Guerrilla Marketing for a Bulletproof Career: How to Attract Ongoing Opportunities in Perpetually Gut-Wrenching Times, for Entrepreneurs, Employees, and Everyone in Between

By Jay Conrad Levinson and Andrew Neitlich

“A powerfully insightful training manual to successfully navigate the 21st-century career battlefield.” —Scott Durchslag, former CEO, Angie’s List
 
Guerrilla Marketing for a Bulletproof Career is an honest, practical, and hard-hitting guide for career success in perpetually uncertain times. It provides a road map to advance your career and prosper without being blindsided by overnight industry collapses, potential layoffs, economic shocks, corporate scandals, international competition, or technological disruptions. 
 
Gain an entirely new perspective on what it means to be combat ready in this economy, including how to achieve your career goals in creative ways while making more money and spending less time working. You will discover the secrets to getting into the opportunity flow so that the best opportunities come to you first, before others find out about them. This is the only book that marries the timeless philosophy of Guerrilla Marketing—being resourceful, doing more with less, thinking like an entrepreneur, and developing street smarts—with the chaotic realities of today’s career landscape. Get started today and never worry about gut-wrenching economic times again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781600379628

Jay Conrad Levinson

Jay Conrad Levinson is the author of more than a dozen books in the Guerrilla Marketing series. A former vice president and creative director at J. Walter Thompson Advertising and Leo Burnett Advertising, he is the chairman of Guerrilla Marketing International, a consulting firm serving large and small businesses worldwide.

Book preview

PART I:

GET

COMBAT-READY

CHAPTER 1

YOUR CHAOTIC CAREER MAP:

Stop Being Attached to the Concept of a Job

If you came of age in the 1950s, you could expect to spend your whole career in a single company and retire with a solvent pension. If you started out in the 1980s or ’90s, you may have already switched jobs an average of five times—and people used to call that a wild ride. In today’s perpetually gut-wrenching climate, expect to face even more turbulence. Going forward, your career will not only include many different jobs, but also many different forms, often over short periods of time.

Odds are good that you will not only be employed, but also self-employed, part-time, interim and, whether by choice or by circumstance, unemployed. You might change industries or functions a few times, and could work overseas for a while. The good news is that almost anything can happen and you have more options than ever before. The bad news is that nothing is guaranteed, and you can expect a few curve balls and perhaps bean balls along the way.

In fact, it will be best if you forget about the concept of having a job at all. Despite a seemingly steady paycheck and perhaps a benefits package as part of your compensation, working for an employer can be riskier than working for yourself. First, when you are self-employed, you typically have multiple clients or customers. If you lose one, you still have income coming in from other sources. As an employee, your employer is your only client. Lose your job and you lose your livelihood. Second, it takes an excruciatingly long time to find employment, thanks to the interview and recruiting process, background checks, and overall caution employers exercise before bringing someone on board. It often takes less time for a consultant to sell a consulting gig to a company than to get hired as an employee at the same company. Third, as an employee, you remain at the mercy of your boss, and perhaps his boss, and his boss’s boss, ad nauseam and are never 100 percent in control of your own destiny. Even if you do a good job, outside circumstances could eliminate your position or reduce your influence at any time.

There are very few reasons to stay loyal to an employer. The first reason is that the company provides you with a clear, explicit, believable path to get rich. For instance, you work at a major investment bank, your employment contract includes a golden parachute that pays you handsomely if you leave, you receive already-registered stock options in a publicly traded, growing company, and/or your career path has been proven to make others rich within five to seven years. The second reason is that the company gives you incredible ways to tap into your passion, learn, develop, and set yourself up for future opportunities while building relationships with talented, high-profile people who can help you throughout your career. If these things are not in place in your job, or you sense that they are slipping away, prepare to make a change.

Even if you love your job, you absolutely, positively need a backup plan in order to stay in control of your career. You need relationships and a documented track record to quickly find a new position, and you should be ready to earn income via forms other than full-time employment. The time to put this foundation in place is NOW, not when you get ambushed.

Most importantly, and to repeat what you read above: give up the idea that a formal, full-time job is the only acceptable way for you to make a living.

A full-time job is not necessarily the best way to earn an income, make a contribution to others, and achieve your dreams. True guerrillas understand this and are prepared to provide value to others through many different forms.

Instead, think about how you can best bring your unique gifts, talents, and contributions to others—regardless of the formal legal description of how you do your work. Change is so unpredictable and can come so quickly that you need to be ready to adapt at any time. You need to be able to flip the switch from employee to freelancer to sabbatical-taker, back to employee, to interim executive to entrepreneur to student to expatriate in an unfamiliar country to investor to retiree, back to employee, and so on. The most adaptable and agile people will experience the greatest career success with the fewest setbacks and be the least likely to feel like victims during tough times.

You probably know lots of people whose careers have meandered from one of the above forms to the other and then perhaps back again. You may be such a person, or will be soon. I definitely am. As I think about my own friends, colleagues, and family members, I can’t think of many who haven’t experienced somewhat chaotic and ever-morphing career paths. In some cases, they build on previous experiences and skills. In others, they start again from scratch. A very small sample includes:

• Fired from first job and then starts up a venture fund. After a college graduate got fired from his first job, he immediately moved to Hong Kong, despite having no background in or significant knowledge of Chinese culture. He learned Mandarin and worked for a telecommunications and cable company for a few years. Then he returned to the United States to get his MBA and now runs a successful venture fund focused on Asian business.

• An attorney born and raised in the United States moves to Australia to become a veterinarian. A frustrated lawyer from Florida relocated to Sydney, Australia, to study veterinary medicine. He chose Australia because entrance requirements were less stringent than in the United States. His wife, an emergency medicine physician, went with him. She got licensed to practice medicine in Australia and now works for the emergency room of a hospital in Sydney. The couple is thrilled to be living in Sydney and can’t see moving back to the United States anytime soon.

• Displaced executive in the family business becomes a mental health therapist. When an executive got kicked out of his family’s manufacturing business, he decided to get his PhD in mental health therapy. Now he runs a successful therapy practice while also teaching psychology at an online university and tutoring students online for extra income.

• Artist turns Internet entrepreneur. A former full-time artist worked as a wine sommelier in a four-star restaurant, started up a nanny placement agency, taught kids tae kwon do, and worked with kids in a nonprofit arts organization. After becoming a stay-at-home mom, she combined all of these experiences by launching an award-winning online product company offering parenting tools, etiquette curricula, and arts-and-crafts curricula for mothers and teachers. You will read more about her in a later