The Final Lesson of CorporateLand is: Knowing When to Leave.

Your stay in CorporateLand will have a beginning, a middle and an end and it’s important not to be the guy who didn’t plan for the future. It’s easy to get trapped, and a semi-monthly paycheck is too often a recipe for a mediocre life. Your goals are as follows: Get in, get some experience, make some money, make some contacts, develop a plan for what comes next, and GTFO. You need to plan your exit and know when to pull the ripcord. Ideally this will be before you get invited to leave in an RIF (reduction in force, which is what a layoff is called in CorporateLand), or before you self-select out by being drunk and disorderly at the holiday party. So yeah, have a plan before you need to have a plan.

How Long is Too Long?

So this just in: corporate jobs are not about allowing you to feel fulfilled or self-actualized. They are about you making someone else rich, ideally while you are overpaid, enjoy the perqs, save money, and then get the fuck out.

Now, it would be fair to point out that I have been in CorporateLand a Long-Ass Time. I am, however, different, in that I have never let my “9 to 5” interfere with my “5 to 9”. I never left music, I never skipped traveling, I never gave up on having slave girls to “settle down” and I never sacrificed time away to be a fucking apple polisher. In fact, my “9 to 5” is there to fund my “5 to 9”, and I recalibrated the former to serve the latter. On average, I probably work two to four hours a day. More during the busy times of year, but in general, I can focus and crush things, then go back to living my life. This is a function of capabilities acquired over time, as well as just how my brain works. It’s a skill that can be at least partially acquired.

Also, I’ve been working from home for 10+ years. That deletes a lot of the “suck” out of my corporate job. Back when everyone went to an office, well there were poor dumb saps sitting at their workstations either doing actual work, talking about last night’s SportsBall game, or otherwise wasting their lives. So yeah, what I do sure beats the shit out of being a working stiff.

Of course, no matter what you do there is going to be a certain amount of aggravation. But that’s just life. So figure out how to balance your life. And then go have fun.

Be In CorporateLand, But Not Of CorporateLand

While not typical, there are those of us who are in CorporateLand but not of CorporateLand. I sometimes joke that my life is a lot like the plot of the movie Office Space, which is a 90s cult classic in which a guy getting hypnosis treatment is “hypnotized” to not give a shit, and proceeds accordingly. My goal is to maximize the amount of freedom I have by accruing cash1 and avoiding spending time in the office – far better to save a couple hours of commuting time, gas and mileage, and a lot of aggravation – years ago I worked at a Fortune 500 and I used to say “You could take a copy of the DSM5, walk around the outer ring of offices and start diagnosing people.” Not being in the office solves a lot of dysfunction. And hey, if I want to take a dip in the pool before the Monday Departmental Call, or grill up a steak after the Thursday Sales Meeting, well, who is to stop me? Nothing like floating around in my pool in the summer, looking up through the trees at the blue sky, and then properly oiling up one of my Slave Girls…what could be better? And if I enjoy a cocktail or two? My slave girls aren’t going to rat me out. They are going to mix them to my specifications and serve them to me, from their knees.

The important lesson to this is: Develop a life outside of CorporateLand that you are happy with. Your life is ending one moment at a time. If you want to climb Everest, you need to do that shit in your 20s and 30s and not in your 50s or 60s. I know a guy who did, in his 40s. Now, in any room he’s in for the rest of his life, he will be “The Guy Who Climbed Everest.” Maybe you want to do some kind of “world tour” – I knew a couple of guys who did that, one in his late 20s/early 30s and another one in at 50. I knew the 50-year-old guy when he was in his mid-60s and he told me (in the course of giving me some avuncular advice – even Uncle Vaz has a wise uncle or two), that he realized at about that time that he had “x” number of years left where he could easily hike the Alps or whatever, so he took a year off and did it.

Thus, long before quarantine, I was working “remotely” as often as I could and basically enjoying my life. This is one of my rules for surviving in CorporateLand: Make yourself indispensable, and then disappear.
Required Reading: “How to Relax Without Getting the Axe” by Stanley Bing, the nom de plume of Gil Schwartz, who was a NYC executive for many years, primarily with CBS, who presaged my existence in CorporateLand with that book. Also required reading is “What Would Machiavelli Do?” There are a number of dangers of staying in CorporateLand too long, of making yourself too vulnerable to layoff, etc. Some folks build up resentment flame out in a fiery end, typically not of their own choosing. I’m not there to “change” CorporateLand. It is how it is. I’m there to make money, and change my own working conditions in my favor, and otherwise live my life. The C-Suite guys where I am recognized my value and let me do what I want, so that’s why I haven’t bailed yet. Plus they overpay me, relative to the market.

For Americans, the “Danger Zone” is ages 50-60. If you lose your job then, it’s fucking HARD to replace it. Ageism is a thing. Sticking the dismount is important. Don’t be this guy. I’m fairly secure, for now, because the CEO and I are buds AND there’s nobody who is clearly in line to backfill me. Right now, I am doing the work of ~3 people – no worries; I can do it with half my brain tied behind my back – however, if the CEO leaves or if they hire some kid for me to train up, that’s the day I’m going to start thinking things over. Anything could change at any time, and it pays to be ready.

