By the end of 2006, I shut down my Planning Coach financial planning ambitions, such as they were, and slowly decided on a new direction. I shifted my sights to working for a non-profit, one that was in an interesting field and that would be flexible enough to still allow me to drop off and pick up Allie without having to worry about a caregiver to deal with after-school time. I also wanted flexibility to take vacations even if it meant unpaid leave. I didn’t need a whole lot of income, but I wanted some, and I wanted to feel like I was making a contribution to my family and society at least until both Barb and I could retire in another 10-15 years. I had promised to Barb that I wasn’t just going to sit on my hands after I retired from Spirent, and I wanted to show Allie that I was something more than just a chauffeur and cook.
To be honest, one of the reason I started this whole Billzpage exercise several years ago was to come to terms with these years of partially casting about in the wilderness. I knew that taking care of Allie was job one and I was happy doing that, but I also knew that I wasn’t being very productive from day to day. Allie was now in middle school, busier with friends and activities that required less involvement from me. The Pfefferkorn house was built and we were well moved in. I had more free time and needed something more productive to fill it.
In writing this post more than a decade later, many of our activities in these years were muddled in my memories. I needed to sort out the jobs and travels which got mixed up in my mind. Working through this post and the 2006-2009 Family photos, I’ve been able to cut through some of the fog, though I can’t guarantee I’ve got everything right. I’ll admit there’s also some amount of self-justification and glossing over what was one of the most self-indulgent phases of my life. I’m not especially proud of these years but they were an education for me. I learned some life lessons and skills, and we took some great trips during very formative years for Allie. It might well be labeled my midlife crisis. I never felt it was a crisis but it was a period where I searched for what felt like a meaningful path.
AIPT
To investigate the world of non-profit job opportunities, I Googled my way to some websites that helped sort non-profit jobs and found a particularly useful one called Idealist.com. One of the first postings I found was for a Marketing Manager for the Association for International Practical Training, or AIPT. The non-profit was based in Columbia, Maryland, with a mission to “foster global training and cultural exchange.” The basics sounded good to me and I sent an application letter in early March 2007, just before heading to Florida for Spring Break.
When I returned in late March, I interviewed with the Director of Marketing, Shara Darden, and was impressed with the operation and its offices conveniently adjacent to the Columbia Mall. I was pleased to be quickly hired, even though some of the others at the company felt I was overqualified and might not fit in all that well with the young staff that would be my peers. They were willing to be flexible with my work hours, agreeing to a loose 9am-3pm regular schedule that I could supplement with additional hours at home.
I started learning about AIPT’s programs which centered on facilitating J-1 Visas for international students to work in the United States. AIPT marketed its services mainly to U.S. companies and leveraged relationships with universities and work programs around the world. AIPT also operated an older but smaller program called IAESTE that basically ran short-term work abroad and tour programs for U.S. college students, but the inbound AIPT programs were the larger part of the organization.
I worked on surveys of program hosts and participants, updated AIPT’s client database, and did some market segmentation and competitor analysis. I was happy working on projects of my own but I did indeed have a little trouble teaming up with some of the much younger, mostly female staff on other things. I was always something of an outsider wandering around the halls and it was hard for me to build up trust. I didn’t help myself when, a few months in, I had a presentation for the staff that I fumbled through with a flop sweat worthy of Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. I still can’t fathom why I stumbled so badly with basic presentation skills that used to be my bread and butter.
Organizationally, things were not going so great. AIPT was in a competitive market and when the financial crisis had its first rumblings in the summer of 2007, international visa programs were one of the first things that suffered, as did charitable donations. By September 2007, any function that wasn’t directly contributing to revenue — like me and my various analysis projects — began looking like luxuries.
Shara was under pressure to cut expenses and reluctantly let me know that they couldn’t afford to keep me on a full-time salary. She was willing, however, to work out an arrangement that let me work from home as a part-time contractor on limited projects. That actually was fine with me as it offered more flexibility over my day-to-day schedule with Allie and our vacation schedules which were ramping up. We identified a handful of initial projects and I went about the mechanics of setting myself up as a contractor.
WHD Planning
I decided to call my consultancy WHD Planning, keeping some tenuous link in my mind to the Planning Coach foray. I had some concerns that I would need to set up a new corporation with the state of Maryland and deal with additional taxes and bookkeeping, but after checking with my accountant, Bob Tuttle, we determined that I could operate as a self-employed contractor. All he suggested I do was set up a separate bank account. I kept track of my time and invoiced Shara at the grand rate of $50/hour (cheap!).
This arrangement with Shara and AIPT kept me reasonably busy though early 2008, but as the financial crisis deepened the entire organization came under a lot of stress. By summer the well had run dry and Shara was actually let go from AIPT as they downsized drastically.
So that was pretty much that. AIPT struggled along as a much smaller organization until 2011 when it was bought out by Cultural Vistas and the Columbia office was shut down. Shara decided to set up a marketing consulting firm of her own and farmed out a few projects for me (and in later years kindly hired Allie as a summer intern for a while). She later started a dance studio before deciding to move to California.
The downtime actually coincided with some busy travel plans I’d made for the summer. In June, Allie and I went on her class trip to Argentina which we extended into a visit to see Jill in the Galapagos. In August, Allie and I spent a week in Colorado with the Embreys before Barb came out. The three of us then headed to Maui and Kauai as part of our extended 25th anniversary celebrations.
For a while I cast about for other freelance marketing projects and possible local clients. I sent out dozens of letters and applied for other jobs that looked interesting. Nothing in particular panned out, and as the summer of 2008 wore on, the financial crisis made things more precarious. Everyone seemed to be getting progressively more nervous, less willing to make plans or spend on new programs. It was a terrible time to look to get hired for anything.
