How to Turn Your Layoff Into a Massive Opportunity

0:00Hello, welcome to today's episode of Black Belt Startup. Thank you for tuning in. What's new in the world of entrepreneurship? Layoffs. Have you been laid off? Or are you seeing signals and the hearing whispers that could be asked? I know the feeling. It's gut wrenching. And I speak from experience back in 2003, I was laid off. I was at VP at a cutting edge cell called the belly start up. We were building this amazing infrastructure software for both OIP and we raised, we raised, 96 million dollars. But sales and revenue did not materialize fast enough. And then I still remember to this day, I remember that a dreaded Thursday afternoon wearing the CO to walk into my office and closed the door and asked if I had a few minutes.

1:00And then since it's fair, tomorrow we have a layoff. And you're impacted. It was one of the most difficult days in my professional career. But what have I told you? This was also the best thing that has ever happened to me. And a layoff could also be the best thing that could happen for your own career. Now, in this episode, I'll show you, I want to share that yes, you're going to a tough moment. I get it. I've been there. But I want you and I want to walk you through things you can do to turn this very tough, very difficult moment into a launch pad for starting your own consulting or professional services business. And even if you're not thinking of starting a business now and you're looking for another job, I still think you can benefit from being aware of what's out there for you to start your own business. And if we're giving you some options to think about as you are submitting resumes

2:04and as you're looking for your next career move. All right. So before we dive in, a couple of housekeeping items. One is that if you're watching or listening in live or maybe tuning in later, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a comment, send me an email. I want to hear about the big wins. I want to hear about your struggles. If you have any questions related to business, email them our way, comment, direct message me, whatever platform that works for you, I'd love to hear from you because I think that input. And we turned that into articles on our website, videos on our YouTube channel. And we answer these questions in these episodes as well. And remember that for those of you who are watching live, it's on Thursdays at 6 p.m. Eastern, sorry, 6 p.m. Eastern 3 p.m. Pacific. And then for those of you who are listening to this recording later, make sure you sign up and make sure you also,

3:05if you're lucky, this content, we'd appreciate a like at a 5 star review. So that's enough on the house, KPI. I did not let's jump into, get back into it. So it comes to layoffs. And whether it's you're impacted or you're hearing about, you're hearing a whisper in the office, there's an emotional impact to this. There's a psychological impact to that. And it is something we have to acknowledge these difficult live events, you know, we go through these films that are in a physical way off, that feel on the unknown, that the feel of the unknown, the uncertainty, and use certain routine. I get up in the morning, I get work, paycheck, benefits, 401k, all that stuff. So there's a whole lot of uncertainty. That loss of, in a way, identity or that questioning

4:09one's self-worth, why it means why now? What did I do wrong? Am I worth it? Yeah, that's not adequacy. So these feelings are there, they're real. I remember in my own experience, when the CEO went to my office and talked to me, when he mentioned that I was impacted, I felt the earth shattering under my feet, my stomach dropped. I felt like the blood was coming out of my veins. It was all these emotions, like all these thoughts go into my mind. I had a family, young family, three children at the time. So again, I understand. It's really, really difficult. And I think it is OK to go through emotion in these feelings. It's OK to mourn and to the event and go through,

5:09talk to the people in your life partner, or maybe you would give course friends. But I really, I don't want you to be stuck down here. I don't want you to be staying that place, because it won't serve you well. And this is not the end. I know this might sound harsh, maybe, but if someone is laid off, this is, they're not the first one, nor the last one, who has been laid off. As a matter of fact, 40% of Americans have been laid off, or terminally. So it is important to think of it as an experience, a difficult experience, a challenging experience, something that I've seen hit hard, hit some people really hard, and to the extent that they could hardly recover from it. And I know it's easier said than done. But I've been there, and I can relate. And my goal here at Start Up With The Hairs

6:11is to help people do better. It's to help you learn from my mistakes, is to help you learn from the mistakes of the founders, and those who are going through tough times in business. And I want you to acknowledge again, these emotions, acknowledge that it's difficult, but also, I want you to stay in that space, in that place for a long time. I wanted to think about the things you can do. The layoffs happen. You didn't have a lot of control over it. It's about what we do. It's about the next step, the next move, is what it's all about. So before I get into specific actions, one can take to recover and pivot. I want to talk about why layoffs happen. And I covered this in a post last year, and I got a lot of traction, and still valid. I think there are two main reasons why layoffs happen. The number of reasons why layoffs happen, and why layoffs happen, and there are some different

