Hello world, I’m delighted to post my first blog post and in this one I will talk about your options if you are looking for a job in 2019.
Let’s say you are looking for your first job or that you are not satisfied in your current job situation. You are looking for something new, something interesting, a job that you will be looking forward to get to every morning.
Well, this is going to be difficult. Right off the bat I’ll tell you that very few people look forward to get to their work every single morning. For this to happen, your job must be captivating, usually a job that you care about like it is your own.
I’ll get right to the point and I will start by listing your options. After that I will go in depth into them and lastly, I will give you my sincere advice as I have been in most of the situations myself in my 18 year work history.
You have 8 job options
- Get a job at a traditional large company
- Get a job at a traditional small company next to a caring boss/mentor
- Find a job at one of those companies that have a distributed workforce system
- Become a freelancer and market your services on one of the very many sites out there as:
- Start your own brick and mortar business
- Start an online startup
- Start selling on Amazon (Amazon FBA)
- Start your own customized and fully flexible business of Affiliate marketing.
Now that I have listed your options let’s dive deep so you can get a clear perspective. After all you are probably asking yourself: What to choose?
In depth analysis of your 8 job options
1 Getting a job at a large company is an excellent choice if it is your first work experience. You will gain insight of how large corporations work, the systems they have in place, their procedures and all the organization levels.
You will be one of many and you might not get proper attention and mentoring in order to grow to your highest potential. However, I believe that this experience will prove invaluable to you in the future when you will be doing your own thing.
At this stage of your career insight and learning from the BIG is the most intelligent thing to do.
2 Getting a job at a small company next to a caring boss/mentor is THE ONE BEST move you can do after you summed experience at the large company. For this to work well though you will have to do your homework and find the right person who will be your mentor.
At this stage you are researching for the individual and not for the company. Remember, you have learned everything you had to learn from the company at the previous stage.
You are looking for the individual who will have natural interest to help you grow. The least you want is a boss who does not care. Don’t go there.
The additional advantage of working for a small company is that you have to multitask. You will probably be involved with many aspects of the business and this will help you grow fast.
3 Finding a job at a company which offers a distributed workforce system is the right choice if you are fed up with commuting. I don’t suggest you do this first though before you gather experience working for companies as I described in the previous stages.
Reason is, I believe that work ethics are important for your career, and you can absorb them best in an environment where you are surrounded by colleagues.
Watch TED original series video by Matt Mullenweg, titled Why Working from Home Is Better for Business to understand exactly what a distributed workforce means.
Something to consider too is that there are still very few companies with this system so you will have to dig deep to find a position.
4 Becoming a freelancer is a great way to go too, especially if you are looking for time flexibility. You need to be good at something relevant to today’s economy and you need to have a computer and a place to work from, preferably a quite one.
Problems I see here are the fact that you cannot scale it and you cannot make a lot of money, if that is what you are looking for. The biggest problem though is that, in my opinion, you still end up trading time for money. I’ll give more info on this later.
5 Starting your own brick and mortar business is tricky. It can be a good and stable job if you nail it, but it can also become a nightmare if you are struggling to become profitable while wearing all the hats at the company. I’m talking from personal experience.
With my wife and our crew at our restaurant in Maui, 2016
You simply might not manage to
grow. You can be profitable, but you still must pay rents and other fixed costs and do a heavy load of small tasks. If you don’t grow and make more money to employee help then you will continue doing everything.
You will have little flexibility of time depending on the nature of the business.
The goal of owning your own business should be to scale in order to employ others do the job so can you create time and financial freedom for yourself. If you don’t achieve this goal, you will have basically bought yourself a job.
Lastly the exit scenario is not easy as selling a brick and mortar business is not the easiest job unless it is a franchise.
Trust me on this, I owned a restaurant.
On the bright side though it’s a good way to get rich, that is IF you nail the business model and avoid the above scenarios.
6 An online startup is a great business as long as you have the following 3 ingredients of success:
- A unique idea and
- the perfect team and
- the necessary funding
It is not easy though. It has lots of ups and downs and the success rate is discouraging. Many things can go wrong such as, money runs out, a competitor outgrows you, you are too early in the market, mismanagement or you burn out.
Also, prepare for long, looong days of work, anxiety and rare vacations.
However, IF you manage to nail it, you are possibly looking at a quick retirement.
Clever options: And now we are getting to, what I like to call, the “clever” options and I will explain why.
