Using Experience to Propel Change

Doing what you know may mean more than just doing the same kind of business. Some people faced with transitions want or need to make complete career changes . But keeping a thread of familiarity in their choices helps ease their way. 

Doing what you know is an excellent way to face intimidating odds. Mary Shaver, for example, survived by doing what she knew best after one of the most stressful years of her life: a year in which her mother died, her daughter was born, her husband divorced her, and she lost her job working in the family business. 

For many years Mary and her then husband worked in her father’s tugboat business on the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. Part of their work was ferrying the customs agents, crew, and, depending on cargo, any other people who needed to get to and from the 1,500 ships that anchor on the river every year. However, when they were exceptionally busy, passengers had to wait quite a while for the tugs to come and get them. 

Mary had suggested using smaller, faster boat instead of the tugs to ferry the passengers, but her father replied, “We have done it with tugboats for a hundred years and we will for the next hundred.” She didn’t forget her idea, though, and it eventually became the business that supported her. 

“I had rolled the problem [of ferrying customs officials to and from ships] around in my head for years. It may have looked to others like I was leaping into this, but I had clearly thought out the idea.”                                                                                 Mary Shaver, President, Anchorage Launch Service, Co.,Oregon

Mary started her own business after her divorce when it became apparent that she couldn’t get a job with the competition. Tugboat companies feared she would eventually return to her family business. “I was backed into a corner, and I didn’t have time to think about it. I didn’t have a clue about forms or anything to do with business. I was only concerned with putting food on the table.” 

Although Mary had long seen the need for a fast ferrying service, she conducted her own survey of the marine community in Portland before she started. People encouraged her. She took her half interest in an almost defunct fishing boat (“the only thing I got out of the divorce”) and her version of a business plan—“it was more like a résumé that explained what I had done in the marine industry and why my idea was needed”—and went to banks for a loan to buy out the partner in the boat. 

“I got laughed out of almost every bank in town. One banker thought the idea was so ridiculous he laughed like a hyena. It was a humiliating experience.” Yet Mary defied the odds and eventually persuaded a friend to help her set up a meeting with a vice president of another bank. Mary took the loan officer to lunch and told her all about the industry and her need to make her idea work. She got the loan and used it to buy out the other partner’s interest, clean up the boat, and start her business.  

Over the next few years Mary built up her business to twelve full time employees and four boats that service between 400 and 500 ships a year. Mary’s definition of success is “knowing I can be bottom lined [when things are as bad as they could possibly be] and continually rise above it.”  

Mary believes she has been successful because:

1. She did what she already knew—then built a company to serve her customers in new ways.
2. She believed in her idea.
3. She withstood bankers literally laughing in her face.
4. She found other resources and connections.
5. She stayed her course.

If you have a transition and not sure what to do next, try a variation on a theme of what you already know—tie in something about your past experiences into your next endeavor. 

Have fun,

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