7:14tops of them. But you hear COS and we're about to get into an intense year. You hear things restructuring. We have to optimize our operations. All of these are keywords, things to be aware of. These are potentially signals that layoffs are around the corner. So this is not just only in tech. You see some economic trends. You see automation. You see AI disruptions. Whenever there is business consolidation, you see mergers and acquisitions, and many other factors. So that is something that has happened. We had big waves of layoffs a couple of years ago. So let's slow down. And now we're seeing this. Again, I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. It might not be the waves of layoffs might not be as drastic as maybe

8:15significant in terms of the sheer volume as what we saw a couple of years ago, but they are still happening. So as of why these things happen, it looked like we had a technical glitch here. So let me just make sure we got where we, oh, I can't tell where we stopped, but I think streaming was stopped for a minute. So let me just double check on where I'm going to just recap here that I was discussing earlier. Sorry about this. Technical glitches do happen even in salt on valley. But what I was summarizing earlier is that due to a number of economic trends, you'll see we have seen layoffs in 2024.

9:19We've seen announcements about layoffs in 2025. And it's only been a couple of years until the beginning of year. And you see also the trends around automation about AI disruptions, also business consolidations and emerging oppositions. So all of those economic trends contribute to companies doing these layoffs. And there are two types. There's the, I would say the restructuring type where a company decides not to invest in a product and a service line or a company decides that they don't want to work in another market anymore. They want to significantly reduce their presence and a specific market. And they would have a sort of a top down, okay, we are cutting off this entire business unit or this service line. So that's one fact. The second part, and this is the harder one to speak about, it is the performance based layoff. So it's a company to use it very often.

10:24This time, this layoff has an opportunity to shut off the bottom, 5% 10% up to 20%. I was in a company way back then in my Florida days where 60% of the company was laid off. I was spared at the time. It's fortunate. So when it comes to this scenario, it's performance based. It's very difficult to talk about, especially if you were part of that group that was like, go, and it was mentioned, that was, it was to do the performance. I do want you, I know it's personal, I know it's difficult, but I want you to also, at the end of the day, think of it as, as this was a business decision by the company, not a personal failure. And I wanted to assess your own experience and assess it objectively. So if you got the hint, sometimes you don't, because companies don't want to get into legal trouble, they don't leave a lot of details.

11:25But if you think it was due to the performance issue, this is the time to think of it as an opportunity for growth. I mean, was it due to maybe apathy? People typically get this engaged from work, or this engaged from work for many reasons. Maybe there's a toxic environment, difficult colleagues, poor leadership, a lot of backdoor politics. This can drain people's motivation to do good work. It could be bureaucracy, endless committees, and layers of approval, and a whole lot of retake. That also can make even simple tasks feel impossible. Also, to be boredom, you've sort of outgrown your position. There are no opportunities to maybe move on.

12:29So they're all going to be become monotamous. You've simply just outgrown your current responsibilities, and you've hit a ceiling. So all of these toxic environment, bureaucracy, more than also maybe defused focus. You're busy during your nights, and we can work on a side hustle, and that's exciting you more than your day job, and then focus on one of them would be better before you burn both. So assess, I think it's hard. It's hard to do when after we hit with a layout, but if you want to pivot, you want to recover, you want to move on beyond this difficult situation, you have to assess what led to this event. Again, I talked about sometimes these things happen to top performers, sometimes they happen, and they are performance-based. And you know, another thing, again, these are hard things for me to say,

13:33but if someone hasn't been performing, and they have been given the opportunity, the opportunity, and the coaching, and the support, but they're still not focused on their career, not pulling their weight, companies, and leaders have fiscal responsibilities, and they have to do what's left for the business. So again, it could have been me. I was very close to getting laid off way back then, early on in my career, and that was a wake-up call to now work beyond the night to five, and learn, and advance, and raise my hand to take on initiative. So do your own assessment. Look at your last performance review. Ask a close friend, ask your life partners, ask your spouses, ask them to give you honest feedback, and take it in its heart, it's hard to take in harsh or difficult feedback, but take it. And if you feel stuck, if you feel stuck, take all these signs,

14:38and learn from that past experience that is now behind us, before it's too late, which brings me to the other point I want to talk about, and it is on starting your business, especially a services business, a consulting business, after LAR. So give to the mindset and the assessment, mindset assessment, taking on initiatives, that applies to any business, but if you want to start a services business, especially if you work in tech and B2B, you don't have to be developing a product, to be a business owner, to be an entrepreneur. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley, and raise funds, and raise millions of dollars from DCs to be an entrepreneur. 70% of the US economy is driven by professional services, consulting services and consulting. So you can start your own business,

