Make Your Own Job

By Wm. Hovey Smith

Entrepreneur Wm. Hovey Smith details how to make your own job by providing methods of selecting and developing money-making opportunities than can be done anytime, anywhere, at any age. The possibilities include step-by-step methods of raising this month's rent to establishing a life-time income for you and your family to a late-life business do

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Oct 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648952654

Wm. Hovey Smith

After publishing his first newspaper articles in High School, Wm. Hovey Smith, has written hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, more than 20 books, hosted a podcast radio show, and produced nearly 1,000 YouTube videos. As a Professional Geologist he worked and hunted over most of the United States as well as in Europe and Africa, and these diverse experiences are reflected in his works.

Book preview

Preface

As I walked into the head of the Research and Development’s team leader’s office to find out if I was going to lose my job, I felt much as I had when I was running to pull time fuses from beneath a crashed helicopter in forty below zero weather on the Copper River in Alaska. My heavy arctic gear was thickly encrusted with ice, and every step was more laborious than the one before. Either I would find and pull the second of two time fuses I had lit on our spread of explosives, or the helicopter crew or I would be blown one hundred feet into the air like the ice we were trying to loosen to prevent the loss of the Million Dollar Bridge across the river.

This series of layoffs had been in preparation for months. There had been an agonizing series of interviews and team meetings that, among my fellow employees, were generally termed screw your buddy meetings. The general method was to cut payroll in order to increase profits by reducing the amount of testing on our products. Layoff decisions were to be made regardless of longevity with the company or past performance. If one task once done by three people could now be altered so that it could now be accomplished by one person, the other two people had to go.

Such events had been happening in countless businesses across the world as companies were being downsized, merged, or bought out by competitors and closed. These days a replacement worker might not be located in the same country or even be human. The former social contract between employee and employer has now been abandoned, and workers need to protect themselves by having alternate job opportunities that they create themselves.

This book is the third of a series of titles based on the premise that the best way for workers to insure their futures is to make their own jobs. No one’s job is safe in this volatile business climate with tariffs or no tariffs, international trade agreements thrown away, Brexit or no Brexit, safety and environmental issues faced by major companies, factory automation, and widespread strikes. From the CEOs to the youngest employees, few are sleeping very well these days, and there are reasons to be concerned.

Particular attention is now being given to workers in their fifties who are drawing the highest salaries with the suspicion that they have already made their maximum contributions to the company. These workers can be replaced by less-expensive younger workers who are seen as easier to train on modern technology and are likely in closer contact with current markets. Cutting older workers will also save the internationally based corporations health insurance costs and cut or eliminate payouts for retirement benefits—Nothing personal, just business, they say.

Younger workers, no matter how skilled, are not safe either. They are now considered interchangeable work units to be added or eliminated as needed once their assigned tasks are accomplished or as soon as they can be replaced by automated systems or less-expensive foreign workers.

This brutal logic pays no attention to what workers might have done before, but only values what their projected contributions to the company’s return on investment might be at the moment. Shortsighted as this logic is, many laboring in this climate of human workforce reduction will be impacted, regardless of age, position, or former standing in the company.

Make Your Own Job: Anytime, Anyplace, at Any Age will help you discover which among several job opportunities are ideal for you and show in detail how to convert these ideas into profitable jobs. These are plans B, C, D, E, F etc. Ultimately, one of these may result in your starting your own business that can be scaled to meet your current and future needs. The results can be a few hundreds or thousands of dollars a month of extra income to your running a virtual business out of your home that generates continuous revenues in amounts that are only limited by your imagination.

This book examines the practicalities of making jobs to bring in immediate income and expands this concept into covering the steps needed to start a modern business. These include detailed instructions on how to write a business plan, find start-up money, learning from failure, making midcourse corrections, selecting partners, finding workers, expanding markets, thinking large, and protecting your assets through copyrights and patents.

While there are many books about each of the topics that I discuss, this is a comprehensive book designed to jump-start your entrepreneurial future. I pulled that second fuse in time, and I encourage you to light yours as soon as possible to first make your own job and perhaps start your own business. The best strategy is to consider these issues while you are still employed and test your alternatives. Your job-starting fuse can burn while you are still working for someone else with your entrepreneurial efforts being a hobby. Ultimately, you will discover work that you enjoy so much that you would do it even if no one paid you and find out how to make money at it.

Once you have advanced your hobby job to the point where it is generating significant income, you will have something to fall back on should your company job suddenly end with a locked gate and a Company Closed sign. This way when you are laid off, you can launch your new business with a blast rather than having to handle the dual traumas of being laid off and having to starting a new business from scratch when you can see only darkness and failure.

This is not a one-size-fits-all book. My approach is based on my experiences, and while I believe they are sound, there is no formula that will guarantee success. In each chapter there are steps to help you systematically work through the processes that are being considered. Just as you have a different set of skills, likes, responsibilities, and knowledge, your jobs and perhaps business will be an extension of yourself.

