This weekend I went to Ocotlan, my hometown, to celebrate my mother’s birthday, she is now 60 years old, but I also came up with some unpleasant news about one of my brothers. And the thing is that apparently my brother Felipe is going to lose his job in the coming week, he had been working in a Ford Motor Dealership as Manager of the branch, and as you know U.S. auto makers have been facing a lot of financial troubles these days. That’s too bad as he has a family to take care of and these are not necessarily the best times to be unemployed.
I know myself from experience what it feels like to be unemployed, as I also lost my job earlier this year, but that was for a different reason. At that time, it just happened to be that I was working on the wrong side of a big transaction to merge two corporations, Solectron and Flextronics and the fears of an economic recession were far to become a reality. Now things are different, amazing how things change in just a few months, now the problem is that the U.S. economy is officially in recession and the effects are starting to be felt across several sectors and countries like in my family’s case.
A different type of crisis that requires a different type of actions
My father and I spent Sunday afternoon talking about the current recession and discussing ways of helping my brother. My dad worked for only one company during his lifetime until he finally retired when I was still at college. Now as we all know, finding a great company where we can work there the rest of our lives and get a good pension for retirement is very difficult. Dad was explaining to me that throughout the years, he has seen that the value of the workforce has continuously been going down as technology has been replacing people and the fact that there is more offer of graduates looking for a job. 30 years ago, the work of an engineer, or any other professional for that matter, was much more appreciated and currently there are some engineers that are as regarded as a technician used to be several years ago.
As I see it, there’s going to be two outcomes from current recession, one is that bad companies will inevitably go bankrupt or will be eaten by bigger ones and second, the ones that are strong enough, will survive but it will be through a very painful process of optimizing the last penny in their resources which of course would include cutting some jobs. But the issue won’t stop there, I believe that when economy starts to recover, most of those jobs that were lost as a result of such measures, won’t be recovered. I think it makes sense, if you find that you can do more with less why would you want to go back to keep spending more for the same result?
So my dad as asked me to help my brother to set up a business in Internet and I agreed to help him. Internet is full of opportunities given its global reach and since I’ve been trying to set one up myself for several years, not to mention countless of mistakes, I think I could help him to quickly jumpstart to make a few dollars online and avoid the mistakes that I’ve made. I hope I really can be of help, when you are taking about feeding a family things get really serious so we can’t fail this time.
Héctor Sánchez is a blogger from Ocotlán, Jalisco and he is currently residing in Guadalajara. Héctor is a Public Accountant from Universdidad Panamericana with a Posgrade in Corporate Finance from the same university, and he is currently working as financial analyst for Hewlett Packard. Even though he works in Finance for a living, in his spare time, he is a geek and he likes to build blogs, websites and studies everything related with Internet Marketing and several ways of building businesses online. He is also an active member of Toastmasters, where is the President in turn of his local club, Toastmasters Atlas Chapalita Club.
