CHAPTER ONE

ON THE WRONG SIDE OF RIGHT-SIZING:
A PATHWAY TO CONSULTING

Upper Saddle River is one of those affluent towns in the northern part of New Jersey where, for years, people have aspired to live. It’s like heaven, if heaven were on Rte. 17 in Bergen County. When I first came to Broadway in the 1950s, many of the husbands and wives who came to the theater on a Friday or Saturday night came in from towns just like Upper Saddle River. Today, its streets are lined with large, recently built single-family homes. Volvo station wagons and German SUVs dot the driveways. Kids walk around tethered to iPhones and iPads on their way to soccer or lacrosse practice. All of these things—these symbols of having made it, of the American Dream—were purchased by the children of the husbands and wives who came to see a Broadway show all those years ago. They are the men and women who commute across the Hudson River into Manhattan every day for high-powered, high-paying jobs in high-status, high-pressure companies. And if they ride home in the bar car now and then, who can blame them? They earned it.

In 2009, Michael Grottola was one of these people: an executive consulting giant KPMG. He would turn 65 that year with two teenage daughters preparing to go to college and a big house with an even bigger mortgage. By his own admission, executive management was not where Grottola ever thought he would end up. He was an electrical engineer by training, having spent most of his early professional years around software and technology. His first job out of college was with a premises protection company in New York City that designed the first automated computer monitoring system in the world and subsequently stiffed him on a raise. From there he went to work for Lockheed Missiles and Space. These were not the beginnings of any path to management or consulting that I’d ever heard of, especially in the early-1970s when this was all taking place for Michael. Then again, what do I know? I was just an actor back then. Star Trek had already been canceled; I was bouncing from guest role to guest role on a bunch of TV shows no one remembers. When you think about it, both our fates were rather uncertain.

Fortunately for Michael, the entrepreneurial spirit that was baked into his DNA—along with a little luck and great timing—led him into small business and self-employment. A little more than a year into his tenure at Lockheed, the premises protection company in New York came calling, this time with their tail between their legs. “No, no, no. Come back!” Michael recounted the conversation to me. “We want you here.”

It always feels great to be wanted. It feels even better when two people want you and one of them knows they made a huge mistake letting you go the first time. A smart man, even in his mid-20s, Michael knew he had the leverage.

“At the time, I thought to myself, you know what would be great? If I had my own business. I could deal with my expenses, work with other companies. I wouldn’t have to sit at a desk. I just wanted to be free.”

Who doesn’t? So Michael made them an offer.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll come back, but you have to put me on retainer…for double my old salary. They said yes. That’s how it started. I essentially played at having a business because I had one customer. And that customer called me back. But then I got another customer, and another customer.”

Like they say, “Fake it till you make it.” Michael Grottola, at 25 years old, eased himself into his own business by identifying an opportunity, seizing it, and then working his butt off.

“I gave them everything I had,” he recalled to me, almost wistfully. “I’d work day and night. I was willing to work around the clock. I ran into situations where I had no idea how I was ever going to do this. And somehow, by not quitting, by asking for help from the right people, by getting a huge amount of assistance, I figured it out.”

He built a successful small business on this philosophy and on the back of this kind of work ethic. For Michael, there was no problem too big or client too small. One time, in the mid-‘90s, for instance, he and his team spent an entire weekend—at their own expense—at a client’s office to address a daunting problem they just could not seem to solve. It was Saturday Night Fever, but with less disco and more Sysco.

“The software we installed on this client’s computers kept failing and failing. The problem was so bad, the computers actually started failing. So we’re into the software and we’re into the hardware. We can’t figure it out. It’s getting late and I said to one of the guys that worked for me, ‘We don’t need those lights on down there. Let’s save electricity. Shut the lights off.’ As soon as he shut the lights off, the computer went down. I said, ‘Do that again!’ Rebooted everything, shut the lights off, computer went down. I said, ‘Son of a gun! There’s a short somewhere that disrupts the power.’ There was no power backup on those computers. It was that simple, but we never would have figured it out if we weren’t committed to doing everything possible to please our client.”

