Page 38 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

26 COACH YOURSELF TO A NEW CAREER

her desire for actual contact with the animals. She thought of volunteer-
ing at dog shelters in her spare time, but that wasn’t a moneymaking
proposition either, and she was too tempted to adopt the dogs herself.
Melissa then came up with the idea of running her own dog day-care
business in Austin, Texas. She calls it Hip Hounds. Again, Melissa knew
that she required financial security, so she started the business while still
working full-time at the law firm. She used her evenings and weekends
to take out a business loan, research the best location for a dog day-care
center in Austin, buy a desirable facility, and hire the managers and staff
to run it while she carried on with her work at the firm.
Needless to say, she didn’t have much spare time on her hands, but
keeping her day job gave her the financial security she felt she needed
to know she didn’t have to make an immediate or huge profit from her
business. She knew she had the income to pay her home mortgage and
other obligations. Far better to be busy than financially stressed! Working
full-time also forced her to define the procedures and policies in a man-
ual and train and hire a full-time manager and staff to operate the place
without her. This freed her up to work on the more interesting projects
such as marketing campaigns to get new clients (dogs) for her venture.

Talane interviews her client, Melissa:

What was your career like before you started Hip Hounds?
Being HR director of a large law firm required working with a lot of
stressed-out, busy people. That, in and of itself, was a career change.
I was an attorney before that and wasn’t happy with that, so I went
on to become an HR director at the law firm, thinking it would be
more fulfilling. But had I had coaching earlier, I would have realized
that people were not my passion; dogs were!

How did doing the work on identifying and satisfying your personal
requirements and needs make a difference?
It is so important to realize what it is in life that you actually crave.
For me, that was security and balance. I knew that financial security
was a need of mine, but I had no idea about the balance thing.