Careers 2.0: Profiles in Career Change

Using Her Sense of Humor to Build a Portfolio Career

Right out of college, Sue Burton Kirdahy fell into financial-services marketing and, from the get-go, she loved it. She loved the intellectual demands, the brokering of big deals, the extensive travel, and the chesslike challenge of climbing the corporate ladder. But she also craved creative pursuits—writing, theater, humor—that had less of an outlet at work, so at night she took classes in those areas. One class was a course in stand-up comedy. For the class final, she had to prepare a five-minute stand-up routine and perform it in a comedy club. To her surprise, “the exhilaration and endorphins I felt coming off that stage were like nothing I had ever experienced.” She had always been “the kid who cracked up all the others at the bus stop,” but she had never imagined that doing comedy intentionally as an adult would provide so much pleasure.

Over the next thirteen years Sue thought about that experience repeatedly, but she never took it any further. “I can’t be performing at midnight at some Chinese restaurant and then go into a big meeting the next morning,” she said. But nonetheless, she put “stand-up comedy” on every resume. It seemed an important part of her identity, and often a hiring manager’s reaction was a good barometer of whether or not she’d fit into that company’s environment.

A Realization: Time for a Change

By the time she was in her thirties, Sue’s enthusiasm for her career had begun to wane. She’d gotten married and had children and was cultivating other interests. Although she was busier than ever—traveling, working sixty hours a week, leading a staff of twenty-five—she began taking more and more classes, even retaking the comedy class she had taken thirteen years before. The mismatch between her “real” self and her work self was becoming starker. In late 2003, in an effort to build its female leadership, Sue’s company had her work with a career coach. “As part of the coaching I went through a process to uncover my core values and look at how my life was in or out of line with them. Well, the values I uncovered were creativity, acceptance, and humor, and when I matched that to my day-to-day existence at the company, I was pretty far out of alignment.” Sue realized she had to leave.

But how could she leave? Her salary provided 85 percent of the family income as well as the medical benefits. She couldn’t just go off and start a business or find a low-paying job in the arts or social services. Hoping for a compromise, she proposed that the company create a new role of “innovation catalyst,” which would allow her more creative freedom and positive impact. But ultimately the company wasn’t able to meet her request. Instead it asked her to lead an employee engagement campaign that consisted of trying to boost employee morale while strategizing downsizing alternatives and reviewing lists of people who were about to be laid off. It was the antithesis of what she wanted to be doing. So in March 2005 she handed in her resignation. She had managed to negotiate a severance package that would pay her salary and benefits for six more months. That gave her a six-month runway to get a new career—whatever it was—off the ground.

The Challenge: What Change?

What could that career be? For a businesswoman with an interest in creativity, what kind of jobs were even available? Perhaps TV production? TV producers brought together resources to bring creative ideas to fruition. That might use her expertise and business skills in a new context—but she didn’t know the first thing about it. So she reached out to friends, family, and colleagues, asking if anyone knew any producers. Remarkably, several did and she was able to set up informational interviews to learn about the field. A friend of a friend was even able to get her an interview with a high-level ABC executive producer who met with her in his New York office. “If you were twenty-two,” he said, “I could hire you as my assistant, but you’ve already had a very successful career and we’ll both feel extraordinarily awkward if you’re making coffee and dubbing videos.” She left discouraged—too old and needing too much money to start over in the world of TV.

Then she learned that she could vocation at Brave Street Productions, a TV production company in New York. Thrilled that she could experience a TV career firsthand, she signed up, and for two days worked with producers Russell Best and Tammy Leech, developing pitch treatments, preparing interviews, editing videotape, reviewing concepts, and setting up location shoots. It was exhilarating and it was exhausting, and by the end of the second day she knew it wasn’t the job for her. She had loved the front-office work—writing pitches and packaging shows—but she had no interest in the mechanics of production or in being on a shoot. Helpfully, Russ brainstormed other paths she might pursue that would use her business experience and creative talent: perhaps she could be a development executive; perhaps she could package shows and take them to Wall Street to find investors. She was grateful for his suggestions; those were ideas she never would have thought of.

