Working For Myself, On My Terms

To manage your career and take control of your working life, you may have to walk a winding path. But, as Laurie Lamont discovered, the further you travel, if you navigate well, the more the scenery will appeal to you.

"Now, when I look at my career I have a lot more ownership in it," says Lamont, 48. "I have a different outlook towards it. I feel more in control."

Lamont starting on her path in Newmarket in the mid-1970s and eventually found her way to the resort town of Collingwood, where she runs a small company, Bookkeeping Etc., providing support services to small businesses.

It's work that fits her perfectly. A life-long learner, she consistently adds courses to her business administration training and prides herself on her organizational abilities.

"I like to organize and find the easiest way to do things," she says. "That's what I like to do."

Lamont met her first client seven years ago, a new entrepreneur like herself. "He needed a set of books opened, needed to be organized, but just needed somebody a couple of days a week. ... I figured if I could get two days a week from him, maybe I could get one day a week somewhere else, half a day somewhere else and I could put all those things together and make a job."

Crafting a job out of several small ones was new territory for Lamont. For most of her working life, she'd held traditional jobs. The last one, in municipal government, was rewarding, challenging and well-paid, she says. Although she loved the work, her department was short-staffed, the hours were gruelling and there was little appreciation of her efforts.

"I was near exhaustion," Lamont recalls. "And a little voice inside me said, If I'm going to give this much and work this hard, it will be for me, on my terms. So, I left."

It was a gutsy decision for a single mother raising two teenaged daughters.

"I kept saying to myself, I have a lot of skills, I've had a lot of jobs in my life, surely I can do something to support my family."

Lamont's confidence was anchored in solid research. She hadn't been reading studies and demographic projections but had researched informally, as anybody can do at any time.

"For a few years before I started my business, I read the classifieds in the Star as though I was looking for a job, just to see what employers were looking for, what skills they were looking for. ... If you read those ads religiously you start to see a pattern. ... That's when I started taking more courses and thinking about how to be more marketable."

Lamont was equally well informed about the world around her. "I have this thing for learning," she says.

"I'm very inquisitive. I'm an avid reader. I love books. I love newspapers. And I have to check in with Newsworld or CNN at least once a day."

As she grazed for information, Lamont started to notice changing patterns in the workplace. More people were doing what she was considering, starting home-based businesses. And, she reasoned, many would need help from someone like her.

A key navigational tool, on any career path, is the ability to market yourself. Lamont accomplished this "in the simplest of ways," she says.

She visited accounting firms in her area and left a resume and short description of her services. And she relentlessly handed out her business card. "A person's best friend is their business card and you never leave home without it," she says. "You hand it out to everyone you meet. It's amazing how they end up coming back to you."

Along the way, Lamont tapped into entrepreneurial qualities she didn't know she had.

"Once I took the lid off the jar, this stuff came flowing out," she says. "When I look back, I see that I was always innovative. I could see ways that things could be done differently. I could look at a situation and see a business opportunity that someone else might not see."

Despite such natural abilities and her best efforts, success didn't happen overnight. "For at least two years, we lived very frugally," she recalls.

In many ways, the hardest part was shifting her mindset. "I had to re-program my outlook," is the way she puts it. "For the first year, I was consciously aware of not having a cheque in the bank every two weeks, and you can forget about sick days. ... But I was convinced I could make it work. It just felt right."

Several years ago, when her nest emptied, Lamont entered a different phase of her life. She sold the family home in Newmarket and began searching for a smaller home, eventually finding just what she wanted in Collingwood.

Moving from the periphery of a large urban centre to a smaller community was invigorating in a personal sense but a setback for her business. "The first year here was very tough," she admits. "I still had clients from the Newmarket area but I wasn't picking up work here."

As often happens when the going gets rough, Lamont began to second-guess herself.

"I thought, maybe I'm not cut out to be self employed," she recalls. "It's just not coming together."

A newspaper ad for a job with an accounting firm caught her eye; she applied and was hired.

"But I continued to work part-time for the clients I had. Thank God! Because within three months I knew it wasn't going to work out."

Ever resourceful, Lamont dusted off her self-employment dreams, turned her employer into a client and began, once again to market her home-based business.

Her efforts paid off. By 2001, Bookkeeping Etc. was thriving to such an extent that it was "taking over my home," she recalls with a laugh. She rented a small office and hired two part-time staff.

Lamont hasn't looked back since. "I'm now making more than I did before but it took a bit of time.

"Opening your own business is like giving birth," she says. "It's like a child you created, you have to nurture it and look after it."

Building a thriving career doesn't necessarily mean becoming self-employed. However, if you're well-informed and resourceful, like Laurie Lamont, you can take charge of your working life in any workplace and look for opportunities others don't recognize.