Jordan Bartlett
Jul 20, 2017 · 15 min read

Who’s Coming With Me?

Tom Cruise did it. Jim Bruer did it. They looked cool as hell when they did it. They turned out ok. It seems a fantasy that plays out every Sunday evening for millennials in America is based on these two characters and their famous lines “Who’s coming with me?” & “You’re cool, you’re cool, F You…You’re cool.” The fantasy always leads to us finding our dream job, where we find our passion and make money and travel the world. Tim Ferris teased us all with his title “Four Hour Work Week” to sell millions of books. It seems like every good TED talk should start with “I quit my boring job so that I could go on to…” So I did it. And it’s way more glamorous in the movies.

I graduated from Rollins College in 2006 with a degree in Economics. As much as I want to tell you I received my economics degree because I was so moved by the words of John Meynard Keynes or Adam Smith, the real reason is because when I was forced to declare a major at the end of my sophomore year I had more economics credits than anything else and all of my future roommates were declaring for economics. I figured it might help be become a billionaire one day too, after I was finished being the best beer pong player this side of the Mississippi.

A lot of my friends expressed excitement of finally getting to the end of college and being able to start making money. Not me. I had two classes a day, worked out twice a day, slept until 10am and partied 5 nights a week. I knew I was living the dream and appreciated every second of it.

I woke up the morning of my graduation, battling a hangover and stomachache that only beer pong and late-night Steak n Shake can provide, to a whole new world. Walking across that stage meant a new sense of responsibility that I was not prepared to handle.

One of the things I was unable to grasp, which I think is true for many young adults graduating from college, is what I really wanted out a job or a career. Because I didn’t have a good answer to the question of what I wanted, I went for the easy default answer; I wanted to get so rich I could do whatever I wanted. So I went straight to the job descriptions that oozed with ‘rich’ words. Financial Advisor, Business Analyst, Growth Tech, Research Associate all jumped off the job postings. I didn’t really know what any of them meant, but I knew they all dealt with money and had huge upsides if you sold your soul to the career.

The first job I got was a company called AP Financial. There was a phone interview (Nailed it!) before they herded twenty of us in for a group interview. Twenty of us wearing shirts made for someone twice our size that billowed out of our baggy pants and sagged below our hips, ties about 6 inches above the waistline with a tiny knot pulled far too tight. It was easy to see that our parents had taken us to the sale rack at Men’s Warehouse the day after graduation.

They proceeded to tell us how their brand new life insurance product allowed clients to protect their future and invest in the market. They pulled out the graph that shows if you had invested $100 in stocks 50 years ago, with a ‘modest’ 12% return you could be ready to retire immediately. The little secret was ‘compound interest.’ They then asked us to get out a piece of paper and write down the name of everyone I knew. Luckily for me, Facebook was released the year before and I had over one hundred people at the tip of my fingers. When they told me 50 was the average number of names the most successful reps in their company wrote down on their first day I was ready to declare career victory. What was everyone complaining about? Everyone should be able to retire early if they found a commission-based uncapped job like this one.

I raced home to tell my mom that I had just nailed two birds with one stone. My career path was 100% figured out and I was going to make her a shit-ton of money with my ‘compound interest’ secret. She was excited that I was excited about a job. She was less excited about entrusting her future to someone she watched picking their nose watching cartoons every Saturday morning only 4 years ago. Ehh her loss, I still had 99 more people on my list!

I had some interesting meetings. One included my sister’s ex-husband. He was a really nice guy. I didn’t really tell him why I wanted to meet with him. When he realized the reason, he was not so nice anymore. Now when I think about it, it seems obvious that asking a guy to handover all of his money to me after my sister had already taken half of it in the split probably was not the most tactful move.

After several more unsuccessful meetings, and the realization my closest friends were as broke as I was, I decided I should look for something else. AP Financial has since gone out of business and had many SEC violations logged against them, so in the long run I did those friends and family members a solid by being such a bad sales guy.

Just to confirm cold calls were not for me, I had a stint with MetLife Financial Advising. They were very accommodating and let me make my own schedule as long as I hit my numbers. Unfortunately, it’s hard to hit your numbers when you don’t have rich friends and you only show up between 11am and 2pm every day. You live and you learn.

My best friend was working for an insurance agency at the time in Daytona Beach. He told me they give you a salary for at least 2 years before they expect you to sell anything. I figured that would be plenty of time to make some money and figure out what I really wanted to do.

Daytona Beach has a reputation of being a great party scene, which it is, for three weeks out of the entire year. Outside of a few weeks in March, Daytona Beach is less than ideal for a 20-something looking to explore more of the world. But my best friend lived there, they have bars and night clubs, and I had an interview with a company that was actually going to pay me money to hang out with my best friend.

I went through the interview process and got to the salary negotiations. I had asked my Mom how much she and my Dad made at the height of their careers and was ready to make a hard stance that I wouldn’t accept anything under $25,000 a year.

