But each time I did it, I had to be pushed off of the cliff!
Probably the biggest vocational leap I ever made was leaving teaching during my 21st year. I didn't really plan it far ahead of time, but I did have a moment of epiphany in the principal's office, the culmination of a series of epiphanies in the last two years I taught. What it came down to, in many ways, was the system's lack of respect for my effort and my core values.
I did not march out triumphantly, though. I felt that decisions made by others were forcing me to leave, because I could no longer stay in teaching and be true to myself.
I spent the next eleven years in a traveling sales job that was not as fulfilling as teaching, but it was as stressful in very different ways. I was, simply put, a failure in that type of sales, in spite of (and because of) being a spectacular success in service. My customers were cash-strapped school districts who would almost always choose lower prices over service. I spent way too much time in desperately-needed service to my customers and way too little time in hard core sales and prospecting.
When I started in real estate, leap number two, it was not by choice. I simply could not find a job, and my brother suggested that my customer service skills would be useful in real estate. No school district would even interview someone with over 20 years' experience and a master's degree. They preferred to hire two beginning teachers or what I came to call "retired war horses," fading out former coaches or administrators. I had no real direction except to try and make real estate work. And work I did. I worked long hours establishing my place in a niche market, doing low pay, non glamorous work most other agents found demeaning.
When the real estate bubble burst, I was right there in that demeaning niche, the foreclosure market. I flourished while other agents went down with the market. And many agents used to high commissions and easy sales of near-perfect properties scrambled to try and get into the niche already filled by worker bee ME. Even when I started my own agency, it wasn't really by choice. The office where I had my license closed and was being merged with another office. I had another moment of epiphany when agents from the two buildings were called together for a meeting.
In that meeting, the Big City accountant proudly reeled off the strengths of the merged offices. One of those strengths involved my book of business, but he didn't mention my name or even look at me, instead saying, "We own (insert major foreclosure client name) in this town."
"We? We, who?" shrieked through my brain. My head nearly exploded. Where was the company when I did hundreds of property evaluations, some of them for free, while establishing my reputation with the banks? Where was the company when I was fronting borrowed money for lawn mowing, trashouts, rekeys, utility bills, and even cash incentives to get tenants to move out of those foreclosed properties? Where was the company when I posted properties and conducted evictions with the sheriff?
I had single-handedly nurtured those foreclosure accounts and built that business, and I didn't even rate a nod? For the last two years I had brought in more company revenue than anyone else in my building, and I didn't even rate a glance? What did HE plan to do with MY business? In real estate, you see, the company owns all of the listings, not the agent.
In that moment I knew that I had to start my own company in order to keep control of the business I had built. So I did, but it was not a leap of faith that I had taken on my own. Once again, I felt like I had been pushed off of yet another cliff--first off of the teaching cliff, then off of the traveling sales representative cliff, and now off of the somebody-else-is-the-broker cliff. Once again, I could no longer stay.
I haven't taken these jumps by myself, of course. My family has been there. My husband was supportive when I left teaching and when I took that ill-fated sales job and then lost that job, leaving me unemployed and unemployable for the first time since I was 12 years old. At that point, I was truly "over qualified" for every job. Going into real estate was not my first choice, and it forced me to recreate myself. Doing work that already-successful agents would not do allowed me to find a niche. Protecting that niche forced me to start a company with the help of my daughter and husband.
It was my daughter who jolted me out of self pity one night as I was sobbing, "I'm too old to start over." She had been my assistant for two years when the closing-this-building announcement was made. Hands on hips, she stood in front of my desk, after giving me a few minutes to cry and rant. "Something you said really bothered me," she announced. "You said you are too old to start over. If that's really how you feel, how do you think you are going to feel two years from now? It seems to me that it's time you get started!"
Now the market is improving, and my business is changing. I have a healthy mix of private listings and foreclosure listings. I won't forget where I came from, though. As others abandon the foreclosure niche for the more lucrative traditional market and blueblood reputations, I will keep the mix. My bank customers were faithful to me, and I will be faithful to them. After all, the experience I have was hard-earned; and I really am getting to old to cliff dive.
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