2005 was an incredible year for me. Six months ago, I was “working for the man” and now, I am trying “to be the man.” I am slowly but surely making progress but there is more work to be done. Many of you do not know my story or much about me, so here it is in a series of occasional posts called My Story.
On leaving behind the 9-5
In June ’05, after just under two years of working for AMS (actually CGI-AMS, soon to be called CGI), I left a very stable and lucrative environment to perhaps naively set out on my own. At AMS, I was as a young gun, well-liked, and quickly climbing the corporate ladder. Just prior to my departure, I had moved over to the USPTO contract and was responsible for the entire implementation of a proprietary system that leveraged data from the Federal Government’s Central Contract Registration. The system aimed to make vendor management in our financial accounting Momentum platform a cinch. The knowledge I gained had solidified me as SME, where I would be utilized across the organization for the various federal agencies that we serviced.
But in May 2005, I received a phone call that has since changed the course of my career – at least for now. Based on my telecom and management background, a colleague recommended my name as potential lead to oversee a large wireless deployment in the Baltimore-DC-Virginia area. After several discussions and working out the financial terms, I decided to leave the corporate world and become an independent consultant at the ripe old age of 24.
