I’ve been a mostly-at-home webworker for about 8 months now. It was November 2007 when I was asked to provide thankless tech support at my office that made me leave. One of my coworkers came up to me with the charming invitation: “I see you spend all your time on the computer, why don’t you help me out with this.” He said it derisively, as if he needed an excuse to not know how to do something—as if the ability to react to my own environment was a fault.
I helped him out despite my best inclinations, and then someone else said, “I hear your a big computer geek…can you help me with Vista.”
“I’ve never looked at Vista.”
“Oh, well, I thought you said you knew stuff about computers.” Mortgage brokers are assholes.
“Someone said that about me,”
Then the challenge, “so you can’t figure it out.” This was to pique my ego, and it didn’t work. At all.
“There’s this site you may have heard of called ‘Google,’” I begin, “and it is a really useful tool to find out what’s wrong with your computer, just type the problem in to the bar, and go from there.”
“So you can’t help me?” he says as if the failure is mine. And then I get asked, “why have you not helped XXXXX” from an owner.
Because the owners are generally nice guys, I pitch in, it takes 20 seconds. “I thought you didn’t know Vista,” he says.
“Never seen it before, but Google has the answers to everything—if you have issues, just Google it.”
Then that becomes sort of my nickname. Said with a combination of admiration and derision around the office. Nobody googles it, they still ask me.
So I picked up some work with my friend Tim, and got to talking about Internet marketing with him. He’s a shill, but not in a bad way, he’s intensely focused on bringing students into his classes, and pretty good at it. I pick up some work with him, and more follows. Then I stop going into the office because I’m able to get more done via IM, and I’m not distracted by morons.
The mortgage industry caused some acute changes to happen in our office, and so my plan to come back in Feb was changed. I still had aspirations to be a producing LO, but I had lost the loyalty of my assistant (and the office was pretty screwy). And the work kept coming in.
My skill is lead generation; I am world class at lead generation for any industry. I am not world class at conversion, I am not world class ast customer service. So, I created an ebook: http://losurvivalguide.com and put it on http://e-junkie.com and it continues to sell. The book is great, it has lots of practical stuff that nobody does and everyone should to have a nice, white shoe mortgage business.
Website work came in in WordPress. I coordinated vendors and did some paying projects. I had as much fun as possible doing it all, and then had the bright idea to creat http://loanoficersurvivaltraining.com. There is a ton to love about the industry. I was able to support myself doing that, and not be tied to any uncertainty. I continued to blog on places like http://tendayteam.com http://lenderama.com, http://mortgagecicerone.com, http://bloodhoundrealty.com/bloodhoundblog, and others. I was making a living in a third career of some sort. I would be prospering if I hadn’t run into the IRS buzzsaw in early 2007. (It also is fair to say that I puttzed around in mid 2006 with anticipated and actual job changes that cost me net $25,000 at a time when it was still easy to make money).
Anyway, I’ve taken a project as finance director for Robert Owens, a fiscally conservative unencumbered candidate for attorney general. It’s a project that runs out shortly after the election ends in November, but it will pay me well, I believe.
But really, what do I want to do? That’s a question I gotta answer because I’m 32. And it’s time to really figure this stuff out.
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