I was sitting across from the hiring manager, and good ole southern boy who seemed to do everything in fast forward. He talked and walked faster than anyone I had ever met. The sun was coming straight into the blinds behind his head, which made it seem as if I was sitting across from a silhouette of this high-speed motor mouth.

He opened the conversation by saying “Our first year reps start at $37,500 a year.” My jaw dropped. I almost asked him to repeat himself, but my brain caught itself and my inner voice started screaming ‘get out of there before someone picks up on this racket you got going!’ So I accepted, shook his hand and entered the real corporate America.

This insurance agency could not have fit the stereotype of a rat race any better. The monthly sales meetings were started by ritualistic whoots and hollers as every male in the room worked to assert their dominance. The sales manager even wore face paint and a head dress while trying to convince us selling insurance was similar to going into battle. Everybody wanted to get close to the leadership team and was ready to fight their way to the top, no matter who got in the way.

The people in that office did work their asses off. As much as I did not fit in, it taught me that a full work day was 7am to 5pm and weekends were never out of the question in that environment. I don’t keep those hours anymore, but have no issue with it if the need arises because of the time I spent in that office.

We wore a shirt and tie every day. The parking lot was a huge slab of black asphalt. In the summer, you could see the heat and humidity radiating off of the ground, like a sea of hot lava. The building was a stand-alone, 5 story building. There was a bank on the first floor, leadership on the top floor and various departments on floors 2–4. The namesake of the company was a legend for building such a big company in a small community like Daytona Beach. He was in the process of handing the reigns over to his son.

The sales team was full of big personalities. Theses guys were motivated by reputation and money like nothing I’ve ever seen. They viewed large accounts as conquests and measured their value by the size of their book of business. They dressed sharp and always had a quick smile and semi-misogynist joke at the ready. Some of them did not have the best lives at home, but in the office, they were at the top of their game.

This is where I first started to wonder what was wrong with me for not being motivated the way these guys were motivated. I dreaded sales meetings because I just did not care who had the biggest account or who got to sit next to the boss. I tried hard to be motivated by the potential of being held up at sales meetings like a champ for bagging a six figure account, the watch and car it would buy for me and the acclaim it would grant me. I just could not do it. I realized that this was not going to be a good fit, but grinded it out for as long as I could. After about a year, I think the feeling became pretty mutual.

At 15 months, they moved me upstairs to sales. They sat me in an empty cubicle with a phone and a list of local businesses. I wrote down a script, called a few numbers and reconfirmed I was not going to be a sales guy. They realized that as well, but they clearly saw something in me.

The hiring manager that made me the initial offer brought me into his office one day and told me there was an opportunity in the Western Regional Office (Phoenix) and promised me it was not a sales job. Before he even began to explain the position I knew I was taking the job. My days as a sales person were numbered, so it was either take this job in a new city or go back to the drawing board in Orlando.

Two weeks later, I was on a plane out to Phoenix to meet the team and learn about the new role. It was an audit job and the role was traveling around to all of the Western locations and auditing the processes and procedures of the branch offices over the course of a week and giving a summary report to the leadership team at the corporate office. They were also giving me more money and moving expenses. I’m not sure who makes the rules at that place, but whoever it is deserves a big high give.

This job was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I got to travel to cities all over the country. Big cities like Seattle, Portland, LA, and Denver; and small cities that I would probably never go to under different circumstances like Bartlesville OK, Misula MT, Reno NV, El Paso TX and Glassboro NJ. I met all kinds of people and everyone was nice to me because their bonus for the year was impacted by the scores I gave them.

I ate local food and drank local beer from different cities every week. I asked to be put on as many trips as I possibly could. I spent St Patty’s Day in Seattle, had Deep Dish Pizza in Chicago, drank IPA’s in Southern California, ate Huckleberry jam from Montana and got caught in my first snow storm in Ft Collins, CO.

It also gave me the unique opportunity to tell hardened business people who had owned their business for 30+ years that, in some cases, they were doing things the wrong way and I, some shmuck from corporate who had opened his first insurance book two years ago, was going to tell them the right way to do it. It made for some very awkward conversations, but gave me a ton of experience with speaking to hostile groups.

One of our audits took us to Orange County, California. I knew very little about Southern California, other than what I’d seen on Baywatch back in the day. So I was excited. I stepped out of the airport and instantly knew this was going to be the next place I lived. The air was clear and crisp, the sky was a bright blue without a cloud in sight, there was no wind and the temperature was at that point where you can’t even feel the slightest hint of heat or chill. There were palm trees everywhere, reaching high into the air. Even though we were several miles from the beach, I could smell a pinch of salt in the air. There were mountains in the background in every direction.

The second night in town, I went to a happy hour in the Newport Beach Harbor and was hooked. I had never experienced a scene so serene. The sun glistening off the water as it dipped towards the horizon, silhouettes of the boats docked throughout the harbor and that amazing, fresh air made for the final confirmation that this would be my next residence.

There was a position available and in June of 2011 I made one-way drive from Phoenix to Orange County, one block from the water!

