Losing My Job During The Recession and Starting a Small Business

by Ryan

working from home

Hi, my name is Ryan, and i am an IT professional with 17 years of work experience. I lost my job way back in Dec 2009 due to recession in the industry.

Due to harsh recessionary measures, getting a job was difficult due to many factors i.e., personal and professional factors that would not match up to changing hiring requirements. Saddled with many bills to pay and a greater need to generate revenue to run my home, i could not afford to brood and live in fear.

I decided to embark on a work from home opportunity- do what? I made a checklist of skills and resources that i had with me. I was clear about doing the business on a zero budget as i was not going to dip into my dwindling cashflow.

I scanned through papers and the internet for part time jobs, MLM jobs, but they wouldn’t work. I asked friends for online freelance jobs and i explored the internet. Finally i came across a few reputed online freelance sites viz.,oDesk and Limeexchange. I registered as a freelancer and learnt the bidding process. I began to bid to bid for Manual testing jobs and other Admin jobs.

It was not easy because the competition is high considering the fact that there are individuals from other nations too! I managed to bag 2 long term projects in Software Testing.

Now that i got them, i placed an online advertisement for testing professionals who had their own laptops, and would be willing to work out of my home. The response was quite good and within 3 days i was up and running my show. It was not easy though because it is important to ensure that the guys come in to work every day and complete the number of hours for which i get paid for.

We persevered and we got paid for the projects and today we can afford office space. And yes...the guys never left me...we are together...believing in a vision to lead us ahead.

I would advise a self-starter to remain as frugal as possible. Stay focussed and believe in your skills or rather keep perfecting them till they are ready to be deployed. Even after tasting success, it is yet important to remain as spartan as possible but share the fruits of success with fellow-beings. So don’t let the reality of losing a much job deter you, get back up dust yourself off and get going again.