“Creating Your Own Job” |
| Posted: 14 Sep 2010 09:08 PM PDT Published: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 5:04 p.m. It's a typical commuting routine, with one difference: Hiller doesn't have a job. He was laid off 20 months ago from his position earning a high five-figure salary heading the New York office of a diamond and jewelry importer and wholesaler. Frustrated at not finding a job, Hiller, 51, like many in the ranks of the unemployed, is trying to create one - borrowing an office from his former employer and using it to build a base of customers and suppliers for an online jewelry store. "I am working harder now than when I was working at a regular job," said Hiller, adding that he has yet to make any money from the venture, a year after he started running it. "I'm putting in 16-hour days, and I don't have a vacation." He said he still spends several hours a day perusing online job boards, writing cover letters and sending out resumes. But after three months of hunting, he said, he realized he would have a hard time finding a job in the jewelry business and really wanted to work for himself anyway. "The light bulb moment was: 'I'm going to take another job, and the way things go now, four or five years from now, something is going to happen again,'" he said. "I'm going to get laid off again, and now I am going to be 55 or 56, looking for a job. ... So why not put myself in control of my own destiny?" Hiller, unlike many of the 4.4 million Americans who have been out of work for a year or more, is less desperate than he is eager to find a way out of his plight through entrepreneurship. It's a strategy that jobless workers, faced with record levels of unemployment, often pursue - but the fruits of their efforts are not clear, business development experts say. The Kansas City, Mo.-based Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, believes high unemployment is at least part of the reason for a 4 percent increase from 2008 to 2009 - to 558,000 a month - in the number of businesses started nationwide. "In some cases it may be a desperation thing," said Dane Stangler, a foundation research manager. "You have exhausted your benefits, you can't get a job. In other cases, it may be you've had this idea, now is the chance to explore it." Vincent Delia, director of the Bergen County office of the New Jersey Small Business Development Centers, said a rise in the number of unemployed clients recently prompted him to create a program teaching jobless, would-be entrepreneurs the ins and outs of starting a business. Yet the difficulty of obtaining start-up capital in the current economy means many proposals go nowhere, said Deborah Smarth, the agency's associate state director, who estimated that at least one-fifth of agency clients are unemployed. "If they don't have the equity, they can't get equity," she said. Hiller, who is married with four children, aged 13 to 26, three of whom he supports, said he had expected for a year to lose his job and had planned for it. When the ax fell, he took a prearranged loan from a friend and paid off the $10,000 outstanding on his mortgage, and sold stocks to create a $5,000 backup fund. Hiller said he has managed to maintain a lifestyle that resembles his old one - albeit slimmed down - by dipping into his savings and carefully managing the income from his $420-a-week unemployment check and the low-five-figure income of his wife. He has spent most of his career in the diamond and jewelry industry. In the past decade or so, however, the production of jewelry and diamonds has increasingly moved to low-wage countries such as India and China, shrinking New York's industry and reducing job opportunities, he said. From 2002 to 2005, Hiller spent three weeks a month in India, running a jewelry factory with 3,000 employees. But in 2005, tired of being away from his family, he took a job heading the New York office of a Minnesota diamond and jewelry importer and wholesaler. When the company closed, battered by the drop in luxury consumer spending and squeezed by the loss of a key contract, Hiller figured he would try to put his management and operations experience to work in other industries. So, far, he's had 15 interviews but no job offers. A year ago, Hiller started helping a Teaneck, N.J., IT worker, who owned and ran an online jewelry store, jewelelegance.com, along with his day job. Hiller now runs the site day to day - unpaid. At his home and at his old office in New York, which his former boss has allowed him to use until the lease expires, he takes customer calls and talks to suppliers. Sales are growing but slow. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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