My Six-Year Search for a Work-from-Home Job

In May of 2000, my advertising agency was about to complete its 15th year of operation. There were just seven employees on my payroll, but we had developed a good reputation and some loyal clients during that time. Subsequently, the business earned a pretty good income for my family.

Then there was an unexpected turn of events. I was diagnosed with Nonhodgkin's lymphoma. Treatment began immediately and it continued for almost six months. I was not able to keep the agency going during that time, although my wife Doris made a valiant effort to keep it afloat for us. By the end of 2000, the cancer went into remission, but the agency was dissolved.

So Doris took a marketing job at one of our local manufacturing companies and I now needed to make a career change at 55. As much as I enjoyed those years running the ad agency, it amounted to a lot of long hours and late nights. I just didn't feel like I had it in me to return to that lifestyle. The more I thought about what I should do to earn money, I found myself leaning toward something I could do from home. So I updated my resume to reflect my experience in management and sales. (I included the sales because I was the account exec for the agency.)

The first job I took was a consulting position with a management consulting company. They gave me a week of training at company headquarters and sent back home to start making calls on companies the next day. I did this for about two months and finally quit. It wasn't my idea of working from home. I rarely saw home, in fact, because a good share of the appointments the company arranged for me were three or more hours away.

It was now clear to me that I needed to focus only on jobs that would allow me to work out of my home office. No car required. So I checked the job postings at HotJobs and Monster two or three times a day. A couple of weeks of this and I took a commission only job with a start-up outsourcing company. Due to my background, they brought me on as VP of sales, giving me complete responsibility for the hiring, training and management of all sales agents. The job was great. Within six weeks or so, I had at least a dozen agents reporting to me, each who were in turn working from their home office. But August became September and September turned into October and nobody had yet made a dime. I stayed on one more month, then finally quit. In hindsight, I should have realized that a start-up company needs time to start up. I was foolish to accept a job where my only income would be overrides from sales.

There is no need to bore you with the next three or four jobs I took before finally settling into something that worked for me. What I ultimately found is a sales management position with a B2B electricity and natural gas retailer. The position has given me a good salary along with generous overrides on commissions. And being in the energy business, the commissions are evergreen, meaning I will receive them monthly until such time that the customer switches to another energy provider. I have been with this company for more than a year and there is no outside travel, unless I choose to get some fresh air and sell their services to local industry.

All in all, it took me just over six years of job-hopping before I found something that allows me to work from home and gives my family the income we need. Others will find a good work-from-home opportunity much sooner than I did and some may need to beat the bushes longer than I did. There are a lot of work-from-home scams to avoid, a lot of jobs that fail to live up to their posting and, like me, you may make some wrong decisions along the way. So what! If you keep at it, I believe you can't help find the right work-from-home job for you.