The worst of all possible outcomes.

(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 03/11/18)

I just took a few minutes to reread my last post, which was from 2016. What has happened after that is something out of a business horror novel.

Basically, my professional career and personal life became a slow-motion, multi-car pileup on the interstate.

In December of 2016 the key stakeholders put pressure on me and my business partner to invest in the new agency venture in order to secure our 3% ownership (each) in the new company. We caved and invested a large chunk of profits from our company, O2 Agency.

By the end of January 2017 the owners announced they were going to close the new agency. A couple of nonprofit accounts cancelled their contracts due to production and data mistakes. This is bad news and trying to recover from it quickly is nearly impossible.

But, we soldiered on and searched for a larger agency to acquire us. The owners took our money in December, and decided to do an asset sale of the printing company plus the newly formed agency. Our % ownership quickly became 0% and our investment capital was gone.

We pleaded with the VC firm to return our investment. They did not. Legal fees would have cost us so much it wouldn't have been worth it to pursue.

In early February of 2017 we were notified that identity theft rocked the parent company and all the employee W-2s had been stolen. Cool, right?

In late February 2017, Unified Agency's BKV group in Atlanta agreed to take on six of us, which saved our jobs and stabilized our client roster. By March of 2017 we were all employed and we worked our asses off to maintain the viability of our group and our clients.

In July, we had to move to a new office space and we sold off everything in our office. It was a space occupied by Hiccup NY, also a Unified Agency company. Three of us occupied desks there but we were never fully integrated into the group. They didn't really know what we did each day, they had their own accounts (separate from ours), and we barely overlapped skill sets or activities. It was awkward and my gut told me it was temporary. Sometimes I hate my gut.

By late July 2017, Animal Legal Defense Fund, our largest nonprofit account, cancelled their contract with BKV. In the end, legacy data issues and disruption precipitated the exit. The account director got laid off in August.

Then one day in a conference call with my boss, my creative director/writer partner and I got notice that we'd be laid off as well. We'd be gone by the end of October. The loss of ALDF was too big to recover from. A make-or-break new business pitch at Consumer Reports in July wasn't a win. Things were starting to unravel.

A consolation prize was a small retainer to continue to work with my soon-to-be former agency, for one account. As they say, it was better than nothing.

I'll say this. In general, losing your job is awful, no matter what your age is. Losing your job in your mid-50s is devastating. Plain and simple. Why? Because there's a lot more at stake. The collateral damage and sudden loss of income forced my wife and I (and our two dogs) to move out of our rather expensive but comfortable apartment in Manhattan. We had to find sublet renters to fill in the months before our lease ends in July.

After much anquish and many family meetings in Novemer and December, over New Year's weekend we moved in with my mother-in-law (also in Manhattan), who lived just a couple blocks from us. She has an inoperable back issue, and my wife suffers from chronic Lyme disease. So the situation was looking rather poor.

My mother-in-law's apartment was a neglected rent-stable 2BR on W 84th Street. Nothing in the apartment worked properly. Things were put together in a slap-dash manner that gave the place a feeling of a low-rent ghetto. And yet, it sat on the top floor of a building and had a terrace that wrapped around three sides of the unit. Not the worst, not the best.

So, living suddenly became very, very stressful, and a little bleak. My wife did what she could to help out at her mother's place, but most of the day-to-day chores and care-giving for two women would fall to me.

My wife and I basically spent all of January cleaning things, purging things, fixing things, replacing things, returning things, and selling things. The logistics of it all was just mind-boggling and strained my marriage enormously. But, we somehow managed to endure, and get the apartment looking and smelling clean.

On the job front, since October 2017 I've applied to well over 50 creative director jobs, and have gotten only one in-person interview. Tough crowd. Really tough. Agencies, which I will never work for again, seem to be putting all their eggs in the video and social media baskets. Fine. Good luck with that. It's a tech trend, and tech will pivot away from itself. It always does.

So ... I've been through many, many shit-storms in my career, and this one may have been the biggest. I guess I'll survive this one too.

If you're reading this and you're a talent acquisition person, contact me at awhetzel@icloud.com.

I can probably handle anything you throw at me.