This Business and Moment...

In between trying to firefight pretty much everything right now (man, I could cry sometimes lol) I think we have a couple of good leads coming in for emotuit so plugging away still. Our developer had a motorbike accident so ****** himself up and was out, and so Sean had to sort **** out and get stuff done. We had/ve a sales person, who realised that it's going to take a lot of calls to generate leads (no ****) so now can't commit to anything until Oct. So I'm back to hammering leads, while trying to recruit a new infra person, as well as another data person. We have 2 people in the pot though on it.
Oh, and M$ bizspark sub runs out in 10 days and I can't afford to pay the 3k it'll cost to spin up everything, so need to try and work that out somehow... hence the crying.


To take my mind off everything I have been trying to ride more (proper fat **** now, since I've not ridden for months now and eaten/drank loads) so want to look after myself a bit more. Also been painting some more, too. www.instagram.com/rosco.studios it's a nice head clearer sometimes.

I was also bored in the office on Monday so built this: https://rickandmort.me/ cost me 2.50 for the domain, and I have a month free on shopify, so virtually free at the moment. Built a quick FB page for it and automated as much as I can at the moment www.facebook.com/rickandmortme

How's everyone doing?
 
Delvis said:
I swear I've seen this somewhere..... Is this new?

On another note, I've seen a job pop up, no idea if I should remotely look at it, same pay but more benefits, technically closer to home (only by a bit).... Just don't know if I'd be moving from one place to another only to get depressed again
Click to expand...
Why not look at it? Are you happy where you are? What is lost in looking? Find out more and if you don't like it, do nothing.


"The key to change... is to let go of fear."
 
Love to hear all this sort of update! Sounds like people are smashing it!

My end emotuit is slow, same old **** really. I have outstanding **** I need to push hard and I'm still trying to scale down our infra and manage that before year end, as well as interviewing people and managing accounts and handholding them/ trying to get new ones!

I've seen a role internally here at novartis that's really what I enjoy, which is more on the emotuit side of things. It's for a Head of GDU (Global Discovery University) which is managing their learning stuff here. I'd NEVER get an interview with my CV, but I could nail every point of the job description. It's all about using technology to improve learning, consolidating LMSs, analytics, understanding the needs of users etc. Which is, you know, what I do... on top of emotuit I have holomua which is a career management tool understanding how to map learning internally to people's prospective career paths etc. so understanding, I feel I could smash it.

I just need to find a way to get a sit down with the hiring manager to talk, as he's the person who used to be in that position in the first place... I think then I'd be OK, but need to find out the best way to approach it. He's like top band on the org chart. :/ Will try and work out the best email to send I think...
 
Good luck man, keep pushing!

I had a nightmare last night on the phone to a customer we're setting things up with and it's taken me so long and a lot of money with them so far, and we can't connect to one of our services. Turns out it's down, and our website is down... and a lot of our stuff is! I went nuts. The guy is a friend, I would class him as a very good friend, we went to Uni together and he wanted in on what we do a while back. He was on 5% equity and said he would look after our cloud infra and be VP Infra, with the clause in the contract that said if he had to do more than a days work a week, he'd get 10%.
We moved from a UK company to a US Corp a while back and he fought to make sure that the contracts stipulated this. So he fought for his 10% and got it, but of late, or even going back a while now to be honest, he's not putting in the work we need. He's not involved at the high level, so hasn't been doing the things he needs to do. Last night I lost it. He came online and got some stuff back up, but I was the one how got the last stuff up at 12am. HE had buggered off again before everything was confirmed working.
I need to send him something today and outline all of this, but I know what he's like. He'll go ape **** and take it all personally, but at the end of the day I'm the one who's put their families life saving into this, I need someone who is reliable and he isn't. If it goes **** up for him, nothing lost other than some time, but for me it's more than that and I'm not having it.

Need to work out how to broach this constructively.
 
Just sent him an email. All business and professional, and outlined all things. Asked how he thinks we should proceed here. I will catch up with him preferably once he'd read it and had a chance to bitch about me to his Mrs (who has never met me but doesn't like me because his parents don't like me (I liked fast cars and booze, and they thought it was my fault their son did too)) which will be nice.
 
Good news Phate!

I've been having a really hard time at the moment, everything feels like it's one thing after another on top of me that I can't brush off. I have swings, just in a low one at the moment with lots I don't know what I can do about. Never the less, I'm off to speak at this conference next week, I hope it gives me a bit more focus emotuit wise and helps me figure out a few big things that need figuring out. I've been feeling really down since Brazil, and more piled on top which just made it worse.