What makes this such an interesting story is that at some point during that weekend trip to the client’s office, Michael stopped making money. In fact, it was costing him to be there with all the man-hours he was paying for. Too many weekends like this and the only system he’d be de-bugging would be his bed at the YMCA. He could have packed it in at any moment and most people would not have blamed him. When I asked him what he was thinking as he toiled away that whole time, his response was simple and revealing.

“I was thinking, ‘I’m creating the best customer I’d ever want.’”

And he was right.

This client was a small business owner, himself. Over the ensuing years he talked about Michael Grottola to many, many people. Some of them eventually became clients themselves. It was, perhaps, his most fruitful relationship as a small business owner—a relationship that ended years later on the best of all possible notes, when the man invited Michael to his retirement party. His friend’s life was now a permanent weekend.

It was not retirement Michael was thinking about, however, when he decided to get out of the hustle and bustle of self-employment and take a job with more security, greater benefits, and better hours. He and his wife had just adopted two daughters from Russia and he wanted to be there for them as they grew up. So after testing the market, he took a job with consulting giant, KPMG. It would be a pay cut from those fatter small business years during the Reagan and Clinton eras, but his salary would still be well into the six figures and, like I said, it would be secure. It’s a decision I understand very well, in fact, as it is the exact reason established actors stop chasing the big movie roles with the huge paydays and start doing television and theater with the smaller, more consistent paychecks. Give me five seasons of “Boston Legal” and you can keep Star Trek 14: The Re-Trekkening.

Despite his expertise in technology and his uniquely valuable skills and experience (to the company), it wasn’t long into Michael’s stint at KPMG that he got a call from a woman in the Human Resources department. She wanted him to swing by her office for a chat. I’ve been an actor my entire life, so I’ve never worked within a rigid corporate structure, but I’ve starred in enough workplace dramas to know that no one in Human Resources ever just wants to “chat.” They’re like doctors. It’s fine when you call them, but when they call you? Look out.

Michael swung by her office near the end of the day, mentally prepared for whatever might happen. It was a Friday, the end of the workweek, when most companies do their firing. The woman told him to close the door and asked him to sit down. As he settled into the guest chair across from her—a desk covered with manila personnel folders sitting between them—she asked him how he liked his job. He assured her that he liked it very much. The work was interesting, the people were nice, and the pay wasn’t too shabby. She nodded along, fully anticipating each of his responses, I’m sure. Then she opened another file folder. His file folder. She scanned it.

“From what I’ve been told,” she began, “you’ve been a valuable addition to the team since you got here. You’ve done good work for your department, you’ve been a team player.” Uh oh, here it comes. The big but….

“But there is an opportunity,” she continued, “outside your department, in the company’s leadership and management training program. We think you’d be perfect for it. Is that something you might be interested in?”

This wasn’t an execution — it was a coronation! Michael exhaled. He could breathe finally. The blood that had drained from his face and pooled in his feet could start circulating again.

“Management?” He asked. “But I’m a technology guy.”

“People you work with seem to like you, and you get your work done. That’s really all management is.” She had a point. Even I could see that, and I can’t see anything without my glasses. “Give it some thought and get back to me.”

Oh, and mop up that puddle of cold sweat under your chair. Thanks!

So Michael thought about it, talked it over with his wife, and ultimately decided to take them up on their offer. Naturally, he breezed through the training program and then spent the next 13 years in management, gradually taking on more responsibility and earning more money.

The structures of capitalism and the apparatus of Corporate America had worked just like they were designed. They identified talent, put that talent in a position to succeed, and then incentivized that talent to lead other talented people. Things were good. What could possibly go wrong?

In a word: 2008. The sub-prime mortgage market collapsed. The housing bubble burst. Major financial institutions teetered on the brink of collapse, triggering massive taxpayer bailouts. As a Canadian, I am unfamiliar with this kind of malfeasance, but I believe the technical term for it is “total shit-show.”

Of course, I don’t need to tell you what happened next. You have your 401k statements and home appraisals and blood pressure readouts from that time to remind you. (Unless you burned them, like I did.)

