Feeling Isolated

Feeling Isolated

Sometimes I feel very isolated, as if no one knows or cares that I struggle every day to make this business work.

I have a great staff, but very few are contemporaries, and even those are well aware of the boss/employee separation. Besides, even if there was someone I was close to on my staff, I couldn’t tell him/her about my frustrations with another employee, for fear it would leak out and be misinterpreted. I certainly couldn’t share with anyone my concerns about our financial situation every time things are tight or everyone will be putting their resumes on the internet. Even when things are going badly with a client and I want to express my doubts about a continuing relationship to my managers, I have to weigh my words carefully or there’ll be a panic among people with families who are afraid of layoffs.

Not being in a glamour industry like adventure travel or film-making (I own a foreign language translation company), few people really care to hear about my business at parties or when chatting across tables at Starbucks, and even friends and families don’t get excited when I explain the difficulties of translation from English into Spanish.

I often feel isolated from my family, too, when after dinner or on holidays, I have to go to my real or home office, and work on a project with a tight deadline, while everyone else is watching a movie together, or out celebrating the season. Sometimes, when I’m working on the computer at midnight, and the only light is the low level spotlight shining on the keyboard, I think to myself that I must be the only person in the country awake and working away, and either I’m doing something incredibly wrong, or that I must be incredibly important since I’m here working in the dark while everyone else is asleep.

For a while I was a member of a group of other businesspeople that met once or twice a month. After a while the group just faded away. While it was nice sharing common problems with others for a while, it became awfully redundant and other than a few tips, like the name of an insurance broker, it wasn’t very useful.

Probably the biggest sense of isolation I feel, is that no matter how many direct mail pieces I send, how many ads I run, how many times I re-design our website, the phone isn’t ringing off the hook and our inbox isn’t burning with incoming emails.

Sure, if we send out a few thousand pieces, we get a response or two, but I’m always hoping for some overwhelming response, something that will say, “The world knows you’re there and wants what you have to offer.” Instead, more often than not, I get the feeling that I’m just covering my costs for a mailing, and the world isn’t banging a path to our door.

After being in business seventeen years, you’d think word of mouth would have spread so much by now that I don’t even have to advertise, that everyday someone was calling me with a new project or two.

I’m probably being more negative than I should be. When I look over our client list, it’s quite impressive with its large government agencies and large corporations, and we’ve been in business seventeen years and never missed a payroll, so I guess things are moving along nicely.

It’s just that it doesn’t feel that way.

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Jack Bernstein is the author of seven books on business and president of, The Translation Station, a foreign language translation company. Send comments to him at: Jack@TheTranslationStation.com
Copyright 2008, Jack Bernstein