It’s hard to convey just how deep and widespread the financial crisis became, especially from September 2008 into early 2009. Stock prices (and my portfolio) plummeted and no one seemed to know what was happening or how much worse it would get. I was glued daily to CNBC, CNN and other news/business channels as unbelievable events unfolded day after day. The world seemed precariously close to a financial collapse and depression that might go on for a long time.
And, oh by the way, this was all in the midst of a presidential election that eventually swept Barack Obama into office. In late September, when the financial crash seemed at its worst, an emergency “Wall Street bailout” was cooked up; Congress (mostly the Republicans) dithered before finally passing it in early October. This package helped stabilize things a little and pretty much sealed John McCain’s fate. Obama’s win in November was a breath of fresh air and optimism, the first in a long time. I was greatly relieved to see George W. Bush and his cronies sent packing, but my goodness did Obama inherit a mess. Upon his inauguration, Obama introduced a major relief package but again Congress (mostly the Republicans, of course) dithered which pushed stocks and optimism down even further. A stripped-down version finally passed in mid-February 2009. A few weeks later, when financial firms started reporting short-term profitability the markets turned and started roaring back. The broader economy, however, took years longer to recover.
Live in Howard County
As I investigated local companies and business opportunities, I became more aware of local communications and information sources…and the lack thereof. Local newspapers were on the decline and in any case I’d never been impressed with the local Columbia Flier or Howard County Times (both operated by the Baltimore Sun since 1997 when they bought the formerly independent Patuxent Publishing Company). I was confronted with how difficult it was to find out about local businesses and news, much less restaurants and events, the things that made living more interesting.
I wasn’t the only one that noticed this lack of local information. A community of various bloggers spontaneously developed over the years but they tended to focus on their own idiosyncratic topics or perspectives. There were new media sites like Patch which launched in late 2007 but it seemed to focus more on local politics and school sports. Facebook was still relatively new and only just turning toward business applications and advertising. I had some experience with TripAdvisor and liked the way they crowd-sourced customer reviews, but it seemed more geared toward international or vacation travel, not local living. Yelp was still evolving and was not yet a ubiquitous site for local business reviews.
I decided to start a blog initially to get familiar with the technology, not really with an idea of doing anything commercial with it. I began with the Blogger platform and meandered a few months on various topics. Before long, I started writing capsule reviews of local restaurant meals and music events, mostly for my own information and education. After doing this for a while, it occurred to me that others might be interested in some of the reviews and local information; it could be the basis for my own site. I decided to build a site and maybe a business around the notion of living well in Howard County. I registered a domain for LiveInHowardCounty.com and went live with the site in October 2008.
I’ll be damned to discover that the site is still more or less alive, still under its secondary blogspot domain. I honestly thought I had shut it down, but there it is, still visible in 2021. (Now I wonder if I can still log in to my old Blogger account…and then again wonder why would I?) The LiveinHowardCounty.com domain, which I used to own, has since been taken over by a Coldwell Banker real estate agent, but my blog is still out there, dormant.
Here’s evidence I kept the blog going for about a year with nearly 200 individual posts. Most of the posts had to do with restaurants or specific events in the county, but a few, like Going Solar in Howard County, were on other topics. You can wander around the old site if you wish.
From the outset, I started gaining a small following, mostly from other local bloggers whom we were all happy to cross-promote. I kept track of some of my traffic statistics and can proudly note that I quickly got to a few thousand pageviews per month, averaging 50 visitors and 150 pageviews each day. It wasn’t too shabby a track record.
I started out trying to post something daily and kept up that pace for the first four months or so. Fairly early on, one of the other local bloggers offered some strong advice to learn how to build a pipeline of articles to have in reserve so I didn’t feel the pressure to produce something new every day. I was slow to heed that advice and instead started to slow down the pace by March, 2009.
I started to think about ways to monetize the site. At some point early on I started to accept simple banner ads from Google. I had thoughts of going directly to local business for ad buys but never made it that far. I wanted to maintain some independence in terms of content; in other words, I didn’t want to “sell” a blog post per se. But it was tempting. It was also tempting to walk into a restaurant, tell them who I was and fish for some freebies but I didn’t do that either.
In 2008, a restaurant named Bistro Blanc opened near our home in Glenelg. They offered upscale dining and wines and it was a treat to have them in the neighborhood. I wrote several posts about them and got to know the owner, Raj Kathuria. I noticed Bistro Blanc had a poor website and little social media, so around April 2009 I offered my services as a PR consultant. I started getting paid to update their website, doing some press releases and helping highlight some featured dinners. I took care not to do too many direct Bistro Blanc promotions in my blog, keeping some sense of firewall purity, but the line started to get fuzzy very quickly.
My site and I got some local recognition in a May 3, 2009 Baltimore Sun article highlighting Howard County bloggers, probably the peak of my erstwhile career. But I was already starting to wind down my focus on LiveInHowardCounty.com. I was already starting to reach a conclusion that, while I could make a little money from advertisements on the site, it would at best be a few hundred dollars per month — not enough to really make it worthwhile. I could maybe make more as a PR/marketing consultant for other restaurants but that wasn’t really an appealing career direction. I knew a fair amount about that world and it wasn’t something I wanted to do every day.
In April 2009, Obama signed a National Service Act that expanded the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program and he talked up the notion of serving the country to help the economic recovery. I didn’t know much about the VISTA program but I rather liked the notion of volunteering in an organized way to help the country. I had a lingering sense of guilt over never serving my country in a military or other capacity, and it seemed like a good alternative to explore. At some point in May, I started looking into the VISTA program to see what it offered.
You must be logged in to post a comment.