For Michael, it was no different. His home lost a chunk of its value while his mortgage stayed the same. He took a big hit on his savings and retirement money, while the price of college tuition increased with cost of living like it always does. The whole situation cast a great deal of uncertainty over his future.

Unlike many others though, Michael held onto his job. KPMG is a very big company with a lot of institutional clients who need their services and spend a lot of money to procure them. They could sustain a hit like this, for a while.

Unfortunately, the financial crisis continued to drag on and it finally caught up with Michael early in 2009. His boss called him into his office, and this time it was the bad kind of call. His boss informed him that he and an entire layer of upper-middle management were being “right-sized.” If that isn’t the most insulting term ever, I don’t know what is. The only thing that could have made it worse is if it was also Michael’s birthday.

Oh, I forgot to mention — it was also Michael’s Birthday.

Being let go sent Michael into a tailspin of depression and self-doubt. What was he going to do? He was 65 years old. He made nearly $300,000 a year. Nobody was hiring people his age who made that kind of money, if they were even hiring at all. But he needed to work. Not just to pay his mortgage and put his daughters through college, but for his sanity and self-worth.

Michael was 65. He wasn’t dead. A little constipated, maybe, but who isn’t? He had no intention of retiring. He liked his work. He was vital, curious, and active. He was alive. Being “right-sized” made him feel the opposite. They were telling him he was done, that he was wrong-sized. That it was over.

As Michael told me his story, I couldn’t help but to flash back to the days after Star Trek ended, because I found myself in a very similar situation. NBC canceled the series after three seasons and immediately I was out of a job. I’d been out of work before, for a week or two here and there, but never for very long. Soon enough a week or two turned into several weeks, which turned into a couple of months. If you think working’s a drag, just try the alternative!

That’s when I realized: what had happened to other actors had finally happened to me.

Like Michael, I had my children’s college education to consider, rent to pay and food to put on the table. And that was just the essentials. I had no idea how I was going to make it all work. In the TV world, it’s commonly understood that after actors are in a long-running series, they don’t work for a while. It can be months, sometimes a year. If you played a well-known character in a TV series, like Captain Kirk, you may not appear on another series for years.

It’s like the studios were following their own version of the Prime Directive: they wouldn’t interfere with my lack of an income.

Although I didn’t realize it, way back when, I took a page from this book I’m writing here to pull myself out of the hole into which Star Trek’s cancellation had hurled me. I marshaled my intuition, my instincts for self-preservation, and the collective wisdom born of years of experience and took my family’s needs into my own hands.

In those days, they wrote plays with one set and 3 or 4 or 5 actors. They would play Broadway for a year or two and the plays would go out and make Samuel French’s playwright list and Samuel would rent them out, paying a few dollars to each of the playwrights. It was cheap enough to produce and if a play was good enough to warrant putting it on in summer stock, some good actors would do it. They’d go out and play all the small theaters. People in their summer homes, on vacation, or just driving out on a Sunday, would come to the theater in rather respectable numbers. Imagine that. America, a country of theatergoers!

I’d written plays before. I’d worked on the stage as well as the small screen. I knew comedy and drama. I was great at memorizing lines so I always knew everybody’s parts. Hell, I was kind of a one-man production company. So that’s what I did. I used everything in my tool kit and put together little plays with myself as the lead, somebody else as well-known as possible playing the other part and we would pick up actors where we could. We’d go 13, 15, 17 weeks, every week in a different theater. We’d move in, play all week and on Saturday night, strike the set, and get into our cars and head out to the next theater down the road – maybe 100 or 300 miles away. I did that for three summers. Me, my Doberman pinscher named Morgan, and a pick-up truck with oversized tires that I prayed would hold out. By forgoing motels during those thirteen summer weeks and instead sleeping in the back of my truck under the camper shell I had mounted, I was able to save enough money by Labor Day each year to fund my children’s education, rent, food and clothes. The little bit left over for me was barely enough to pay for popcorn. But boy did that popcorn taste good. I think Morgan liked it, too.

