I am frequently asked if I am still affiliated with Bridgeway Career Development (now called Bridgeway Career & Professional Development), the Seattle career counseling and executive coaching company I launched and ran from 1999 to 2009. The short answer is, “No,” and here are some lessons I learned about why you should think twice before relinquishing a company you founded:
1. When I rebranded from BridgewayCareer.com to VocationVillage.com, I gave away BridgewayCareer.com because I didn’t realize that Google loves older domains better than newer domains. This is why if you Google my maiden name, Janet Scarborough, the first site that comes up is still BridgewayCareer.com rather than VocationVillage.com.
2. Relinquishing BridgewayCareer.com felt liberating at first because I wanted to focus on new pursuits. But over time, I felt like I had given my child up for adoption and I wished I could change my mind. By then, it was too late to get it back.
3. The Web never forgets. Years after transitioning ownership of Bridgeway to the new owners, there are still dozens of sites that identify me with Bridgeway. Every time I find one of these and persuade the site owner to update the info, it seems like another outdated site pops up to replace it. It feels like whac-a-mole. And of course there are many sites that haven’t been refreshed in years and from the looks of them, they never will be.
Should I have kept BridgewayCareer.com and forwarded the domain to VocationVillage.com? OF COURSE! Transferring away the domain was like losing years of work in a hard drive crash. Giving up Bridgeway Career Development was probably the single biggest business mistake of my career. My clients benefit from my expensive learning experience because I always walk them through a process of decision-making that considers pros and cons of business transitions such as this one.
In most life endeavors, resilience is required. When I am tempted to be hard on myself, I remember one of my favorite quotes:
“Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.”
Ingvar Kamprad, Founder of IKEA
So now you know…thank you for reading…
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For me the lesson is to take a moment when going on a new adventure (or venture) to look around and ask yourself some questions. What am I leaving behind? What am I giving up or even what am I giving away? And probably most importantly how do I feel about it/how will I feel about it? Not that I would do anything different but perhaps seeing how you did things will make me pause for ½ a second to consider these things. Thank you.