In Orange County, I returned to a desk with a book of business. The office specialized in professional service insurance for financial services companies. It was an interesting time to be in that industry with the financial collapse still on going and financial service companies going out of business and getting sued almost daily. The office was on the third floor of a bland brick building in a bland office park off of the highway. This office was much more laid back in many ways, somewhat representative of the coast it called home. Button up shirts and slacks were the attire I sported most often. Jeans Day was akin to pizza day in elementary school, used as a tool to please the masses. There was a very strict hierarchy in the office, with some members of leadership completely unwilling to talk to anybody below the management layer directly under them. While in Daytona there was a sense of intense ambition to be top of the class, in Orange County there seemed to be an intense ambition not to be blamed for any mistake. Everyone seemed to be on edge constantly, and anytime a mistake was spotted the first reaction was to go back through documentation to confirm it wasn’t your fault. The office had not grown in a long time and leadership was starting to feel the pressure. That pressure trickled down like an avalanche in the Rockies to the rest of the office. On a positive note, I did meet the love of my life there, but that’s for another story!

I worked in that office for a little over a year. I still had no idea what I wanted out of a job. I knew it wasn’t money, even though I really wanted my motivation to be money. I started to look at other jobs that I thought could make me a lot of money. This was 2013, so the recession and crumbling job markets were in full swing. I found a job posting for a boutique executive recruiting firm in Orange County. Being a one office shop, it was a far cry from huge, national corporation that was Brown and Brown.

I interviewed with the namesake of the company and decided, if nothing else, it would be interesting to learn from someone who started their own business and to try something new. I also knew I was letting work slip in the current role and wanted to get out of there before it caught up with me.

I started with the search firm in the role of a recruiter. Essentially a company would contract our firm to find a certain role for them (CFO, CEO, etc) and it was the recruiter’s job to find all of the candidates in the current database and any candidates through different web searches, cold call them and do initial interviews with those that were interested. Once a group of candidates were vetted, they would be interviewed by a principle consultant. The recruiter would then right a report on the top two or three candidates that would be passed forward to the client.

The atmosphere was more along the lines of that in Daytona Beach. The team generally liked each other, the sales team were the top dogs and the support team had a hard team with the egos on the sales team. There was also an expectation of long hours and large workloads. I thought there were somewhat lofty expectations on the role of recruiters, but they seemed to be very good at picking people for those roles that would push themselves to meet those expectations for a certain amount of time. There had been high turnover in those roles, which seemed to make sense.

Whatever it was I was hoping to find in this role, I did not find. I did, however, find a connection that would lead me to the next step, which would be the step I had been looking for the entire time. Jeff Black was a partner in the firm who specialized in mission-focused clients. He didn’t work with many non-profits, but the clients he had wanted candidates to buy into the company and the roles they were interviewing for, not someone looking to take a new step in their career. Jeff was cut from that cloth. He found passion and motivation in the people he helped by placing great leaders in great companies. I admired that about him, even if I didn’t feel the same passion at the firm.

I began to confide in Jeff that I wanted something more meaningful to me. I shared my growing interest in working with young people, especially young people who were in foster care. Being adopted, I felt compassion and empathy for those that did not have a connection to birth parents and were looking for ‘family’ from other areas. On a walk around the parking lot, Jeff shared an analogy with me that changed the way I thought about life and a career. He was referring to a non-profit that worked with dogs and an executive director of this organization had said there are board members and dog-walkers. Board members handle the businesses side, but the dog-walkers spend every day in contact with those dogs and change the lives of the dogs. I was starting to realize that I getting ready to be a dog-walker.

I came back from that walk and stared at my computer for about 45 minutes. I was struggling with all kinds of emotions. I had just signed a lease to live with the previously mentioned love of my life. At this time, we were still getting to know each other. I knew rocking the boat in a big way would impact more than just myself.

But I also realized I was at a crossroads of just getting by in a job that made me miserable and taking control of the next step and demanding more meaning and purposeful work out of myself. I worked up the courage to tell my boss I was ready to quit to go work with kids in foster care. I had no idea what that meant or what that looked like. I had no jobs lined up and hadn’t even talked to someone about a potential job. I didn’t even know what jobs actually worked with kids in foster care. I did know that the right step was to cut my safety net out from under me and see where I landed.

Unlike the movies, it was not instantly a great story. That was almost three years ago and it’s still difficult. I’m making much less than I was at that time. My current role is still in a state of uncertainty and flux every day. But I get up every day knowing that I’m doing exactly what I want to do. It has nothing to do with being away from corporate America, or working for a social organization, or even starting a business. It is the simple pleasure of knowing that I have decided this is what I want to do every day. I find meaning and purpose in that statement alone.

I have been in several jobs I really disliked, but have a lot of respect for those that were in those companies and motivated and driven to succeed. I believe that is the key to feeling complete in your career and life. That is how you create work/life integration. And it will work out the way it’s supposed to work out. It has a funny way of doing it every single time.

Here’s to the next step! Who’s coming with me?

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Jordan Bartlett

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