Hey, ya’ll.

It’s that season again. Over the last 18 months, a lot of marketing firms’ sales have gone quiet and a number of my friends have been laid off from agency or corporate jobs. Here’s what I tell them when they have called me.

• Lay down on the closet floor. There was a time my firm relied on signing two new clients every month just to make payroll. When our sales dried up, I had to lay off folks, some of whom had worked with me for over a decade. Every week brought a new torrent of emotion as I made cuts. Toward the end, I was so bleary eyed after insomnia and deep grief over it all that my husband found me curled up on my closet floor crying. He sat down next to me and asked what he could do. I told him I just needed a couple of days to be sad and angry, and he assured me I could take longer than two days to sit with my emotions. Yes, it’s just work, and Amy Poehler wrote, “Your career won’t take care of you. It won’t call you back or introduce you to his parents. Your career will openly flirt with other people while you are around. It will forget your birthday and wreck your car. Your career will blow you off if you call it too much. It’s never going to leave his wife. Your career is f***ing other people and everyone knows it but you.” It just hurts sometimes, and sometimes we must just let it hurt.
• Get by with a little help from your friends. In the first weeks of rebuilding my company as a consultancy with a contractor model that’s much easier to scale rather than a full-service agency with an employee model that required me to be on an endless hamster wheel, I talked with a lot of friends. I shared openly about what was really going on with me, and they, knowing me as well as they do, reflected to me all the things I had done right over the years, all the gifts I possessed, the strong track record I had accumulated. All I could see was what went wrong and where I could have made better choices, but they widened my perspective. I also connected with my long-time business coach Alicia Marie of People Biz, Inc., who has for more than a decade asked me the right sets of questions to get me thinking in new directions, pivot and build anew from a place of self-love rather than ambition.
• Get creative. Poehler continues, “Let me make a distinction between career and creativity. Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, ‘I like this. Do it again. You’re good at it. Keep going.’ That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world. Your creativity is not a bad boyfriend. It is a really warm older lady who has a beautiful laugh and loves to hug. If you are even a little bit nice to her she will make you feel great and maybe cook you delicious food.” In the quiet that ensued once I rightsized my company, I picked up an old copy of The Artist’s Way. In working through the text, I remembered how good I was at writing prose, and I reawakened my inner teenager who got such joy from writing short stories. In the last year and a half, I’ve compiled 18 short stories and started writing my first novel, an allegory about family recovery. Every morning when I wake, I write two pages, which starts each day with a reaffirmation that writing is my gift and it is valuable whether or not I make money from it. The practice has been life changing.
• Remember, this too shall pass. Now that I’m 30 years into my career and 16 years into owning and operating Big Buzz, I can look back and see the various cycles. A friend of mine in the Women Presidents Organization told me once that for every 10 years in business, 2 are crappy, 2 are terrific and the other 6 are normal. I find this to be true. Remembering this cyclical nature helps me more readily recognize and enjoy the banner years and trudge semi-happily through the tough ones. This too shall pass. The good, the bad and the norm.

 Just keep going.

Since 2007, Big Buzz® has helped Stage II to Stage III organizations systemize marketing to achieve growth goals. Founder and CEO Wendy O’Donovan Phillips is the author of two books available on Amazon, Kaboom and Flourish, multiple data-driven eBooks, has been published in McKnight’s, in Forbes, and has been quoted in The Washington Post, ABC News, and Chicago Tribune. She has lectured for the American Dental Association, Argentum, several chapters of LeadingAge, and dozens of other organizations in front of audiences ranging in size from 25 to 3,000. She has been honored by the American Marketing Association for excellence in her field and has been named a Gold Key Award Winner by the Business Marketing Association. In her two-decades-long career, she has consulted with hundreds of organizations globally to support improved marketing clarity, strategies and outcomes. Get details: visit www.bigbuzzinc.com and follow Wendy.