Episode notes
Transcript
Download .txt209 timestamped passages
What's up? Good morning. Good evening. Good night. Good afternoon. Shout out to you wherever you're
listening from. Shout out if you're listening from Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Amazon Music,
Samsung, Podchaser, GeoSavant, Deezer, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and YouTube if you're watching
in. Thanks for letting me get dressed today. Giving me a reason to at least. I won't say you
let me get dressed. We're coming live from my microphone to your phone, computer, headphones,
TV, car stereo, smartwatch, Bluetooth speaker. You could have been anywhere in the world,
but you are here right now listening to I Will Not Lose Podcast. Take a moment to be present
and recognize that it is right now. Right now. Whether your right now is working, running,
cleaning, exercising, laying down, flying, driving, we are grateful to be alive, baby.
We're here for another episode. Failure can be frightening. However, as Winston Churchill
reminds us, success is all about going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
This is I Will Not Lose Podcast. Let's jump right in. All right. Recording this on November 19th.
And if you're following along, launch date is November 18th. So I went to record the podcast
a little bit earlier this week. It just wasn't right. I had a video shoot later that day. I was
dressed in a Tommy Hilfiger three-piece suit, not off-brand for Tony Ortiz, but a little bit
off-brand for the podcast. So it all around felt rushed, and that's what happens. The video cut
out about halfway through. So rather than put together a rushed piece of episode, I said,
you know what? Let's fall back, take a breath, and make our launch date on Saturday or Sunday
instead of Friday, because it's just too much during the week. So pick up, learn from the
success, learn from the failure, and keep it moving. So last week, we ended the episode with
a message to everybody who got laid off from Meta or Facebook. This week, we need to expand that
message and expand the episode a little bit because there have been nothing but more layoffs.
We'll have to expand that from Facebook to Stripe and to Zillow. I have a long list of
everybody that laid off this year, making 2022 a large, Zuckerberg called it a macroeconomic
downturn. This is coming from the Washington Post. His statement came a day after Zuckerberg
said the macroeconomic downturn was one of the reasons he needed to fire 11,000 workers
or 13% of Meta's workforce. In the first wide scale job cuts in its 18 year history,
Stripe is cutting 14% of its staff, real estate marketplace Zillow 5% and ride handling Lyft
13% of their workforce. That brings a total displaced tech employees in 2022 to just over
120,000, according to layoffs.fyi, a layoff tracker run by tech founder, Roger Lee.
So tech workers who had previously counted on dozens of offers for their skills will now have
to compete for jobs with thousands of other people. I'm not going to get into the percentages
just for the sake of brevity, but 2022, we've had Amazon layoffs, Meta, Twitter, Zillow, Peloton,
DocuSign, Tableau, Snapchat, Outbrain, Lyft, The Mom Project, OpenSea layoffs, Substack layoffs,
Niantic, Masterclass, Bird, Superhuman, Cameo, Robinhood, Virgin, Hyperloop,
I said Peloton and Beachbody. So these are big, high tech names with most of their workforce
displaced. If you're talking about 20% of your workforce, you got to imagine that is a huge
amount. That's like, that's a whole fifth. I mean, geez. So it's not the end of the world.
This isn't a doom and gloom. You guys know that's not the goal of this podcast is to shed light on
anything. But you have to think it's not the end. So I didn't realize I was asking around. So,
hey, have you ever been laid off? People like, no, no, no. I didn't realize it's not just a part
of life. So my personal story started with Circuit City, which before the economic downturn or around
the economic downturn in 2008, they went out of business. And before then, I'll admit layoffs
were not a common household thing, but I have been let go from jobs. I have been laid off.
I've been terminated. It was never the end of my story. It always led to something else. So
part of the episode, I'm going to be going over, kind of getting personal and sharing some of my
past history, what I learned from it, how I moved on, just to kind of give you guys an idea that
this is just the beginning. Last week's episode was titled The Start of Your Story, I believe.
largest layoff in company history the start of your story so uh for those of you who don't know
circuit city was a big tech giant competed with best buy and radio shack which was another tech
giant i don't think is everywhere anymore um but circuit city sold electronics tvs computers
printers ink that sort of thing they're almost like a staples with a heavier focus towards the
electronics, picture staples with a home theater section like Best Buy. They had laid off a large
percentage of their top earners. Now they were under a commission-based model. So their top
earners were people who were selling the most. It was tied to your salary. So you could argue they
were their best employees that they laid off. And they brought on people like myself who would work
for, I think $9 an hour was competitive pay at that time, 2008. I was 18 or 19 at the time. I
was a digital native. I could sell technology. I knew how to use it. And I was willing to work
without a commission because I just never realized how much money I could make with commission.