I want to help you discover what that optimum job is for you and how you can profit from it. This book is reflective of my longstanding observation that

There is nothing in human experience that cannot be turned into profit by an inventive mind.

In this book, I am going to help you discover the potentially profit-making experiences of your life and how to make jobs out of them that can add financial stability and happiness to your continuing life adventure.

Chapter

1

Modern Workplace Realities

A look at the whos, the wheres, the whys,

and the hows of business today.

Almost every day brings news about how once-thriving businesses are laying off tens of thousands of workers and why this trend will very likely increase in the future. Once common retail giants like Kmart, ToysRUs, and Sears are now ghosts of the past. Even giant manufacturing companies like General Electric, General Motors, and Boeing are facing uncertain futures. The nation’s mines are closing or restricting production based on low metal prices and the move away from coal as fuel for the nation’s power plants. The domestic financial services industry is also under attack from less-expensive trading platforms based offshore.

Changes in buying habits that are convenient for the shopper have resulted in more online sales, stores serving as little more than pick-up points for electronically ordered goods that are increasingly delivered to homes. In some stores, the aisles only serve as display platforms so potential customers can view the items that they will purchase for at-home delivery. Whereas a conventional store might have twenty employees, their modern equivalent will have only two. You can even buy an automobile from a vending machine, should you not want to hassle with an overly aggressive salesperson.

Coming trends include driverless trucks on the nation’s freeways and emission-free electric vehicles that will cause transmission assembly plants to be closed. Fewer net jobs will remain from the closing because the potential alternative positions will be a few supervisors at the very largely automated battery manufacturers and vehicle assembly plants. The automated assembly lines once seen in Star Wars movies are now real factors in modern manufacturing. In many industries, the night security staff will outnumber the workers inside.

What’s Happening Today

Time was when things were different. I had a cousin, Dean Lennard, who was a decade older than me. He went to Georgia Tech, earned an engineering degree, and after he pulled his two years of service obligations in the army as an artillery officer, he started work at General Electric in the Jet Engine Division and remained with that division his entire working life. He was a company man who might have a reasonable expectation of starting and finishing his working career with a single company.

Dean worked his way up the corporate ladder following a series of in-house training programs designed to ensure that a maximum amount of his intellectual output was directed toward company activities. It was forbidden, for example, for him to do work outside of the company, except as expressly permitted by GE. He might be assigned to be a member of a joint-venture work group that included other companies and even work out of their facilities for a time, but he was still very much a GE employee, even if he might be in France or Germany.

Sure, he could have his hobbies, enjoy aspects of his leisure time, and support charitable causes, but anything that even sniffed of commercial activities was strictly prohibited. GE considered that they had bought and paid for his services and demanded his complete attention. In return they offered health benefits, retirement, challenging working conditions, and, implied through the example of his peers, job security.

The successful post-war revival of Japan brought more attention to the Japanese business model where the usual convention was that once you were employed by the company, that was a lifetime job. Many aspects of an employee’s life were controlled, including daily exercises, singing the company song, team play, and group problem-solving meetings. The company as a collective was seen as much more important than any individual. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, this blending of corporate and individual lives gained traction in the US as the wisdom of collective decision-making was embraced by Japan’s one-time foe.

My Work Experiences

Starting at about seven years old, I began earning money by mowing and cleaning up the yard around our house on McCarty Street in small-town Sandersville, Georgia. The house was surrounded by large pecan trees that dropped not only the leaves that I had to rake in the fall, but also nuts that I was allowed to sell for extra spending money. For my services, I was paid fifty cents a week, which was later increased to $1. At the time movie prices were thirty-five cents, popcorn ten cents a bag, and comics sold for the same price. With two movies in town, I was allowed to take off at noon on Saturday and often attended two double features.

In grade school I sold peanuts outside of Brown’s Five and Dime on the town square when on Saturdays the streets were thick with people from early morning to midnight when the stores closed. This was the town’s big shopping day, and many came into town on Saturday and no other day of the week. Mules and wagons were not unusual at the time, particularly at harvest time when the three cotton gins were running twenty-four hours a day. My father, a cotton buyer, graded and purchased the cotton and acted as a middleman between the grower and buyer.

One of the big events in my small town was the opening of our first chain grocery store, which was a Piggly Wiggly where I worked as a bag boy. This chain of stores carried southern specialty foods as well as the usual line of produce and canned goods. They also bought locally, which included the Martha White line of canned vegetables that were produced in the county, as well as fresh vegetables and fruits from local farmers.

After graduating from the University of Georgia with a geology degree, I pulled two-and-a-half years of service time in Alaska where the events I described in the preface occurred. Feeling that an advanced degree was necessary if I was going to practice professionally, I then attended the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, which has one of the few remaining schools of mines in the country, others being in Arizona, New Mexico,