Rekindling a Passion

Meanwhile, Sue had begun actively pursuing comedy again. Shortly after she quit her job she had worked up her courage and gone to an “open mike” at a local comedy club. It was terrifying to get up onstage, but once again, coming off, she felt that endorphin high. In the weeks after that, she had gone to other clubs, met local comics, and begun doing semi-regular stage time. As a result, when Russ suggested that she go to a “boot camp” held by the National Association of TV Program Executives where she would be able to pitch an idea for a program, she knew exactly what she wanted to pitch. Working with the comics she had met, she wrote a pitch for a TV sitcom called Open Mike, about the trials and tribulations of a band of small-town comedians. To her surprise, when she presented it at the boot camp, executives from two cable networks asked her to create a demonstration pilot. With further advice from Russ and help from a local cable access director, she and her comedian colleagues taped a ten-minue pilot. Ultimately it wasn’t picked up, but she was thrilled to have experienced the development process firsthand. She’d been out of work for eighteen weeks, she wasn’t close to finding a job—but for the first time in a decade she felt she was following her heart and moving ahead under her own creative power.

The Network Comes Through

When there were two months to go before her salary and benefits ran out, she got a surprising phone call. She had made a point of staying in touch with people from her former career, letting them know what she was doing, and now the marketing director at another financial-services company called to ask her to help produce TV commercials on a freelance basis; the pay would be close to what she had been previously making. Sue leaped. It wasn’t her dream career—the work was about financial services rather than her own creative product—but it was a perfect opportunity to combine her former experience with all that she had learned and it was less than full-time, which would leave her time to continue to explore other options. She had started her quest thinking she wanted to be a producer—because that was a title that she knew—but her explorations were showing her that other possibilities existed.

Discovering What She Didn’t Like

Intrigued by Russ’s idea of packaging TV content for Wall Street, she volunteered for a company that found financing for independent films. What she learned was that she absolutely hated asking people for money! She volunteered as an event planner for a children’s charity and found that while it was personally fulfilling, it also lacked the creative and intellectual challenge she had been craving. Eventually her research led her to a motivational humorist named Loretta LaRoche. She had seen Loretta perform and thought her show excellent, so when she learned that Loretta lived in a nearby town, she worked up her courage to call. Her pitch was straightforward: “I’m in marketing; I love what you do; maybe there’s a way I can use my marketing skills to help you.” Over lunch, the two women brainstormed ideas for expanding and marketing Loretta’s business; the next week Sue began volunteering, implementing the ideas they had come up with. It was a win-win situation: Loretta profited from Sue’s marketing know-how; Sue learned firsthand about life as a motivational humorist.

On Stage, a Calling Becomes Clear

When they had been working together for several months, Loretta asked Sue to open for her onstage. Sue was terrified. It was one thing to write a few jokes and tell them in a club or bar; it was altogether different to write twenty minutes of inspirational humor and deliver it to an audience of a thousand! It would mean doing what she’d said she wanted to do. She wrote a draft skit, tore it up, wrote it again, and then wrote it a third time. She thought it was good—but was it good enough? She performed it for Loretta, who gave her a thumb’s up. Finally it was time to go out onstage. To her amazement, the audience responded. Laughter and applause filled the theater and that endorphin high came back again, even bigger and brighter than it had the first time. When the set was over, Sue knew that she found not just a career, but a calling.

Today [2005] Sue has a “portfolio career,” a cluster of part-time jobs all related in some way to her dream career. She works part-time as Loretta’s creative director; she opens frequently for Loretta onstage; she also books her own humorous and inspirational speaking engagements. Recently she vacationed a second time with a professional comedian in New York who mentored her on how she could make presenting to corporate audiences a lucrative, full-time career. She still produces TV commercials for the financial-services firms to pay the bills, but the old feelings of dissatisfaction and misalignment are gone. “Now I am actually doing what I said I wanted to do two years ago,” she says. “I still don’t feel as though I’ve arrived at a final destination, but as time goes on, my transition to my dream career comes more and more into focus. With each experiment I learn more about what I like and what I don’t, I make new contacts and learn about new possibilities, and I uncover back-door paths for getting into this career. Maybe most important, with each experiment I live less exclusively in my head and more and more in my heart.”

Brian Kurth is founder and president of VocationVacations, a firm that arranges a few “vacation” days on the job—on your dream job, that is—in a real company or organization, so you can get a firsthand feel for a profession that you’ve been considering. He also is the author of Test-Drive Your Dream Job: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding and Creating the Work You Love, from which this piece was adapted. Copyright © 2008 Brian Kurth. Reprinted by permission of Business Plus, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved. To learn more, visit VocationVacations.com. Or purchase an autographed copy of his book.