How to Overcome The Challenges of Starting and Running a Resume Business?
Resume businesses face many of the same challenges as other businesses, such as overcoming changes to the economy, building and keeping client relationships, ensuring every bit of content that is written converts, and staying on top of professional development.
Of course, there are a few industry-specific challenges we face.
First, the challenge that comes from trying to write a great resume in the first place … and sometimes slipping into the role of “teacher” to educate our clients that what was provided is much better than the heap of junk they arrived with.
Second, the challenge that comes from working with clients who aren’t passively seeking new employment, but thrust into the job market with an understandable sense of urgency (unexpected unemployment from firing or downsizing, for example). We work with clients who are sometimes under duress.
Third, for many of us, we work in solitude, as one-man (or woman) Armies. We have limited interaction with the outside world, other than the time we spend speaking with clients.
Want to know the secret to overcoming most challenges in your resume business?
You probably think I’m going to advise you to learn how to write a faster resume, transform your customer service systems, or secure an office to get away from the solitude, but actually, those are just “symptoms” to business that you already know how to cure. We most often already know how to treat what ails us.
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Overcoming most obstacles is just about moving forward, putting one foot in front of the other. Yeah, not really a secret. Sorry.
But that’s it. You don’t need a master’s degree in marketing or a doctorate in psychology to start and effectively run a successful resume business. You just need will. There are tons of skills that people contribute to their success in business, but the few that get little attention and credit are sheer persistence, stamina, stubbornness, and fear from failure. When people ask, “Can I really run a successful resume business,” my quick thought response is, “I don’t know, can you?”
That’s really the difference between a successful business professional and someone who fails at the task. The ability to keep taking “licks,” getting back up, shaking it off, and moving forward. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. The ability to persevere when so many others throw in the towel and say, no more.
Who makes up today’s resume writers? The following probably provides a good snapshot:
People with formal and informal educations
People with marketing backgrounds … and those who have never marketed or sold a toothpick
People with little resume-writing experience and those who are award winning
People with only a few months in the business, while others have been in more than 20 years
People who run their businesses like corporations, pulling down multimillion-dollar revenues, while others are making less than $50,000 per year
People who are sole operators, while others have up to 12 contract writers on staff at any given time
People who work full-time, while others work only a few hours a month
The above are merely broad-stroke characteristics of what make up today’s resume writers. You might fall into one or two in this list, or none at all.
So, the challenges of starting and operating any business can in part be overcome by …
1. Recognizing that you have more grit inside you than you give credit
2. Identifying your strengths/weaknesses and adjusting your actions and strategies accordingly
3. Embracing continued formal and informal professional development — always strive to be better, do better (the School of Hard Knocks could arguably educate you just as well as Harvard Business School)
4. Understanding that you’ll wear many hats — some lighter, some heavier
5. Knowing that certain trials and tribulations are perfectly okay and part of doing business
6. Accepting that not everything will always go smoothly; sometimes clients can be jerks; sometimes resume projects aren’t easy; sometimes there’s more in the to-do column than there is in the to-done column
7. Believing that you are the decider of how your business runs, profits … and yes, fails
8. Avoiding letting people “rent space in your head” (the best piece of advice I ever got from my oldest brother, one of the smartest people I know)