So I was always a top salesman in electronics and computers, car stereo at Circuit City. That was
kind of my thing and I did really good at it for a while. But you saw some things that I didn't pay
attention to at the time, but you would have people lining up at the counter at Circuit City's
register and showing people Best Buy catalogs and telling them not to buy that. Sorry they waited in
line, but go across the street, tell them stories of how horrible the company was, how they had laid
off so many people. It was a shame. And they really kind of tore the company apart from the
inside out. So this was almost like a, like a parasite or something, you know, its own audience
was tearing it apart because of the treatment of its employees. So eventually they worked on
firing their staff, getting people out and closing down their doors completely. So here I was,
I believe I had dropped out of college at the time, Circuit City. I had a few thousand dollars
saved in the bank, but I was working pretty much full time. And now here I am displaced.
I thought if I fell back on maybe starting a business, maybe there would be other people
who would start a business. So almost like if you heard Henry Ford was going to be building
the Model T and you had a chance to build a gas station, I started a graphic and web design
company so I could help these companies brand and kind of pick up. Originally, it started with
musicians, but it's still something I'm doing to this day, what, 2009, 2022, 12, 13 years later.
So I can tell you that in my experience, marketing is always the first to go whenever there's an
economic downturn or perceived recession. So I have been the first to go, whether it's at that
job or whether it was the contract that was the first to go. So I'm used to kind of being mobile
and flexible on my feet. And one thing that I'll challenge you is when's the last time that you
updated your resume? We all do it when we get laid off and we need to look, but how often are
you keeping your portfolio and your resume up to date? I can tell you I'm probably about three or
four months behind on my design website and my LinkedIn has got to be about a year, year and a
half out of date. I've been blessed to have full-time contract work for the last year, year
and a half. So I haven't been working on updating my LinkedIn. So you can feel displaced. You can
feel like, man, I'm not competitive, but go through the practice. Just take a look. I get
certifications all the time. I don't think right away to put them onto my LinkedIn and update my
resume and my doc files and have them on me. It's just not something that rings in my head.
So I would challenge you, take a look at it and really think deep. Go to a specialist if you want.
uh shout out to someone who can help you walk through your resume and maybe look at some things
from a different perspective so yeah i was able to turn into a successful graphic design business
after circuit city people did fall back on to other things like starting their own business
or even taking a side hustle or wrapping their vehicle so i spent some time learning the
different aspects of design over a good decade. Still picked up side jobs, any side job. You
never want to walk away from money. You never want to say what I'm doing is so good and is
going to be there for so long that I don't need to take this opportunity. So there's other things
you do, but it doesn't all have to define you. Another company, I ended up at a digital marketing
company. And I had eventually or essentially been brought on as a content creator, mostly in the
form of written content. And about a week or two into it, he says, oh, you know, the PPC guy left.
So you're in charge of pay-per-click and content. And so I thought, okay, this could be fun. I can
learn pay-per-click, not realizing that it's essentially a full-time job. There's a lot of
research, a lot of maintenance, a lot of things that you have to monitor and watch. So I was given
a small budget to do that. Did what I could with that budget. And eventually the company ended up
leaving my position vacant and going in a different direction. It's a small startup,
digital marketing. And so they wrote me the letter telling me that I was on my way out.
And I had thought, man, that was the only year that I actually shut down my graphic design
business in the last 13 years. And I had went all in on somebody else's business. And now here I was,
wow, I kind of let all my clients go. I put all my skills into this. But I did think that it let
me get a little bit into the digital marketing, the pay-per-click. Fast forward five, six years,
my largest contract is in paid advertising and digital marketing at the time of recording this.
So even though it didn't work out, you take what you learned from that job, you take what
you've added, you add it to your resume.
People don't do this when they go through breakups.
They blame the person.
They think about everything the other person or the company or the job did wrong rather
than being accountable and thinking, what can I do to better myself in this situation?
So I would definitely encourage you to take a look at what did you learn?
What did you grow from your jobs?
because you never know if you're going to have to use those skills in the future.
And I was able to confidently say in my interview for this last contract, yes,
I've managed X amount of dollars in Google ad spend. I'm comfortable with doing it.
I've made enough mistakes that I can do this well. So yeah, again, wasn't the end of my story,
but it was another layoff. I had spent some time right before Corona and up until Corona
in a manufacturing company where they brought me on to essentially stop paying for an agency. So my
job was to work on their graphics and their website, and eventually they would grow that
into video. So although going into it, I only had a couple of videos in my portfolio, I was able to
create both motion graphics and video. I was given a budget to purchase equipment. So when they laid
me off in Corona. Sure. I was upset, but I thought, wow, you know, I have all this production
experience. Um, I shouted out in the first episode, one of my coworkers from there who helped me pick
out the mics for this podcast, uh, all the editing and everything comes from the practice and the
grind that I put in into this video. So even being able to do this podcast, um, I may have had the
technical ability to do it, but I wouldn't have been able to pump it out every week at a high
level. So big shout out to the production things that I learned, the video skills that I learned
at that manufacturing company. That was a great spend of about two years of my time. The company
paid for education, really got nothing bad to say about any of my ex-jobs or ex-relationships for
that matter. But yeah, the goal is really just to let you guys know if you are a developer for
Facebook and now you were displaced, you know, you can start your own software and it goes a
long way to say former Facebook developer starts this program or this stuff. So take what you can.
