Everyone reading this blog knew it was coming eventually.
In 2022, after trying to find something remote or based in New Hampshire for 11 months that excited me, I accepted a role at CK and relocated Heather to Charlotte, NC. We rented a $2,200 a month home, doubled our cost of insurance, utilities, food and started paying both sales and income tax (not necessary in NH) and I realized pretty quickly that I had moved for a pay cut. I shared this with my new boss on our first meeting. I also wrote about it on this blog.
This was a fast-growing company and I expected to show immediate value and be rewarded for it through a promotion as I would be able to quickly convince those in charge that we needed more program governance, additional talent to support these frameworks, capacity planning, streamlined planning software and I’d show this value by being myself because it’s how I work and I am someone who has always been a natural leader. 2 months short of my 2nd anniversary, I was put up for a promotion and leadership rejected it. I was a one-person-PMO and I am not one to complain but I was working hard with little authority and Heather at home who also moved under the pretense of opportunity was wondering after nearly 2 years, what we were doing here.
When I accepted the job, we kept our home in New Hampshire and rented it out. I told Heather to give me 2-years. In 2 years, I’d be promoted, be leading a larger team, possibly be in a different group in the company and would have leveraged our amazing benefits to maximize as much as I could. I succeeded in the last bit but I also told heather that in 2 years, I would be able to parlay this opportunity into something bigger and hopefully it’d be something back in our home town of New Hampshire. The issue is that in New Hampshire, I can work at Hypertherm, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth Hospital or work a remote job. Those 3 companies require a college degree to step foot in the door. Another on my list, Creare requires a PhD to even do project management and they pay $70-$120K a year. I applied to a few jobs there assuming my experience mattered and they asked me to please stop applying.
This meant that from month 12 at CK, I began applying to remote jobs that would allow work in New Hampshire. You can’t believe how difficult this is because these are companies that have to have some presence (LLC usually) in the state to have you work there. Most global companies don’t. So for the last 18 months, I’ve been looking around and have interviewed with a few but nothing really spoke to me. As we approached 2 years, having been rejected from a promotion and still been living on a very tight budget, I started to feel like I was going to let Heather down.
I’ll talk more about my time at CK more functionally in a separate post once some time has passed but as you’ve seen in this blog, I was able to to accomplish a great deal using their benefits that exist outside of base salary. Base salary means a lot to me and is the most important thing when it comes to a pay-package but we were able to get a lot of things done medically (something like $180K worth of medical billings) in addition to spending $15,000 of CK budget on professional development toward many project certifications and other things like getting in shape, losing weight and taking advantage of every perk the company offered to have a decent time with it. I would not have been able to transform into who I am today had it not been for CK’s support and while that greatly exceeds the base-salary in value, I still look at my checking account every pay period and really miss how much more money we had when living in New Hampshire.
Heather started spending more time in New Hampshire. I think this year, she was there for 5 of the 12 months. She was there while I was in Dubai and was going to be back for 2 weeks during Christmas. Almost every person she’s ever called a friend or family lives within 50 miles of our town up there. There’s nothing like that in Charlotte and there never will be and although we had agreed that if I found another great opportunity, she’d be up for 2 more years at a place not New Hampshire, my goal was to get her back home especially with a now 1 year old baby where we actually could use the help of family a couple of days a week or for a date-night which we haven’t had since Matilda was born. There’s also a looming threat that while she is permanent full-time remote, one way the new administration will ‘trim the fat’ of federal employees is to mandate 40 hours a week in the office. So, we think it’s also very timely to be back in our hometown in case that happens which is very likely.
Of course, this isn’t just about Heather or Matilda but while I don’t want New Hampshire to be where I retire, I do love the area now and I prefer it to many other places I’ve lived or visited. Charlotte is really hot from May to October and the bugs are horrendous and the traffic is just terrible and has gotten worse since we arrived. While i have enjoyed some local sports and activities, I can do any of those in NH with a 3 hour drive to Boston. It sounds crazy but honestly, it’s not too bad up there. I thought I’d love being 40 minutes from an airport but really, CLT is just a bounce to ATL for all of my flights anyway so the 2.5 hours to BOS from home is better since Boston has more destinations than CLT. I’ve enjoyed riding motorcycles year-round but the price of ownership is so much higher down here that I actually wouldn’t mind less riding season and lower cost of having this hobby and gain the ability to just go riding off road without having to plan for weeks since off-road is just outside of my doorstep. Hiking, camping, fishing, hunting, off roading, it’s all just easier up in New Hampshire and that’s what I enjoy the most during free time.