Notice I said “thinking” and did not say “worrying”. Where people run into problems is when they treat their job like a sinecure. It isn’t. When employers complain that there “isn’t any loyalty anymore” or how employees are “only loyal to their paychecks” the conveniently forget that it was they who broke CorporateLand Social Contract first. There is no point in worrying and you simply must understand the Rules of the Game, and act accordingly.

Warning Signs: You are getting older and more expensive. The company’s financials are not doing so well. The company gets acquired. You get a new boss who clearly doesn’t value you. You are asked to train a junior person in what is basically your job. You start getting left out of meetings and decisions that you formerly did not. Out of nowhere, you get an unjustified shit review – that means they are setting you up.

How to Make Moves On the Street

First, Get in.

Second, Get Some Experience. When looking at your job – and most people have jobs, not careers these days – think about your current skill set, and what skills you want to develop. I know an old lawyer who, years ago, was planning his exit from his employer (a large insurer), he started taking on litigation that they would let him do in-house – small cases near the amount of the deductible. He took on as many as he could. He was building his skill set. Read on and you will understand why.

Third, Get Paid. Then Get Paid More. You should control expenses and put $ away when you are a young guy. Save at least the first 10% that hits your hand. You won’t miss it. Don’t buy ostentatious things like Too Much House, Too Far Out, some high-end car you don’t need or some kind of fancy watch. Think of a car as a “box of miles” and use your mobile phone to tell time. When you buy things, buy things that will last. Beyond that, keep your combat load light. When you start incurring debt, you lose flexibility.2

Fourth, be sure you Make Friends. This applies to outside of the company as well as inside. There are guys I knew from the neighborhood who have gone on to bigger and better things. One kid who was nicknamed – I shit you not – “Stinky” back when we were kids because of a particularly unfortunate fart in grade school3 – now manages over half a billion dollars in assets. The good news for me is I always called him “Jim” instead of “Stinky”, so he remembers me fondly. There are other guys I’ve collected over time – some of whom were adverse parties at first – who respected how I conducted myself in our interactions. There are even a few guys from TRP who are now pieces on my chessboard (and I on theirs.) You’re going to know a lot of people over the course of your life. There’s no point in being a dick for no reason. This is especially true of industry people. When I transitioned to my current gig there was a phone convo with a trading partner where our guy asked the person formerly in my role, “When do I start transitioning things to this Vaz guy?” They counterparty – who had been zoning out a bit – said, “Wait, did you say Vaz?” It turned out that this guy had worked with that guy for 5 years at a different firm. He gave me a plug on the call with our top deal guy. It was a nice kickoff for my new role. It also made deals our firms did with each other easier because of the level of familiarity we had with each other.4

Another guy I worked with at [Name of Infamous Bank] – he in the London Office and I north of NYC came to visit us on his first trip to America. I asked him if he was planning on visiting NYC, and he said “no” because he thought the logistics of getting there were a pain in the ass (driving in the Metro Area can be intimidating for folks who aren’t familiar with it, never mind he’s used to driving on the left, so his instincts would all be wrong. So I took him down and showed him around NYC. We did all the shit NYers wouldn’t get caught dead doing in NYC: Times Square, the Empire State Building – and over the next few years we kept in touch. He disappeared for a bit, and then re-emerged having done some deals in Turkey, Africa and India, and basically he’s a gazillionaire now. I try to keep our relationship strictly social, because money can be a wedge in a friendship, but if I ever need a favor, well, I was his friend back when there was no juice in it for me, which puts me in a different category from other people who might have “motives.”5

Fifth, develop a plan. So earlier I talked about making a plan. When my lawyer friend, above, left the business he was at, he set up a boutique insurance defense practice and made a bit more in his first year out than he had in his last year. The next year, his income doubled, and pretty soon he went from being the corporate equivalent of Johnny Lunchpail to being a baller. He recognized where he wanted to be and worked on skills that would get him there. You need to develop your own plan. I have a couple of ideas in the Energy Space and the FinTech Space, but we’ll see how it goes. In a few years, hopefully I will be posting from my villa in the south of France, but I’m not worried about it either way. I can always visit.

Sixth, GTFO. Remember, not-so-famous Wright Brothers, Lorin and Rechlin. You’re not going to do something cool like INVENT THE GAWDDAM AIRPLANE if you are stuck in a 9 to 5 down at the tool & die or the lumberyard. Choose your moment (ideally when you have 3x what you think you’ll need) and politely resign. Then walk out the door humming to yourself.

Takeaways

-Get in, get some experience, make some money, make some contacts, develop a plan for what comes next, and GTFO.

-Don’t let life pass you by as you gain experience and accrue cash.

-Have a plan for your exit.

-Thank you for attending my CorporateLand TED Talk.

1 And before the “Cash is Trash!” crowd shows up, I am talking in the general sense which includes other assets. Cash is an option on the future. I had some on the sidelines when the virus hit and I was able to pick up blue chip companies at a steep discount. For me, the real “Amazon Day” was in the spring of 2020.

2 Cue the leverage guys showing up and talking about how they have a ton of cash flow based on leveraged debt. That’s not they type I’m talking about. Also 90% of people suck at that and wind-up carrying consumer debt which is stupid. Cheap money gets people into trouble, and we’ve had cheap money for a long time.

3 As in “Gambled on a fart and lost.”

4 Notice I didn’t say “trust”. “Seems to me if there were any logic to our language, ‘trust’ would be a four-letter word.”

5 Should you ever know rich people, you never talk about money, and you certainly never ask for it.