As I mentioned in my last blog recapping the Year of 2023, my wife and I have been happily married for 18 years now, we have five wonderful furry babies, and been together for nearly 25 years; so, it’s safe to say that we are content with the direction of our lives.

In this new year of 2024 there is a lot of interesting, if not very significant, life and professional events that I want to share, ‘for the record’. Some of these things you won’t believe. These are real back-room stories which some are from my experience in the ECM market, and other stories from my personal life, that I want to share to set the record straight.

As everyone that knows me personally, I’m an extremely humble person, and while I’m not interested in petty-politics and water-cooler talk, it’s come to my attention, and I’ve verified, that certain individuals had no problems with lying to make themselves try and look better by lying about me. So, it’s simply a matter of setting the record straight.

This might sound like also like something petty to set the record straight, but it’s very important as I move forward in my life, that people have absolute trust in my words and my actions. I’m working on the next phase of philanthropy in my life basically. So, people that tried to hurt me, when I’m trying to genuinely help others, need to re-evaluate their duties of being decent people and quit.

I will, or have already confronted these individuals, as a learning moment for them, and, surprisingly enough, most of them have admitted their indiscretions and said they’ve improved their lives to quit gossip. I have my doubts, but I trust them in their words, yet again, but they will never be trusted or endorsed by me ever again. Burn me once – shame on me, burn me twice – shame on you.

2024 – The Year of Layoffs and Trusting Friends

I share this wisdom of experience for trusting friendships, both professionally and professionally, to make a serious point and prediction.

Most people are living paycheck-to-paycheck (which means most likely you – the reader of this blog article is one of those people). It’s nothing to be shameful of but my advice is do yourself a favor and control your own destiny by having some sort of side-gig.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t pay full attention or not give your fullest to your employer, because is they pay you, then you have a moral obligation to give them your fullest, however, in your spare time, you owe it to yourself to do something to control your own destiny.

While I try and be an optimist on most things, I’m also a realist, and as far as the labor market is concerned, I think there will be many more layoffs before hiring begins again. In the past few weeks to start 2024, I’ve already seen a few of my extremely talented friends get laid-off from their companies. Most likely not from lack of performance, but it’s just something companies do in times of uncertainty, such as the US elections in November 2024, to conserve cash flow.

Leaving Law Cypress Company – A real world Trusting Friends example

As one real story to set the record straight I will briefly explain my leaving Law Cypress Company (LCC) in 1993.

I started at LCC in 1989 as a warehouse worker driving a forklift and packing boxes for a wonderful manager, Jack Brooks, who had a big heart on the inside, yet pretended to be a bad person on the outside. Jack was my manager in the early days of my professional life but later he was a true friend and like a second father to me.

From a pure managerial perspective, he was awesome because when I was offered a promotion from my warehouse position to a sales position, Jack was not jealous nor hurt, and he genuinely was happy for me to get this promotion. I’ll never, ever, forget how tense the negotiation was between Jack and Jeff Zontos. In retrospection, it was one of the best learning experiences for me ever and I thank Jeff for his amazing trust.

What’s important as far as my telling this quick story of Jack Brooks is that even after I moved into the Sales Department of LCC, he really cared for my career and he gave me probably the most important tip ever, in my life! Seriously.

Jack tipped me off that one of the sleazy new LCC middle-managers was about to fire me despite our territory smashing revenue numbers, going from #3 to #1 sales territory and over-accomplishing on many other metrics. The fact of the matter was that I was not an “insider” with the cool group, and I preferred hard work and judge me by my performance sort of attitude instead of his petty personal management.

In the end everything worked out great from myself as well as LCC. The sleazy middle-management was eventually ridden, and I came back to the Company in 1999 until the closing in 2001.

Controlling Your Own Destiny

In conclusion and in summary for this blog article, I want to encourage everyone to Control Your Own Destiny in life and business. In life, I won’t even to venture to go there because I don’t know. However, in your professional business life, you have much more control than you likely know.

The first thing you MUST do is to have some sort of side-gig whether it’s a professional hobby, furthering your business education or continuing to network with other professionals; you simply must do this. No other choice.