On the contract side of things, I so badly hate what I do now and it's just so far from what I do and love. I'm likely to get extended as my colleague has got a new job (my only counter part in Basel) which I'm glad for him as our boss is a total moron when it comes to business and management. Regardless of emotuit stuff, I always like to have a side plan as well and hence applying for the Global Discovery University role at Novartis, too. I emailed the current person in that job as I think I mentioned earlier in the thread, and heard nothing, and then got rejected for the role at the weekend so was a bit down about everything.
Yet, this afternoon the guy emailed me asking if I wanted to meet up for a beer to explore things a bit. I highly doubt it'd lead to this position for me, it's a truly amazing role, but it might get me networking with people (well, him) where opportunities could arise. So I'm going to make sure I get all dressed up proper like and I've been researching as much as I can on what they're up to/ have been doing so I can have a really good chat with him tomorrow night. Hopefully I can hold a decent conversation and if nothing else make a good contact.

It perked me up a little from my blues either way, reminded me that you have to just keep pushing.
 
My issue is just the length of the sales cycles and the fact that I currently support the family money wise, and we couldn't live without that coming in. Which is a pain.

I'm actually nervous about having a beer tonight with this guy. He's functionally like 3 levels down from the CEO, although that's never phased me one piece as I've met way higher people and chatted over whiskeys/ beers/ **** faced lol I suppose it might be because I am desperate for an out here, and feel this could be it that I feel that pressure. #SelfShrinkage
 
Yea, it was good. Chatted about what they had been up to since he joined 4yrs ago. I had knowledge of some of this as I did a lot of research on it before, and also could chime in / build on the conversation with my experiences, which was good, I found.
He asked me about my background and we generally chatted. He was up front that he didn't think I was right for the position of Head of Global Discovery University (which he was doing up until 3 months ago) but as we talked about all aspects of what we both had done/ were doing he said that he'd been given the sign off to build a team around digital learning. They have just had a project to consolidate 14 learning management systems in to one, with all learning content rationalised too (over 440k pieces of content migrated), but need a team around it, where he is yet to define the roles, but thinks there could be something in there.
He also said that they were yet to deal with analytics and that was on their short term radar as well. We talked a bit more in depth about the area and again he said there could be something in there too, he's just got to work out what that would look like too.

He asked if I was talking to anyone else about roles yet, which leads me to think he was quite keen and he told me about someone else who used to work here, went off and built their own company in edtech and then he persuaded him to come back. I got the feeling he could see synergies between me and this guy, as he said we should also get together for a drink.

We agreed to keep in touch over the next few months as he defines what they need and I said I'd be happy to help him define what they could look like too, if it would help.

Sent him a thank you email last night when I was back and reiterated that I'm looking forward to staying in touch and seeing where he thinks I could fit in his organisation etc.

I really think it was useful. He got to know that I was more than a random CV, and could get the measure of my experience and knowledge in our convo, so hopefully something will come out of it.
I got a 12 month renewal through for this contract today for the whole of 2018 and normally I'm glad, as it's stability and money in, but I'm like pffft.

I also applied for an internal role for a Global Program Director Predictive Analytics, which sounds interesting. While not around learning, it's all analytics around drug discovery. It would't be my first choice, (if I had to choose between that and a learning job) but if it's a good level I could possibly use as negotiation.

Will see how things go over the next few months...
 
Been having a tough time lately. We got a large tax bill, which was bigger than we expected, but knew one was due really and I've put all the savings into my business which is obviously not paying off to be able to pull anything back for it, which has caused a heap of strain at home. Like, hugely but hey.
In the meantime I've been trying to work out how to get out of this contract and into a job I like day to day, although they have unofficially asked if I'd like the internal job (or to apply for it at least) of my full time colleague who's leaving. I don't, I ******* can't stand the morons in that team but they have only renewed my contract for 3 months, which has now made my wife put pressure on me to take a job I don't want, because it's for the family, and I should just suck it up.
Obviously I don't want to do that and that meeting I had with the Head of Learning the other week led to another meeting with a colleague of his tonight, we chatted about some stuff and he mentioned a job that he was recruiting for. It's for a Head of Capability Building Digital Transformation and the description sounds really interesting. I'm not counting my chickens before they roost, but it's one avenue to explore at least. I also applied for a role doing program management for predictive analytics, which seemed interesting too. Not in the learning space, but interesting data use for drug discovery. Hopefully something gives some fruit, it's been a depressing end to the year quite frankly, and struggling to shake off the funk!

/moan
 
I actually go via another company. It's kind of an umbrella company, but here in Swiss you need a company to go via, you can't do limited company as most companies have preferred suppliers list etc. but I am contracting currently.
What's weird here, is that you're actually no better off contracting vs. perm. You can normally negotiate a very good salary, just shy of your contracting rate, which means with holiday, the bonus and very good pension, you're normally better off. Miles different from the UK in that respect.
 
I had a "pre-screening" HR phone call about the Head Building Capability Digitisation & Analytics role yesterday. HR lady was lovely. Think it went OK. Hoping that I can skip the phone convo with the Hiring manager and go right to a f2f meeting due to the recommendations to speak with me by her peers, but we will see how that goes. Fingers crossed anyway. Seems like a decent position.

I'd love to hear something positive from these other 2 positions, too. But hey, I'll just wait and see... nothing has come about yet.
 
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