Ebb and Flow
When I started my first consulting job we were flush with work. I was just a field tech and I was easily pulling 50-60 hour weeks traveling from site to site collecting samples. Things were good and money seemed endless. But our office’s main contract, and the company’s biggest contract was up for renewal. Right before we started to put together the proposal, our office manager held a meeting to discuss the upcoming bid and what to expect. He kept mentioning the “ebb and flow of consulting” where contracts come and contracts go and this renewal bid is something normal. But there was no need to worry because we were doing a good job. We should disregard the fact we won this contract the last renewal from another firm. And most of us weren’t worried because we were doing a good job and at the time the work felt endless.
Fast forward 6 months and things are slow. We weren’t awarded the renewal and the winning bid was the firm that previous had the contract. Again, the “ebb and flow of consulting.” We had a contract and lost it, they lost a contract and then won it. Despite giving us reassurances things will be alright and business will pick up, I got shipped off to another office for a temporary assignment in order to remain billable.
Fast forward a few weeks and I am wrapping up my temporary assignment. The manager of the office I am helping out at pulls me aside and needed to tell me something. There was a layoff. 10% of the company was let go. My home office took the biggest hit with a quarter of the staff let go. I begin to panic because I realize I was alone in his office and I thought I was one of the people let go. I wasn’t. He just wanted tell me privately before he told his office so I was not shocked by the news. A side note, that was probably the kindest thing a manager has ever done for me.
When I returned to my home office, we had a early Monday morning meeting to brief us on the previous week’s events. It didn’t take more than 5 seconds before “ebb and flow” was brought up and at that moment I was officially checked out of that meeting and that firm. If layoffs is a routine part of environmental consulting due to losing contracts, how secure is my job really? Some of the better office staff was lost because they were working on the wrong project. They weren’t let go because they sucked at their job. The company lost their client so they lost their job. That simple.
Within a year of that meeting I was out of that firm. I found a new consulting firm to join that was flush with work. Things were great and I was busy for several years until those contracts dried up too. Too many people not enough work. This time around I was not so lucky. I’m not surprised. If you follow my blog, I’ve been looking for a new job for a while, partly to get out of this contract cycle. But I couldn’t land a new job before I lost my old one. So as I am applying for jobs, I just keep thinking back to my old manager: The ebb and flow of consulting.