What I Learned From Job Hopping for 10 years.

Long time since my last blog post but here we are. I wanted to talk about my experience in what I call job hopping over the last ten years. Over the last ten years I've worked in many different industries for periods as long as three years & for as short as three months.

Ever since I was a little kid, I was starting businesses. My first business that I can remember was drying out Mango seeds on our front porch, branding them as wallets & selling them for 25 cents a piece. Or later selling Soda's out of my locker in school, by the time I was twelve I had a draw full of cash, but what changed? Why did I go job hopping? Why did I not continue my entrepreneurship?

Well I did, Just in a different way, when I was about fifteen I was building computers and had my own little IT business. A man told me with a very stern voice, "you had best get out of the computer business, there hasn't been a dime to make since the dot com boom". I immediately began to panic learning that maybe my business was not going to grow and that I should learn other businesses before investing all of my time & resources into this one thing.

Years later I learned that this older gentleman was a fool and had no idea what he was talking about, but hey the past is the past right? When I was 15 I got my first job working in a candy store for $5 per hour for 5 hours per day. My goal was not to do something i love or was passionate about, it was merely to learn as much as I can about as many businesses as I can until I eventually open my own.

I smiled to people when they came in the store, helped them choose gift baskets and this eventually helped me in a later job, where I worked in a gift store in New Jersey. I started looking around for a better job and found a grocery store hiring cashiers and was able to get in the door without any experience but a good mouthpiece and a convincing argument.

When working in this store, I volunteered to do all sorts of tasks, labeling shelves, data entry, counting inventory, quietly learning the management roles and simultaneously gaining favor in the eyes of my superiors. After about 6 months I had learned enough and was off to upstate new york to spend the summer with friends & eventually seek the next job.

You see even when I was with friends I always presented myself well and I was always marketing myself as a person of strong work ethic. While some were out on Saturday night I was working an extra shift at the pizza shop. I got the job in the pizza shop through a friend who knew me as an honest hard worker and he was willing to put his name on the line when recommending me.

After some time working in retail, my brother referred me to a job in a warehouse that was paying almost 50% more per hour than the gift shop I was working in at the time. There I learned about the wine industry, in the process, I learned a lot about warehousing, logistics & fulfillment. Though it was a seasonal job I though it would b a good way to learn a new business.

This eventually lead me to working in the retail wine stores where I still work as a management consultant. But in leading up to that, I did work in the moving industry for 3 years. I started by working as a trip manger for a driver going cross country. I managed the GPS, I sent for workers when needed and helped unload.

I later used this experience to land me a job in a moving company as director of operations. Since I was familiar with the business I was able to use my street smarts to get the role. I worked in a few moving companies and was always learning. 

When I started working in the wine industry again, I used my experience to create an effective delivery system that none of the other wine stores had. When working in the wine stores people always asked me if I owned it. I was working so hard and took so much responsibility that they assumed I owned it. 

I also took a few jobs along the way in finance, I always loved finance and saw it as a way to make a lot of money while helping businesses grow. I worked in the real estate market during the financial crisis of 2008 helping homeowners avoid foreclosure. I worked more recently helping business owners fix their credit so they can obtain financing for their business.  

Along the way, as I was working in the many different companies, I volunteered to run google ad campaigns, use social media to reach out to potential clients and have in some way created a specialty around social media alone.

My advice to readers is as follows, keep learning and always improving your skill, you can apply your knowledge to any business. Give as much as you can to the organization you work in, it will reward you handsomely. Always look for the architecture of the business and learn the different models, eventually you will apply this knowledge as a consultant and or business owner & you will be very successful.