Leaving The Corporate World

Of course it’s been a while since I posted, so much fun stuff has happened and I’ve honestly just been too busy. I’ve always kept this blog just to vent my rants, complaints, and the occasional update on projects. So not much will change, I do expect to post some random thoughts and updates. A lot of “local” people read this (not sure why) so I may be including some rants that only make sense if you live in this area. I’ll try my best to make sense though.

Oh and one last thing, if you get offended easily, please hit the “back” button now!

Leaving the Corporate World

Not a ton of people know that along with being an affiliate for the past several years, I still worked in the corporate world. Mostly doing Legal Affairs and Loss Control type of stuff. I could go on and on, but I won’t. It was a tough tough decision to leave a secure job, which most people would call a dream job. I made a fat salary and good benefits. I also worked 18 hour days for the last 2 years.

I would wake up at 6am, hit the office by 7:30 (was a 30 minute drive) – Deal with issues all day, get home at 6pm, have dinner with the family, then work on “web stuff” until 1-2am. Sleep for a bit and do it all over again. Funny thing was I loved every minute of it. But I never spent much quality time with the family, my health was suffering, and I just honestly got tired of the corporate world.

So I was working on my personal network of sites, working for Rakeupdate, and working for a very large corporation. It was fun, but it just wore me out. I don’t want to get into the Rakeupdate crap right now, maybe somewhere down the line.

Working for yourself is hard work

What Have I been doing?

I get this question a lot lately. I’ve mostly been working and spending time with my wife and kids. We have 6 kids and the youngest are are two 13yo girls, and my oldest are 17 and 17, and they are graduating this year. I’m only 33, so as you can guess we started young and with them graduating I’m feeling old as hell! We are starting to visit colleges now, one of our boys has been asked to come to several schools to play college baseball, and the other scored really high on the ACT test, so schools like Harvard, Stanford, Notre Dame, etc – All want him to come for a visit. Both will likely get a nice scholarship.

It’s looking like all our kids will have an opportunity to go to college, which is just amazing. Less than 10 years ago my wife and I were struggling to pay our daycare bill. We were poor, like couldn’t afford cable TV poor. Her family was a little better off financially than my family, but neither of us grew up as a spoiled “rich kid”. Its funny how some decisions which at the time seem unimportant, turn out to change your life, and the life of those around you. I’ll post more on that later.

So I’m still adjusting

I guess I was sorta foolish to think I would just make a smooth transfer from corporate life to working 100% for myself. It’s just been tough to adjust. My sleep schedule was tootally whacked out initially, I didn’t set a good work schedule, etc. I’ll have to make a post about working for yourself. The transition can be brutal.

Anyway, I have plans for a lot of posts just to get some things off my chest. So now that I have this update out of the way, I’ll be posting more soon. OH almost forgot! I have turned into a huge golf nut, which is really just LOL to my wife. Sure I was a jock in high school, but golf caught me off guard. But:

1. It gets me out of the house/office

2. Gives me wife some much needed “alone” time – This is serious since I no longer have a normal job

3. Since I’ve started playing I’ve lost 20lbs

4. My sons are addicted too, and so are my daughters. So now we have an extra family activity we can do together. We have access to a very nice country club where we can hit the driving range at 3am if we want too

5. Well I’m a business man and I make websites. Golf is a Multi Billion Dollar business each year. So of course I’ve met some new clients, and bought Arkansas Golf
(Still under construction obv) and I’m working with a couple very nice Golf Country Clubs.

6. Best of all I now have a hobby which isn’t on a computer lol