There are two things you can do when you hit rock bottom. You can splat against it or you can bounce back off it. I bounced back. And I realize now, telling this story, that I did it by essentially hiring myself. With the specter of extended unemployment hanging over me, I put my skills and experience to work for three years, doing summer stock across the country. And not only did I provide for my family, but I emerged a stronger person for it. Then, before you know it, I was back working on television and the movies. From a pickup truck to a network pickup letter. Only in America!

Michael Grottola took a similar route. He chose to bounce back off the bottom. He collected himself and started to take stock of everything he had going for him.

He had a degree in engineering and expertise in software, neither of which had gone out of style.

He had 13 fruitful years in management, so he knew how to lead people and manage projects.

He’d started his own lucrative business once upon a time, so he understood risk and entrepreneurship. More importantly, he was comfortable with them.

He’d saved a good amount of money and built a solid credit history over the years, so he could be his own ATM for a while.

It turns out Michael had a lot going for him. These were assets, literally and figuratively, that no one could take away from him like KPMG had taken his job. They were his, the product of decades of work and experience. Now the only question was, what to do with them?

As I got older, I wrestled with this same question. When jobs ended I struggled with what to do with all the assets and experience I’d accrued over the years. I could put myself back into the meat grinder of the traditional Hollywood system like any other actor looking for work, but the auditions and offers for an actor in his 60s are fewer and farther between, so I would have been subjecting myself not just to the law of diminishing returns but also to the humiliation of constant rejection. In the military, they call that a “soup sandwich.”

Michael was in a similar position in 2009/2010. The job market for well-paid workers closing in on retirement age looked like the soupiest of soup sandwiches. And kudos to Michael, he had no interest in taking a bite. He wasn’t going to play their game only to be entertained, patronized and shown the door; both parties to the interview knowing full well that he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Phoenix of booking the gig (in the parlance of show business).

Taking stock of his assets, Michael realized he had a lot of very useful knowledge and experience that people could profit from. His years as a successful entrepreneur combined with his years inside one of the world’s foremost consulting firms made him the perfect candidate to start his own consulting business. In other words, by firing Michael, KPMG didn’t just lose an asset. They created a competitor.

Now, if you’re like me, you probably don’t have a solid grasp on what exactly consulting is. I know I didn’t. So I asked Andy Stefanovich, a business consultant for numerous Fortune 100 companies from Richmond, Virginia who started a wonderful little consulting business called “Play!” back in the ‘90s that he sold to a bigger consulting firm called Prophet a few years ago.

“A consultant,” he told me, “is someone who is an expert in a particular field or area of business that companies hire when they don’t have that expertise in house.”

“So Bob Routt, who was one of our technical advisers on T.J. Hooker, he was a consultant?”

“Exactly,” Andy explained. “He was an expert in police procedures that you guys hired because you were TV people doing a cop show, not cops doing a TV show. If this were the business world, he would have his own consulting firm, or consultancy, which is basically just the business you build around your expertise.”

Pretty sweet when you can be both the owner of a business and its main product. You know you’ll never run out of stock!

Initially, Michael Grottola thought about focusing his consultancy around technology. He was an engineer after all, and he was great with software. But that idea didn’t light a fire inside him. Besides, there were thousands of that type of consultant all over the world and most of them operated on the very front edge of technology, where he decidedly was not after a decade plus in management. What really got Michael going was the idea of helping aspiring entrepreneurs, young and old, realize their dream of starting their own small business.

With decades under his belt as a successful small business owner, then in management in Corporate America, Michael was ideally suited to help entrepreneurs avoid getting chewed up and spit out by their respective industries. He understood the importance of hard work because it was the difference between getting paid and getting fired when he first went out on his own. He recognized good ideas when he saw them because it was the companies built around good ideas that could ultimately afford the services of his previous employer, KPMG. He knew what investors were looking for and he had a feel for where the market was headed; why do you think he got into technology way back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s? With his skillset and wisdom—his expertise—he could help these fledgling companies learn from his experiences so they didn’t have to live them themselves. He could be like a veteran athlete taking a rookie under his wing, minus the part about changing in front of each other.