15:40even if you have a technical background, you can provide training, you can provide strategy, you can provide hands-on implementation, you can do a whole lot of things, even if you come from a technical background. You don't have to be developing technical products, or household products, or any type of product. You can start your own business, and the reason why that's what we focus a lot on, and our content here at the start of this service, but also it's much easier to start a services business from a financial perspective than a product business. We had, we did a live stream, an episode on comparing product and business service businesses, and that's how interest we can run, you can attend your life, you can add the link in the description. But in terms of the benefits of starting a business, a consulting business after a difficult period is number of things. One is, when you are your own boss,

16:41you have the freedom to do your own work. You can focus on the skill that you've acquired, you've accumulated over the last five, ten years, ten plus years, and turn those skills into an offer. I talked about lower startup costs, and also, it's difficult these days to make a living. It's difficult for especially the younger generation to save money and put it down, take it on a house. So if you're ready to take some risk, some calculated risk, and if you are ready to put some time and effort and energy, and put a season of your life to build something that is going to turn into a strong business, a sustainable business, then you have a potential, there's the potential upside and the potential path to financial freedom.

17:43So all of these are, in my mind, great reasons why you can, unless you're sure, you can, you have the option to start a business after a layoff. And the one thing that you have, the one thing that you have on your site, when, if you have a layoff, you can lay it off, is that you have time. So prior to the layoff, if you were, maybe doing some side hustle, you know, you have a few hours at night, you have some time on the weekend. But now you have the entire day, you have the entire, you know, the whole weekend, you don't have a job, so you have the time. So you can, you can use that time to vet your idea, you can use that time to grow up to the market place and see who else is offering what you have in mind and see learn about the competitors. And I'll show you how to template free here. I'll show you the second, but there's a lot of things you can do in that time. And even if you're still undecided about starting your own business,

18:47that the advice I give to these one to the entrepreneurs is, you can dedicate three to four hours a day to look for a job and then dedicate maybe four to six hours a day to vet and idea, come up with an idea to match your skills with a need in the marketplace. So, so these are all good reasons on why you can. Why in my mind, if you're, if you want to do something that's been on your mind for all these years and you want to have a potential path to finance or feed them, there's no reason why you don't leverage this time of being without a job to turn that into, again, the launch pad for your next business. And for those of you with us here, if you have a question, you have a comment. You also love to hear from you about your own experience and how you've managed this, this period when you hear whispers that they'll be layoffs or that they're announcements by the CEO that they're layoffs and, and you're not sure if you'll be impacted or not.

19:50Or if you've gone through a layoff and, and you've managed to, it's you struggle with it. I'd love to hear from you. Also, if you manage to turn it into something very positive, whether finding a job in a different sector or maybe different goal, and maybe you need that time to hold, hold your skills and then pivot into something different. I just love to hear from you on new experience. And maybe some of the things you're hearing from others in your network and how they're dealing with this with the layoffs and life post layoffs. So that was on why consider, consider starting a business. Now in terms of what you want to do next, and these are things I wanted to think about right away. As soon as you think you'll be impacted by by layoff or if, if you already, already hit by layoff, is I want you to build a financial one-way. Now, depending on our financial situation,

20:50on how disciplined we were before the layoff, you can cut expenses. I mean, some of us might be doing having to do two jobs to survive. I hear you. I was watching this just for a long time. Going to school for a while, with a family and watching this, I hear you. But in the event that you have expenses to say, you have expenses to cut, this is the time to do so. Cut your expenses anywhere from 20 to 50%. If you're doing maybe that, the membership, maybe that trip that you're planning, maybe all those subscriptions that I have, maybe the nice car I was about to buy. So see how you can cut your expenses by anywhere from 20 to 50%. And then I want you to build a one-way, a financial one-way. For those of you who are watching,

21:52I have a one-way, the financial one-way that I want you to build. This way you have some peace of mind when you're looking to launch your new business. So let me share this on my screen here. For those of you who are watching and for those who are not, we will leave the link in that description so you can, in the show note, this way you can see it later. So here, in one second, to be coming up, here we go. One second, sorry for that. All right. So you see in this financial one-way,

22:53it's a bit of a calculator and a runway. Basically, in the first tab, I want to do the list, all your expenses. And this is all editable. You can have this link, make your own copy, and then you can edit. So I have some sample data about all the personal expenses, food, childcare, medical, housing, transportation, common expenses, that will give you the total. Then I have what I called here individualized expenses. So if you have a loan, elderly care, for maybe your aging parents, any hobbies, decorations, travel vacations, gift donations, maybe you're putting money into your savings account. So also add all those expenses that are already specific to you. So at the end of this, you'll come up with the annual personal expenses. And then you have about that. Well, you get the monthly. In this case, I can add some sample data. Let's say it's about $4200.

