Career Curveballs: All Who Wander Are Not Lost

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share how they turned setbacks into success.Read all their stories here.

We are all so different when it comes to our career choices and how we actually end up where we are. How many times have you said to a person starting their career, or for that matter, still at school, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The first lawyer we had at Boost was a dynamic young woman who knew when she was 10 years old that she wanted to be a lawyer. It was really simple for her, but I think she is the exception.

I have one son who is 15 who told me that he will have a dual career: one being a Reiki Master and the other a world leader. I think that is a pretty good combination. My 5-year-old daughter told me she wants to be the tooth fairy, which I thought might pose a bit of a challenge!

So, where did I fit in? Growing up, my first job was picking strawberries at a local farm, I was 14 years old and was paid by weight for what I picked. My next job at 15 was a checkout chick at Target, where I worked whilst I was at school and managed to save enough to buy my first car. I went to a technical college designed to create trade work, i.e. they had a great sheet metal, woodwork and secretarial course. The upside is that I am pretty mean with a soldering iron. The school finished at year 11 - it was just assumed that after year 11 you would then go and get a job. None of my friends went to college. I think a couple went to a Tafe, but a university degree was just not what you did. So after passing my typing test with a very quick 100 words a minute, I was off into the work force.

My first full time job was working for McCann Erickson, an advertising agency that was located on St Kilda Road in Melbourne. It was the 80’s with great parties and long lunches. My job title was Media Assistant, but my real job was typing numbers into tiny boxes making sure our client (GMH) received the airtime that they paid for and my boss had a coffee on his table.

After about 8 months at McCann Erickson, I thought I would try modeling. There was no real success there, but I was the house model for Adidas and if you were ever into greyhounds, I made the front cover of Greyhound News - yes, I know, very impressive. While I was modeling I worked part time at the local gym. I sold memberships and ran a few Aerobic classes, but after experiencing no real success as a model, I started to work towards my real passion, which was to travel around the world and have an adventure. Working three jobs for 12 months enabled me to save $6,000 to start my travelling adventure.

First stop was the San Francisco Girl Scouts where I was a camp counselor after joining the program Camp America. After four months of teaching blind, deaf and able-bodied American kids all about making candles, learning to swim and singing songs, myself and four friends travelled around America for the next three months. I went on to the UK after the American adventure and through an agency, obtained a job as a nanny to three small children in Le Coteau in France. No one in the village spoke English, and I certainly did not speak any French, so it was quite a lonely 6 months. After a call from a girl friend who landed herself in Germany, I left my job as a nanny (the mother was horrible) and went to Germany to have some more fun. Seeing the funds running low we heard about jobs in the Canary Islands, so we backed our bags and headed for Tenerife, Spain. My job there was called an OPC (Outdoor Promotions Consultant), a new flash title for someone who encouraged people to go into timeshare hotels to see if the sales persons could sell them the timeshare. After doing this job in Spain and in Portugal it was time to leave this very lucrative career (not) and head to the South of France, where I heard that you can get jobs on the yachts. So with my exaggerated resume I landed myself a job on a big white yacht, owned at the time by an oil man from Texas. Six weeks after I landed this job (which was lucky, as I was dead broke) David Bowie bought the yacht. So here I am at 21 working on a bona fide rock star’s yacht in the South of France.

We cruised up and down the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean for over two years. After a while it was time to return back to normality, so back to Australia I came. I was now working for Village Roadshow as a cinema manager at Knox City. After 9 months I was asked to assist in setting up Cinemas in Singapore, which I did for a year before returning to Melbourne to work as a Publicist for United International Pictures. Lots of movie stars and directors later and after meeting the man of my dreams, we started to look at the possibility of our own business. Some failed attempts included touring world class comedians, which ended with an unknown guy from San Francisco called Bob Smith. We tipped our toes into publishing. But we eventually found our passion, which was Boost. The rest as they say, is history.

Even though my career journey is certainly not the norm, each and every job I obtained did help me with the skills required for business. The biggest skill is problem solving, and being a young girl with no one to help you solve the millions of problems that pop up when travelling in countries that are not English speaking makes you think outside of the square and enforces you to stay with that problem until the solution is found. Sounds like business to me.

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