7 Amazon FBA is a the new way of doing business now and in the future; and that’s why I like it.
How it works is that you essentially become a partner of Amazon in the sense that you outsource to Amazon exactly that part of a business that is hard to do and that Amazon thrives in: customer acquisition, building and managing an online store, storage, deliveries, returns and customer care.
Think about it for a second. Imagine you can have a business where you sell your products online and you can focus on the most important aspect of it: THE PRODUCT. This means that you still have to find the product, you have to manufacture it or, most probably, have it manufactured.
Lastly you have to brand it and have it shipped to the warehouse facilities of Amazon around the world and….and… that’s it!
Yes, I mean it, THAT’S IT.
The rest is taken care of by Amazon. You just make damn sure that you have a kick-ass product and you let Amazon do the rest.
Of course, once listed on Amazon your main task will be promotion which includes posting on social media, paid advertising, putting the actual product in the hands of web influencers for testing as well as active blogging in order to drive traffic to the listing.
I can only think of pros for this business idea. Look, you are your own boss and you make your own schedule. You have the potential to make tons of money depending on how committed you are. Unlike the previous alternatives where you basically trade time for money here you can create passive income and scale.
If you wish to learn more about how to do this then I can recommend you this free video workshop series made from some very respectable online entrepreneurs who I respect utterly. I myself follow their training and I can’t recommend it enough.
8 The Affiliate marketing business model
With Affiliate marketing you basically sell other people’s products earning you a nice commission. You don’t have to manufacture nor ship anything. What you have to do is find the customer and send him to a link to buy the product.
You have to become good at it.
When I started my journey with affiliate marketing in 2018 my goal was to learn how to sell anything anywhere in the world.
Think about it for a second. You DON’T have to own the product and you DON’T have to ship it. And you don’t have to “eat it” if it doesn’t sell either. You do not have this risk.
If you decide you don’t want to continue marketing a particular product for any reason, then you can find other products to sell and replace it. There are not contracts.
I’m not saying it’s easy. Like everything in this world, you need to invest time, sweat and money to learn it. Once you invest and master selling online though you can apply it to more and more products.
The way to go is only upwards.
Let me give you some examples here. Amazon gives you the opportunity to sell it’s products. YES, Amazon, the largest online retailer in the world has an affiliate program. If you enroll you can promote any product on their list and Amazon will pay you a commission anywhere from 3% to 10%. Isn’t that sweet?
You may say: “Andonis, all this sounds great, but where do I start? How do I learn it?
Well my dear friends, let me tell you, the solution is not far from you. I myself have gone this path recently in 2018 and after countless research on Google I found THE MOST legit training on the web.
It’s a group of online entrepreneurs who have formed an educational platform with the goal to pass on the required knowledge for success in the growing digital economy. And they do this in a clean, structured form.
The training is long and it’s not a quick learning curve. As you can imagine you have to learn, from scratch, a complete new skill. Click the bellow link if you want to find out more about this training.
My advice to you
As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I have been in most of these businesses in my life. Not less than 6.
These were:
- My first job as a field electrical engineer at the largest construction company of Greece in 2001
- A development company which I co-founded with my brothers in 2002: we built vacation homes on the Greek islands while maintaining our main jobs
- An agency for electronics which I started in Athens in 2005 after quitting my first job. I was working from my laptop for 4 years
- A real estate fund which I co-founded in Brazil in 2009 when I moved to Rio de Janeiro
- A tech startup incubation in Brazil in 2012
- A restaurant in Hawaii in 2016
Here I am with a coworker at my first large project back in 2002 in Greece
What I have come to realize, and I have as advice to you can be summarized in the following bullet points:
- If you are starting now then start from the beginning, stay about 3-4 years in each of the two initial stages and then make your way up choosing the most appealing path to you
- If you are looking to avoid trading your time for money then go for the last two options
- If you are attracted to the startup option make sure you have all the 3 ingredients. It’s risky but it can be very rewarding IF you have those
- If you are looking for time, geographical and financial freedom then go for the last two, Amazon FDA and affiliate marketing
Conclusion
You see, my advice depends on which stage you are in life and what your priorities are. The advice I’m offering to you springs from my experience of 18 years working in 6 different job types and positions.
I strongly suggest you think about it for the long term. Where do you see yourself in 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
Do you want to be in the fragile position to fear of getting fired?
If your answer is NO, then take your future in your hands and go onto the training I suggested to you above.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave a comment bellow. I will be delighted to talk more if you have any questions.
To your success
Aloha