23:53Okay? So that is the, what it's costing you today to live the life you're living. If you can cut this down by, I don't know, by 30%, maybe by 50%, no hobbies for a few months, that's okay. Maybe we can delay that vacation as I said earlier, that trip. So to the extent that you can save money, I want to do that. And then you take that number, and again, I won't go into a lot of details here, but the idea here is that you come up with, right? With this plan that, that this is what it costs me to live and survive. And then I will have, in this, what you see on the screen, I have six months where I can survive without having to maybe do additional cuts or tap into my 401k.

24:54So in someone's case, it might be a two month one way, and someone else's case, it might be a six month one way. But you have, I think once you have that defined, it will be some piece of mind that I can, I'm surviving, my financial situation is in order, and now I'm going to focus on this idea that I want to start. So that is on the financial runway. And if you have any questions about it, let me know, but we'll leave a link in the description. The next thing is then, of course, if you have, depending on the state you're in, look for, and for the benefits, hopefully the company that has laid you off, or about you, they have a reasonable, several package. So add all of that up into, what will give you that piece of mind of having a financial runway. So that's number one. Number two, packaging your skills.

25:56So if you haven't had, if you haven't started a business before, you don't know what's involved, you don't know what to do. At the end of it, there is the essence of, sorry, business, the essence of starting a consulting business and services business is that you have some skills that are addressing the needs of a segment of the population. Someone who has a small business that may help with IT, they want to install their software and the computers, they want to get, they don't want to be hacked, you're an IT consultant. You know how to do this. You have experience in elderly care. You want to start an elderly care facility, one of the most growing sectors. Let's say you are a coach, you want to start offering workshops, you want to offer training services. So all of those skills that you have,

26:58whatever those are, you want to go skills together and document that. And then I want you to use the 10 plus five rule, one of our, one of our start-up affairs rules templates. And first talk to 10 people who are likely to buy that service or they buy similar services to what you're thinking of offering and then also list five competitors. And we have a three-simple spreadsheet here. I'll show it here on the screen. For those of you who are watching with us, basically you go here, the first step, talk to them people. I want to list those 10 people. It's homework, you got to do it. List the association. Do they have? Do they are using a current supplier of the service that you're offering? Ask them how they hired this person, what made them hire this consultant or the service provider. Is there something missing that this other supplier is not offering? To the extent that you can find out about

28:00how your potential private audience, how they're buying that service that you're all planning on offering and also what issues they have with the current service providers. Because maybe the service providers are too expensive, maybe they're too slow in delivering services, maybe the quality is not there and you can pick anyone of these and differentiate you offer based on maybe better responsiveness, higher quality, less expensive, and then you'll send out and get business. So that's number one. The number one thing you've been talking to your skills is to talk to people, 10 people, that's your homework. And then the second thing is research, five competitors. Five competitors, local, regional, doesn't matter depending on the service you are planning on offering and talk to them if you can at industry events, you can check out their website, their reviews online, whatever you can, whatever information that you can get about these competitors is going to be gold because then you want to differentiate.

29:00You want to do those better than these competitors. So again, we'll make this the sheet available, both the financial runaway sheet as well as the 10 plus five companies. So make use of it. And as you go through this process and I don't want you to take months to do this within a week, I want you to be thinking, documenting your skills, researching the competition, talking to them people who are likely to buy the service and that's, this is the work healthy, that whole process will help you create a compelling offer. And again, if you struggle with some of these ideas, you're very new to business. You haven't started your own business. You can check out our site blackbeltstartup.com and we have a free course. You can finish it in one hour about starting a business. So a lot of the people who reach out, laid off or otherwise,

30:00they're amazing technical experts. In whichever area that is technical as in IP consulting, as in programmer, also as in the code as someone who is in account and they're on account company. So if you have some subject matter expertise, that's the core, that's the essence of what you offer. You have to do some market research, as I discussed earlier, and then you are ready to create that compelling offer to go out and build that business along that offer. Now, the third step here is to finding, is about finding your first client. And for those of us who don't have any sales background, and to be exact, it's about 70% of all new business owners who started business, they have that technical skill, but they don't have background in marketing and sales. And I'm here to tell you, that's me 21 years ago

31:02when I was laid off. I have zero sales experience. So sales, marketing, building a business, all of these are muscles you can build. And when it comes to getting that first client, we're not looking for perfection, we're not looking for the most amazing logo we can get. Initially, we want to be out there, telling the world about that we started a business, and that he is what we are, he is what we're offering, and he is why people should buy from us, because we're amazing people who have these skill sets, and we can offer these services cheaper, higher quality, and faster, again, whatever your differentiator is. So there's a whole lot of process to sell, of course, and we have a lot of content on our YouTube channel, and also on our website, you can go to startupacairs.com, slash sales tools to learn how to pitch.

