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What options do you have????
In 1996, I learned a valuable lesson. No matter how big I grew the company that I worked for -- I was not the owner. Sounds simple enough right? But, I was raised like most kids -- told to work hard, keep my nose to the grindstone (whatever that was!) and get a good job with a stable company.
Well, as it turned out, doing a good job was simply not enough for me to overcome some personal differences with my boss. While I tried to figure out why I pinned all the hopes of my family on one steam of income, my boss asked me to consider doing something else, somewhere else. He outranked me, and I moved on.
I was stunned. In four years I'd grown that division from around 30 employees and a $2 million budget to a firm with more than 260 employees and nearly $15 million of budgeted revenue. Yet it didn't matter.
When my boss asked me to leave that company, I jumped at the chance to take a job at a major teaching hospital. My thinking was that this hospital, one of the 100 largest in America, HAD to be the most stable thing I could do with my career. But with three kids, a mortgage and car payment, I was found out what hundred of thousands of former employees learned the hard way -- there are no "sure things" when it comes to a job.
Eventually I decided to start a new life of challenge and possibility, doing the things I loved. But that decision also scared me to death. It was the beginning of establishing what would become the Private Practice Model of business development.
I've come to learn that the word SALARY comes from the Latin "salarium," which is the wage a salt miner (read slave) was paid in Roman times. The new businesses we've developed since the end of my salaried job have enabled my family and I to travel to places we never thought we would see in this lifetime, enjoy a lifestyle that while occasionally bumpy, is so much more stable than that of my relatives and friends who work for "large, safe companies." Today, we teach people how to develop their own PrivatePracticeModels so that they too, can enjoy a more stable, brighter future.
Terence Blackwell
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