I’ve Been Let Go
4 Times

I've been let go 4 times, and never once for the work. Each time, the job ended with the same sentence, almost word for word. "Unfortunately we can't keep you on. It's nothing you've done. Your work is excellent." Four different bosses, four different desks, one identical sentence, and every single time the real reason was a small business struggling. This is the story of those four times, and why they are the reason Saltline Studio works the way it does.

The Sentence

There is a particular quiet in a room just before that sentence arrives. You know it when the door closes and the coffee gets offered and nobody quite meets your eye. And here is the strange part: every time, the sentence was true. It really was nothing I had done. The work really was good. That is precisely what took me years to make peace with, because if the work was good and the job still ended, then something bigger than the work was deciding.

The Four Times

The first time, the business was downsizing, and three roles were folded into one "diverse" role that was not mine. The second was a straight redundancy. The money simply was not there, and a marketing salary is one of the first lines an accountant circles.

The third one I did not understand until months afterwards. The company was losing money and nobody could work out why, so five of us were let go on the same day. Much later, I learned that someone inside had been stealing. Five people packed boxes because of one person's choices, and none of us knew it at the time.

The fourth was the lockdowns, and if you ran or worked for a small business through those years, that one needs no explaining.

What None of Them Had in Common With Me

Four endings, and not one of them was about performance. But here is the other thing they shared: not one of those owners was bad at their trade, either. They were good people doing good work, exposed to things they could not see coming. A market shift. A betrayal. A pandemic. A quiet month that became six quiet months.

That word, exposed, is the one I keep coming back to. Small businesses do not usually fail at the work. They get caught out by the things around the work, and the people on the payroll feel it first. My dad taught me what building something with your own hands looks like, and I wrote about that in what a roof tiler taught me about marketing. These four jobs taught me the other half: what it feels like when the thing someone built starts to wobble.

What It Taught Me About This Job

When a small business leaks customers, it is not an abstraction on a dashboard. Jobs leak too. Someone's shift gets cut, someone's role gets merged, someone hears the sentence. I know exactly what that moment feels like from the employee's side of the desk, four times over.

So when an owner hands me a marketing budget, I treat it as what it actually is: payroll. Someone's job security, including the owner's own. That is why I publish my prices, why my advice sometimes ends with keep your money for now, as I wrote when I explained when not to buy SEO from me, and why everything I build belongs outright to the business that paid for it. Money spent on being found properly is not a marketing expense so much as a stability expense. You cannot push the tide, but you can build where it lands.

Where the Line Gets Drawn

People sometimes ask why I finally went out on my own after twenty years of working for other people. This is why. I decided that if a business of mine was ever going to be exposed, I wanted it exposed on my own terms, doing work I could stand behind for people I understand from the inside. Saltline is a small business that works for small businesses, run by someone who has been on the wrong end of a small business struggling, four times.

The whole studio is really an answer to that sentence. Being easy to find, easy to understand and easy to trust is not vanity. It is stability, for the owner and for every person whose job depends on the owner's next quiet month never coming.

If you are wondering where your own business stands, the free Found Score will tell you honestly, in about two minutes. Or simply say hello. There is no discovery call and nothing to pitch, just someone who knows what your payroll actually means.