No job? Make your own with a startup

So you’ve been stood down, made redundant, or simply have spare time that you’d otherwise spend commuting. Is now your moment to launch a new business idea?

When jobs are scarce, the temptation is there to create your own. The fear, however, is surely also present. After all, the Australian economy lost an estimated 594,300 jobs in April alone and many people are feeling bruised from redundancies and layoffs.

Slingshot founder Craig Lambert has been at the early stages of startups as an investor and mentor and tells Get Hired Australia he’d never inherently discourage anyone from working on a startup, even amid a pandemic.

“The early stages of a startup are always going to be hard, no matter what,” he says. “Startups need capital and typically, an entrepreneur that has the capability to start their own business can self-fund for a period of time. Maybe they’ve picked up a redundancy payment and that will sustain them. The question is: when will capital become freely available for startups?

“No one really knows the answer, and founders need to be realistic about their pathway to growth.”

He says investors are keeping an eye out for ideas that will work amid the pandemic because consumer behavior is changing so rapidly that a good idea three months ago may not be relevant today.

Lambert, like all leaders, knows a thing or two about failure and risk. When the Global Financial Crisis hit from 2008, Lambert was in the micro venture capital business, and had invested in lots of high-growth-potential businesses that looked promising. I think you can guess what happened next.

“They all failed,” he says with a wry smile. “It was a challenging time. What sucked out of the economy was people making lots of money. There had been a lot of fast wealth creation through margin loans, property, investments —money was making money. Then it all just stopped.”

This time around, the market has changed, and while investors rarely put money into startups in the early stages he says that when investments are made, they tend to be larger.

Lambert is taking his own advice too, creating a startup with his team. He is bringing innovation specialists (many of whom have recently left startups and corporates due to downsizing) together under the name Slingshot Practice, ready to consult.

Do you have a business idea you’re quietly working on? Tell us in the comments what you need to make it a reality. Perhaps there’s a fellow #GetHiredAustralia subscriber with the skills set to match your needs. 

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How many people are out of work right now? It’s not an easy question to answer. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says the number of Australians holding a job dropped 3% from March to April. Yet you’re still considered employed if you’re on JobKeeper, have been stood down, or were paid in the last month. Want a more reliable read? Look at collective paid hours worked across the nation. Over the same time period, there was an 8% drop in Australia’s total working hours. The SMH indicates that’s a fall of more than one million people’s jobs.

What is ‘wage scarring’ and how will it affect you? University of Melbourne economist Jeff Borland uses research to show how a high unemployment rate can affect wages after a crisis has peaked. He tells the Australian Financial Review someone entering the labour market at a time when the rate of unemployment is 3-4% above average causes a decrease in earnings between 3-6% each year for the next decade. If you extrapolate those figures out to a 6% rise in unemployment, workers could lose 9% a year. For someone on an average salary of $57,403, that equals $51,662 not earned over a decade.

What’s your silver lining? More than 900 people subscribed to Get Hired Australia last week and so many of you are sharing your stories and supporting each other. A comment from Adelaide’s Adrian Pickles caught my eye. He planned on working on his career as a sports commentator for the likes of the NBL and Cricket Australia for 2020 but instead found himself out of a job. 

He tells Get Hired Australia he's applying for jobs everywhere but the silver lining of the last few weeks has been spending time with his kids, aged 10 and 16. 

“It’s been amazing, especially with the 16 year old. We’ve gone from saying ‘hi’ when she gets home as she goes into her room to hanging out again. I feel like I’ve got my daughter back. 

“If someone told me I could do this all again but have a job, I’d say no, I’d rather spend it with my kids.”

What has been your silver lining from this pandemic?

Next week we speak to the woman behind 'aloha' coffee for job hunters.

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