Getting laid off can be one of the worst things that can happen to a person – both financially and emotionally. But for people who’ve had an itch to test out their entrepreneurial chops, getting the boot can be the life-changing nudge they need.
Alison Fletcher was laid off last spring from her position as marketing director with Burger King’s Canadian operations after almost two decades in the business.
“I was absolutely mortified,” Ms. Fletcher of Toronto says. “I always take my work very, very personally, so I was upset even though I knew that it was ultimately going to be good for me.”
Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, she had always felt that one day she, too, would hang out a shingle of her own.
“I was thinking of going out on my own for at least the past five years,” says Ms. Fletcher, a mother to two boys, ages 6 and 9. “But there was just never time to think about what that could or would be.”
After being laid off, Ms. Fletcher finally had that much-needed time to consider the next step in her career. But a few days were all that she needed. Less than a week after losing her job, on her way to dinner with an old colleague, Ms. Fletcher wandered into one of her favourite places – a kitchenware store.
“I had an ‘aha’ moment,” says Ms. Fletcher, an avid home cook. “I realized that this was my concept, more or less. This is what I had been waiting five or six years to figure out.”
Not even a month later, Ms. Fletcher had a location in her trendy west-Toronto neighbourhood, a business licence and a full business plan, with financial projections, for her specialty kitchen store and cooking school: Cookery. The store opened five months after she left Burger King.
Grace Attard, an entrepreneur coach in the Greater Toronto Area and chair with executive leadership organization TEC Canada, likes to say that entrepreneurialism is “either chosen for you or it’s chosen by you.”
“In Alison’s case, it – the opportunity – was chosen for her,” Ms. Attard says. “And she acted decisively.”
Other pieces fell into place for Ms. Fletcher and The Cookery. She had a modest severance, financial support from her mother and a husband who agreed to use the couple’s personal property as collateral. She had, in Ms. Attard’s words, a good “financial runway.”
“If you’re used to having a paycheque and you’re moving into the entrepreneurial world, I’ll ask people if they have a runway that will fund them to profitability,” Ms. Attard says.
Successful entrepreneurs need to have both passion and profitability, according to Ms. Attard. A baker, for example, can be passionate about creating the world’s best cupcakes, but if she hasn’t mapped out a path to profitability, her business won’t succeed. At the same time, the desire for profit alone won’t enable a business to succeed – the owner has to be passionate about the products or services she is offering.
Ms. Fletcher, with her love of cooking and her well-thought-out financial projections, seems to have both of those critical elements. But she’s not too proud to point out her shortcomings or that she kept an eye out for more traditional marketing roles even as Cookery’s opening day neared, just in case she couldn’t pull it off.
Her blind spot, she says, has been the regulatory side of her business: getting up to speed on public health practices and fire codes for her cooking school, and permits for signage outside on Roncesvalles Avenue.
“No one says, ‘Have you thought of this or have you thought of that?’ when you apply for a business licence,” Ms. Fletcher says. “Nobody flags that you need a commercial kitchen at the beginning of this process.”
These days, she says, she’s exhausted but she’s “never been happier.”
Her advice to other fence-sitting entrepreneurs? “Do not underthink it.”
Ms. Attard agrees that going into business on one’s own demands a lot of consideration. It also shouldn’t be undertaken simply as an “escape” from an unpleasant situation at a corporate job.
“I think the best time [to go solo] is when you are choosing it from a wanting place, not a needing place,” Ms. Attard says. “You have to really want it.”