If you haven't networked, sorry, but that's one thing to do if you're still in the workforce is
constantly expand your network, constantly meet new people. Opportunities sit on the edge of
people you know and on the edge of your network. So the larger you expand your network, the more
opportunities you're going to have. Excuse me one second. I just need to apologize greatly for what
I'm about to do. I have my coffee that I haven't finished. My goal is to not do anything that
interrupts the flow of the show, like go and get lost on a Google tangent, go and sip coffee,
or I don't vape during the show, but my coffee's sitting there. It smells super good. And we're
already posting late. So you know what? I'm going to ease up a little bit on the rules and I am
going to sip my coffee. I'll do my best to edit it out if it sounds disgusting. But if you are
tuning in on YouTube, I'm sipping out of a West Virginia University cup. Shout out to my wife.
That's her alma mater. So not sure if you're listening, but I stole your cup. All right.
So where do we go from here? When you instantly get displaced and you have a job or a plan,
Like great Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face and getting laid off or getting displaced can definitely feel like a punch in the face. It's like, whoa, wait a second. I was headed this direction. I did all this.
One thing that I would say is it may not make me the greatest employee in the world to have
the mentality that the job is not going to keep me there forever.
And I have this conversation often with my mom.
She finished as a manager at a call center for PPL.
She managed the call center, actually, so quite a bit of employees.
She had started working there and had different roles throughout the company, but ultimately her entire work career from 18 till 60 something was with one company. They pay for her retirement. She has her benefits through there. I had never looked at that as a story that was going to happen for me.
I don't think that jobs necessarily look to keep workers. And if you look at a lot of, there's plenty of documentation on things like amazon.com and their hiring methods where they look to essentially push people to get a small promotion and then leave the company.
their job is to constantly bring on new people and constantly bring on because people get tenure
people have to get paid more you know it sucks when you have to think about it like a business
owner and you see moves like Elon Musk and things that they're doing yes a workforce is a valuable
part of your business it's also almost across the board the largest expense for any business
So when you're going and you're looking and you're trying to figure out where can I cut
costs, where can I take things away, you naturally go to the biggest chunks and you look, well,
if I just scrape a little bit off that, that'd be different than scraping a lot of bit off
all these other different things.
So I understand the mentality of what to do.
So I'm not speaking and telling businesses that you need to have the obligation to keep
somebody for 40 years, pay their pension, pay all their raises and continue to educate
them and continue to match competitor offers look like you make your decision with how you run your
business. What I'm saying is as an employee or as a contractor, that's another thing people don't
want to talk about, how quickly the world can move to contractors where you essentially know
you're going to get laid off in a year or two or six months and you do your absolute best because
those reviews are going to lead to your next job, but you don't absolutely hunker down and commit
yourself completely to one job, one contract. It's one of the 48 laws of power about never
committing solely to anyone. So what can you do to be a better employee, to be more
productive is we'll constantly educate yourself. Never get stuck in your job or in your field
and think that you've learned everything.
Educate yourself on the new tools that are coming out,
new methodologies, go to conventions,
stay on the top of your game.
It has to be an absolute sharpened sword.
When you get into going into like your resume,
make sure that is up to date.
Every couple of months, just go through,
add a couple of projects,
add a project that you're working on currently,
and then remember to go back and say,
here's how it started, here's how it's going,
here's how it ended.
this is people view these and a lot of times when companies are looking for talent they're looking
on indeed they're they're looking for people who already have jobs in order of recruiting them or
headhunting them so it never hurts even if you're completely happy in your position to keep your
stuff up to date so take a pause set my coffee down for a second it's a lot different podcasting
uncaffeinated than it is. And I'm not going to lie. I like this vibe of recording on a Saturday
rather than a Friday morning after the kids go to school. So we may keep this going. I did check on
the numbers and you guys aren't sitting here breaking down the door, waiting for it to drop
on Friday. Anyway, you guys usually take a couple of days and read it. I did build this podcast so
that you can pull in at your time, listen to it on the app that you like. I didn't want you to have
to change anything that you normally do. Just add me to your content schedule, work on it.
So I say, whether you're running, jogging, whatever you're doing, that's going to bring
us towards the end. Don't have any announcements other than next week is Thanksgiving. So if I get
a chance to record over the holiday, I may do something short. I think it's a little too early
in the podcast to say, all right, we're just going to skip a week, but I know you guys won't kill me
if I do. Don't really have anything super planned. No guests for next week, so we're going to ease
into this holiday. Enjoy it. Stay safe. If you're going to drink, drink responsibly. If you're going
to be around family, consider drinking. This is I Will Not Lose Podcast, stories of success
learned from failure. To support the show, visit the website shows.acast.com slash I Will Not Lose
and subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Share the episode link, leave a comment. Whatever
you do, guys, your contribution is greatly appreciated. Tony Ortiz, thanks you for listening.