32:04Most people who haven't done sales before, they don't know how to pitch. What is a sales pitch? What is it? How do I tell strangers that I won their money? So there's a process to do this. So it is intimidating for most of us. It is overwhelming, but just think, I talk to anywhere from 100 to 150 entrepreneurs every year, and a lot of them come to me with no sales background. I do talk to some more established entrepreneurs, people who want to grow scale, those eight figures, they want to sell their businesses, that's different, but for the early stage entrepreneur, someone who's thinking to start a business, someone who has started and is struggling, all these difficult things that you have to do as a business owner, click up then, and the first time you wrote the buy. The first time you were thrown in the water, you got in the water to swim. The first time you drove a vehicle.

33:09Just think about those times, they were very differently, probably driving like this, they're very tense, and if someone was talking in the back seat, you were screaming at them, and they actually turn on the volume, or turn up the volume, turn down the volume, or turn the radio on, you'd scream at them, because you're so tense and so focused, just on what's ahead and the same thing in business. There is no magic formula, there is no overnight success. It's building these reps about marketing, being out there, leveraging your network, each one of us who has worked in corporate, has been working for a little bit of time. We have a network, and we have people who are there to help us, because a lot of people help us. Those of us who have, say, made it, you know that no one made it alone, a lot of help, we all got a whole lot of help along the way, and many of us have been there, already there, already to help others. So you don't have to initially see the help of a paid consultant.

34:12There's a lot of people who come in there, check out our content on YouTube and also on our websites, but I want you to know that it's not that difficult to get that first client, and it will be, at least it was for me, one of the sweetest events or moments in my professional career, when after, when I got my first sale, the first day we went out to sell my partner line, my business partner line, we went to five restaurants, and I've mentioned this already before, and these people knew us, we go and eat their places, their local restaurants, all the time, and I went and asked Pope, I must have whatever courage I had to go and tell this business owner that, hey, we're here, we build websites for you, that was, that was cutting ads back in 2003. The first day we went out there to five restaurants, and we got five rejections, it was hard, it was difficult, we thought we were not gonna recover, but several weeks down the road,

35:13we ended up closing that first deal to the restaurant, and again, that was the sweetest, one of the sweetest moments in my professional career, because I had that explanation, the confirmation that you know, whatever I've been working hard on for the last 70 weeks, I can now sell. It sort of validates every effort, and every ounce of energy, all the time, and all the days, and all the nights, I put behind, you know, getting myself ready to start that business. So, it is difficult to sell, it is difficult to market initially, but you can take specific steps to learn how to network, to learn how to pitch, to learn how to listen to the needs of the potential target audience, and then go back, and then present to them, and share with them how you can be as valued to them. See, business is not charity, you're exchanging value, for money, you're asking them for money, but you're also helping them address their pain points,

36:14maybe reach their aspirations, whatever concerns they have, whatever, pass all they have, you are helping them overcome those challenges, and you as a consultant, as a service provider, in turn, getting paid for that amazing work that you've done. So, that is, you know, that's what's involved, in terms of turning this very difficult challenge, this difficult moment situation in our lives, when we are laid off, or maybe we are thinking that we would be laid off, we would be impacted, because of the risk version, because of many certain signs, but it is the time, if you have not been laid off, the best time to prepare for it, and prepare for lots of business, is when you're employed, because you have the benefits, you have the salary, the best time on the weekends, extra few hours a night, but this is the time to do it. And if you were impacted by a way off, then this is a time to, I think, do that one after one way, and then start, do an inventory of your skills, soft skills, hard skills,

37:16and then find an offer, go out, and talk to others about it, and then start going after getting that very first one. So it's not easy, but nothing worthwhile in life is easy. So I hope this is useful in terms of turning a very difficult situation, into something productive, because remember, you didn't choose the layout, it's not something that you wanted to do, but you can choose what happens next. So build a financial runway, package your skills, and then go out and find your first client. Good stuff. If you have any questions or comments, let me know. For those of you live, would love to hear your questions or comments, and for those of you listening later or watching later, I get feel free to address anytime on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, you name it on YouTube, but we're there. And I do wanna just share a couple of things on our Black Belt startup program. For those of you watching, we have, again, the free course, no obligation.

38:20It's one hour, 12 modules, we can finish in one hour, but all things to do with entrepreneurship, and then we also have our YouTube channel at startupacare.com, fairestog.ffr.fus. So let us know if you have any questions, and if not, we will see you next time. Thank you for tuning in. Bye-bye.