So, in the early fall of 2009, Michael Grottola opened a consultancy dedicated to helping aspiring entrepreneurs find funding for their business ideas. He would help them put together their business plans, their investment proposals and loan applications. He would help them refine their pitches and coach them on how to best express their value proposition. This was new territory for Michael—telling people what they should do and getting paid for it—but one he was comfortable finding his way through.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the beginning the bulk of Michael’s expertise came through the wisdom he gained from thirty years of hard work. It turns out you learn a lot when you’re too busy to notice!

“I tell them,” Michael said, “to be an entrepreneur, you have to take risks. You have to say, ‘I will expect an income that is few and far between in the beginning. I have to live with spotty cash flow. I have to persuade people, demonstrate value. I have to deal with a myriad of things that someone who has a job and is employed doesn’t ever think of.’ You also have to work around the clock. Weekends, nights. Work your butt off. There’s a reason it’s called ‘sweat equity.’ If you’re a forty hour a week person, don’t even start.”

Tough love, delivered with a smile – and an invoice.

His advice did not fall on deaf ears. By the end of the year—with less than six months in business—he’d made his first $30,000. It was a fraction of what he would have made at KPMG in that same period. When I asked Michael if that worried him, if it made him regret his choice to go out on his own, this was his answer:

“I was happy as a clam.”

He had bounced back. He was alive.

Do you recognize aspects of yourself in Michael Grotolla’s story? It doesn’t matter if it’s his age, the circumstances of his firing from KPMG (I refuse to dignify it with a term like “right-sized”), his early work history, his heritage or geography, even his choice of fields. What matters, if you relate even a little to Michael’s story, is to ask yourself the same questions and take the same inventory he did when he felt like he’d hit the bottom.

What do you have going for you?

What are you good at?

What can you teach the next generation that they need to know?

Who is counting on you?

What drives you with a fire so hot it burns the inside of your t-shirt?

Most of you out there over 50 years old who are trying to bounce back, or find your next thing for the next phase of your life, have answers to these questions that make a consultancy a real, viable option for you. It is not: if being a consultant makes sense, it’s what kind of consultant will be the most rewarding personally and financially. Piecing together your answers to these questions around whatever goals you have for the next phase of your life will go a long way to figuring that out.

Of course the road ahead is not paved with sunshine and kittens. Unlike movie tickets, there is no AARP discount rate for success. You have to earn it. And like Michael tells his start-up clients, you’ll have to work your butt off. If you don’t want to do that—which no one will begrudge you in the least—then maybe a consulting business is not for you. If you’re up for the challenge though, the payoff is clear.

In late 2009, at his lowest point, Michael Grottola said “Enough!” He took everything he had learned, all his wisdom and in late 2009, at his lowest point, Michael Grottola said “Enough!” He took everything he had learned, all his wisdom and expertise from decades of experience, and chose to put it to work for himself.

By 2013, Michael had multiple full-time employees, more than 40 regular paying clients, and annual net profit at or above his salary at the time he was let go. As far as Michael was concerned, KPMG now stood for “Keep Plugging, Michael Grotolla!”

I’ll never forget my reaction when Michael told me how happy he was in those first few months on his own. Happy as a clam? Really!? I was shocked. Almost as shocked as he was confused by my question.

“But weren’t you scared?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Of course I was scared. But I was more scared of doing something I didn’t like. Or worse, doing nothing and withering away.”

I talked to dozens of people over 50 for this book and almost to the man (and woman) they acknowledged the fear and in the same breath talked about how happy they were to have faced it down.

They would never go back to Corporate America, to the 9-to-5 rat race. Not a single one of them. They couldn’t imagine their lives any other way.

In chapter after chapter, you’ll hear from inventors, writers, franchisees, small business owners, web-masters, and coaches. All of them will say some version of the same thing. And you will see in them aspects of yourselves that I hope spark you to take the leap, to bounce back, to live. By hiring yourself.