I Got Laid Off. Now I'm Starting a Business.

It's been 65 days since I last logged on to my company-issued laptop as a full-time Email Marketing Manager at a mid-size company here in the Midwest. Decent pay. Okay-ish benefits. Definitely the kind of job that made my parents feel good knowing I had some stability.

Until I didn't.

One morning, a random Teams meeting appeared on my calendar that I wasn't expecting. HR was on the invite. Restructuring. Budget cuts. Nothing personal. Twenty minutes later, I was filling out my exit interview form and printing a shipping label from IT to send back my laptop and monitors.

It took me roughly 45 days for the shock to wear off. Forty-five days to be completely comfortable with acknowledging that the company I had dedicated 45+ hours a week to for the past three years laid me off — along with 29 other employees — with no warning. Sure, there were signs. Sales were down and stakeholders were getting increasingly nervous. But I naively assumed I might be safe. And honestly? This layoff did feel personal.

For the first couple of weeks, I did nothing productive. I spent my mornings and evenings doing my typical routine — shuffling the kids to and from school and extracurricular activities. But it was the rest of the day that left me feeling uncomfortable. I've never been without a job. I don't know how to "do nothing." So I spent hours scrolling through LinkedIn and job boards. I cleaned up my resume and even designed a colorful version using a snazzy template on Canva.

Now here I am. Sitting in my house at 1 pm on a Tuesday with nowhere to go and no paycheck coming. That one month of severance stopped hitting my account weeks ago. I'm sick of scrolling LinkedIn and submitting applications every day. I can't bring myself to submit one more this week. And I know I'm not alone — thousands of people nationwide have lost their jobs in the last six months. We're all stuck in the same routine and rat race.

But today feels different than the previous 64. Not some big, dramatic bolt of lightning moment — more of a slow, quiet realization.

I don't want to go back to a 9-to-5.

What if I stopped hitting "Apply"? What if I didn't go back to what's been familiar to me for the last 20 years? What if I bet on myself?

So I started Googling. "How to start a business." "How to make money online." "How to start a business with no money." I found thousands of resources. But I also found a lot of noise. People in rented mansions telling me to "just start" and to buy their $497 course for all the answers. Apparently, no one thought it would be useful to put together a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to actually start a small business from scratch.

So I've made a decision. Two decisions, actually.

First: I'm going to figure this out. Step by step, starting from literally zero. I'm going to learn how to start a real, small business — not some get-rich-quick scheme or a vague "side hustle," but an actual, legitimate business that could one day replace the salary I lost.

Second: I'm going to document the whole thing. Right here on this blog. What worked. What didn't. What I still need to figure out. I'm never going to claim to have all the answers, because I don't. What I am going to do is be honest about every step of this journey.

That's what Day 1 CEO is about. Today is Day 1.

I'm declaring myself a CEO in Training. A real CEO probably has their arms around what sort of business they're running. I don't — not yet. But earlier today, I started brainstorming ideas in a doc. And because I'm me (a former Marketing Manager who can't turn it off), I also started vetting some of those ideas by pulling up Google Trends and mapping out how these idea can generate income.

This isn't going to be a masterclass. I'm not a guru. I don't have a six-figure success story to sell you — not yet, anyway. I'm a 35-year-old mom who got laid off, decided to bet on herself, and is figuring it out one Google search at a time.

If you're in a similar place — you just lost your job, or you hate the one you have, or you've been thinking about starting something but don't know where to begin — follow along. I won't always have the answers, so I won't pretend to. But I'll share every single thing I learn along the way.

Day 1 is today. It's a little overwhelming. But I'm doing it anyway.

Next week, I'll share what I've learned so far about actually setting up a business. Turns out there's a lot more to it than just having an idea — but it's also not as scary as the internet makes it seem. I think.

Wish me luck.

— Charley