegiate events. As we sold more, awareness grew, and we got invited to more places.
Growing our business came down to three simple things:
Location, location, location. We found the places with the most customers ready to buy. That meant farmer’s markets, fairs, festivals, and pop-ups, and later evolved into sporting events.
Raise the ticket value. We learned quickly that the goal was to increase the amount sold in every transaction. So we spun up branded lemonade and kettle corn, giving us additional revenue streams.
More conversions, more profit. We worked to convert more passers-by into paying customers, and developed a tried-and-true free sample method that converts more than 25% of the time.
We also learned some business killers: paying too much in rent or fees, doing events with no traffic, and spreading yourself too thin.
Owning your own business means you control these things. The exhilarating (and scary) part is that the choices are ours—along with the rewards and consequences of those choices. The upside was unlimited. So was the downside. I was equally free to succeed wildly or fail spectacularly, and some weeks I did both.
With all of this, I started thinking about legacy differently. In my corporate job, I was a nameless, faceless cog who could be replaced in a minute and forgotten a second after that. Nobody will remember what I did for Panasonic, or Twitter, or Twilio. My reputation lived on someone else’s platform, subject to someone else’s algorithm. But in the handshake economy, my legacy is the neighborhood knowing my face. Customers seek us out week after week. Kids smile, and point, and enjoy the experience we deliver.
And a business built on handshakes can’t be deleted by an algorithm change, because it never depended on the algorithm in the first place.
The reality we had to face was that a single donut business wasn’t going to replace a tech salary at the speed we needed it to. The pressure I put on the business early on really hurt it (and me). We’re still climbing that hill. But we see a path to growth. A path to long-term viability and profitability. And most importantly, a path to a legacy that will be remembered—one I can pass on to my kids.
To say the layoff was a gift is cliché. It wasn’t. The layoff was corporate greed at its finest, with those at the bottom left paying the check while the executives at the top just keep getting more.
The corporate job gave me a salary, a title, and the promise of a future that could be snatched away from me whenever the numbers stopped adding up. The handshake economy gave me something I own.
So no — the layoff wasn’t a gift. But it did give me something.
A legacy that actually belongs to me.