What goes up…

Not really sure why this seems to be the status quo for the past few years but I’m on the job market again. Shortly after Acronis changed leadership, they got rid of the Channel Development position along with a few others. It made sense, a majority of the company was based in Mass. and I was only 1 of 6 people working in a small Emeryville office. After the VP of Sales was released, I saw the writing on the walls. Such is life in high-tech I guess. At that point I had been in long enough not to have my feelings hurt, when you work for growing companies they have to make financial decisions that tend to lay-offs versus other measures. The only bad part of that situation was that the US was in (still is in most aspects) a recession, unemployment was at an all time high and the job market was minimal. It wasn’t unheard of to be applying for a job and have 60-100 other people all vying for the same position and many of them over qualified but in need of work.

Then I was introduced to Paragon Software and they needed some help. I was brought on to build the channel and help the existing sales team become more channel friendly and work with high value partners. The company was a great fit, VAR recruitment doubled and revenue in the channel grew steadily and was becoming predictable. One of the reasons postings have been so infrequent here is that besides the channel sales/recruitment/enablement tasks, I was also building the social media platforms and doing some product management for the company. I explain that more about the social media piece in this post. Actually I don’t know how I kept all of the parts moving since I was multitasking at such a high rate. The truth is I was having fun, learning a lot and the team was a good group of people so working long hours didn’t bother me. I still had time to play with Grayson and spend time with family and friends but all of the normal free time (like writing for my blog) was used getting the job done.

To make a long story short, the company needed to make some hard decisions and they affected the entire US team. Again since I was located out of the HQ in Irvine, it could have something to do with the decision. Sad, but that’s how businesses need to be run sometimes and in the course of activities my role for the channel went away and the other tasks I was handling were distributed to those that were left in the US and to our other offices in Germany. Everything is in capable hands and it was fun to build a channel around such great products. So this leaves me on hunt for another great company to be a part of. The silver lining is that I am walking away from Paragon with a whole new set of skills that I can tap into for positions I would probably never have applied for in the past.

This all reminds me of a great book I read years ago called “Who Moved My Cheese“.

That’s the quick update.