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I thought I knew it all.
I left my job working in the family business in a blaze of glory. Well, let's call it what it was, a tantrum. There was some pen-throwing, some name-calling and handing back the keys to the company car before I then stormed out of the door; no looking back - thinking I was about to disrupt the ever-loving shit out of the PropTech market. How millennial of me, in retrospect I was a bit of an entitled dick.
I don't quite exactly remember how it happened, but a couple of weeks after I had left my family business my partner (M) suggested I do some design work for the company he's working at - he wanted to move into more product design and UX which meant there was the actual design/illustration work up for grabs. Hey, I'd done a degree in Animation so I had some skills in the area - how hard could it be? Also it sounded like a cool job and I could work on HANDL (the disruptive PropTech app) at the same time, I even pitched HANDL to the CEO of M's company and he was on board with it, so I began working at M's company in the capacity of Graphic Designer.
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Suffice to say it did not go according to plan. I might write a post about the 4+ years working at that company with M as a bit of a cathartic post but today is not that day.
---Jump to last year in August, I was on maternity leave with a 3 month old baby trying to figure out life post-partum and feeling pretty confident about going back to work. I thought I had my shit together - I was no longer under the illusion that I was a designer and instead focused more on project management and the months before I'd gone on maternity leave that was what I was doing and things seemed to be going well. Also I was on an absolute mental high after going through a natural home-birth. My three months are over, I'm due back on the 1st September. I don't message anyone on the 1st and no-one messages me. I make a plan to talk to the CTO on the 2nd and get on with making a plan and the morning of the 2nd I get a message from the CEO essentially saying he is cutting my hours, and because there had been no communication throughout the entire time I was on maternity leave I was obviously not serious about coming back. I won't go into the long and short of it because that is another post. But suffice to say I was 3 months post-partum unemployed and looking for work.
Shit.
After a few months of looking for work, I chat with my family and my Dad offers me some work at the Property Management company to tide us over. I return, with formality and caution with the aim of running the company and learning some humility along the way.
M has now cut ties with the company as well and is developing his practice as an artist and is developing a studio and gallery. Coincidentally, read not coincidental at all I am doing some part-time work at a local community gallery/artist network implementing Digital Marketing strategy.
It seems like what I'm doing at the moment is sprinkling digital transformation everywhere I go.