by Yuki Noguchi and Amy Joyce - Washington Post Staff Writers

Bad Job!

Done With Tech Careers, New Entrepreneurs Say It's Better to Go Solo

Amy Nichols spent most of her career at three telecommunications companies working like a dog before she finally resolved that what she really wanted to do is work with dogs.

So Nichols stopped pounding the technology pavement and last month opened Happy Tails Dog Spa in Tysons Corner -- a day-care center that offers everything from an outside playground to doggie snacks and group naps for pampered canines with busy owners. Like numerous former technology workers in the area -- many of whom have been laid off several times -- Nichols has happily vacated her once-prestigious technical position in favor of a smaller niche business where she's the boss.

Seven people recently laid off from WorldCom Inc. walked into Snelling Personnel Services in Vienna, asking recruiter Lisa Calla-Russ for advice on getting a new job. Their primary request: "Just not telecom."

The recent crop of unemployed people, she said, is expressing a collective fatigue from toiling in tech workplaces, and is trying to take its skills to greener pastures.

During the first three months of this year, the number of jobless managers and executives younger than 40 who started businesses nationwide jumped by 36 percent, according to a nationwide survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., an international placement firm based in Chicago. In the fourth quarter of 2001, 25 percent of discharged managers and executives younger than 40 started businesses, up from 6 percent in the third quarter.

That describes Nichols, 29, whose husband, Michael Schlegel, was laid off from WorldCom along with 17,000 others last month. She avoided a layoff simply by leaving on her own, and hired two other former telecom workers to work at her new business.

"Telecom was cutthroat. Everybody was on the verge of not making it, so there was very little integrity," she said, citing colleagues who competed against each other to keep dwindling job slots. "All along, I kept thinking: There's got to be a way to make use of my business skills for something I like."

For some, there is little choice. In the Washington area, at least 20,000 jobs in the telecom sector alone have been lost in the last year and a half, and at least 20 firms have filed for bankruptcy protection or have shut their doors in the last three years.

Nearly twice as many budding entrepreneurs are beating a path to Caroline Mansi's office in search of advice on how to start their own business -- mostly clients who are simply tired of the serial pink slips, she said. Mansi, who directs Loudoun County's Small Business Development Center, said she counseled 139 clients in April, compared with 86 in April 2001, and has seen more than 500 this year all told.

Clients "feel that the paradigm about how people find jobs is changing," said Mansi. "They can no longer look for jobs from big corporations, but they have to be creative and learn how to make their own jobs."

What's true for them is true for Rica Guarnieri.

"You know, I don't want my fate determined by other people," said Guarnieri, who has been laid off twice in the last two years, and last month started her home-based painting business, Design by Rica, in Alexandria.

Guarnieri, who paints the rooms of people's homes, had worked for YellowBrix Inc., an online news firm in Alexandria that merged last year with another company and eliminated her corporate communications job. She found a job at PowerUP, a philanthropic division of AOL founder Steve Case's foundation, only to get laid off in March.

For Guarnieri and others, it's no longer about working for The Man -- that generalized corporate entity that now seems to be falling out of favor as employees' pension plans vaporize and scandals topple large companies.

"The nicest thing is, I'm not trying to make somebody else rich," said Guarnieri.

Now, Guarnieri says, her life is "fabulous." She works just as many hours, if not more, but she gets to be creative and "see something tangible" at the end of each day, she said. Her old jobs were useful -- at least as a source of contacts who have provided her a roster of customers, mostly through word of mouth.

Jason Denny was laid off last year from MicroStrategy Inc., a Vienna data-mining software firm. So Denny parlayed his longtime love of home improvement into a real business, and spent about $10,000 of his savings to start Denny Wilson Contracting Inc. out of his Manassas home.

"We have no shortage of work, and we've advertised hardly at all," said Denny, who used to spend 60 hours a week training people how to use MicroStrategy's software. By contrast, "you see how the tech industry's been in the last two years. . . . I feel more secure doing what I'm doing because the tech industry is so unpredictable."

© The Washington Post Company 2002