Charlotte wasn’t going to be a forever home anyway and I feel in 2-years I pretty much know what it’s about. Had things gone differently at CK, I probably would have worked out and remaining there for longer. Maybe 2 years in Charlotte at CK wasn’t long enough to expect a promotion? That was probably too aggressive. When I resigned, management was talking about growing my program management office, giving me more reports, more authority and empowering me to take on the things I’ve been wanting to take on. I also heard that I will probably make the next promotion cycle but that’s in 4 months. All of the while, Matilda is walking and talking, Heather is homesick and I’m missing the cost of living we had up north. I want to be back on the dirt roads that excite me and get back in nature and the view of our lake.
I’m going to miss gigabit internet though.
As I’ve said on this blog for a while, everything happens for a reason and there has always been this life-alignment for me that occurs when I really will it into existence and a few other things happened recently that line up. Aside from the family things that will be better up North, my friend and mentor Muriel passed away a few months ago and with her, the Vermont BMW Club’s leadership has an opening and I want to get back involved with the club if they’ll have me and help with events and the annual rally. Losing Muriel is huge and I feel it’s an opportunity to get back involved When I saw her in September, I told her we were working on coming back up and she was happy to hear that. Also, our house has approval from both the town and the state’s environmental board to go up a level, build a garage and make other overdue improvements so we can have a proper home for Matilda while not losing out on lake access or proximity to her family and friends. Also, there are some hobby-things that line up pretty well that I’ll share in future posts.
So through sheer will, what will I be doing when we move back? I left out one company from above primarily because they weren’t on my radar for employment. It’s yet again another industry but I’ve proven that my talents are not industry specific. They are based in the Upper Valley and they’re #1 in their national market of products and expanding like crazy branching into more direct sales, retail, loyalty programs, subscription media and taking on some powerful brands head on as they expand head count like gangbusters. That’s King Arthur Baking which underwent a rebrand a few years ago. They’re based in our home town and I have a few friends who work there. I had looked at their openings over the years but nothing operational had shown up. Yet, 2 months before my self-imposed deadline to move back north there’s an opening for Director of Strategy and Operations. I applied via a referral and had just gotten a certification they require for consideration among a few other certs I got while at CK and I had just rolled out Agile for a few teams and Jira as a project management / service tool so I had basically exactly what they were looking for in a new leadership position.
It was a really tough interview where I met with 12 people including the Chief Operating Officer and head of operations along with a few other directors from nearly every part of the company. This is an important role and it’s really important that they get it right so I’m pleased with the time and care they took to get to know me and my skills.
After a few weeks, they made an offer and I’ll start in January of 2025.
I’m really happy to have kept my promise to Heather of getting us home in 2 years at a company and title I never would have gotten had I stayed at TomTom and given everything I’ve heard, I may not have survived the 2 reorganizations that occurred after I left TomTom where many more of my friends were let go. It feels like their presence in NH is slowly dying and so to would have been my position. I would be nearly 15 years there and been really challenged to keep my job but also stay in NH if they let me go. Instead, I’m returning to NH with another industry and successful experiences, a dozen certifications added to my resume and in a physical and mental space of being confident and ready to take on a new challenge at a new company. As usual, it’s not clear what life will be like at a new company and I hope to have a lasting impact on how they do business but more importantly at this stage in my life, I’ll be able to provide for my family in a role that really excites me and do it in a town and home that we love.
The only caveat really is timing. Despite 2 years being the goal, our house isn’t done yet. We’ll be moving back into our 700 square foot home now with a baby and we’ll be trying to find a place to rent next summer while construction is happening and we’ll be moving back just as Winter begins which isn’t ideal as I love camping and hiking in the Winter down here in NC and it’d be so much nicer to move north right when it gets hot down here and hopefully to a completed home but I can’t ask a new company to wait 6 months for my arrival and I can’t be present to my current company knowing my end date is half a year away so while the time to move isn’t ideal, it is the time to move and it seems like this will be going back to the way things are but I really believe that things will be different this time. I moved to NH originally to escape from San Francisco having failed to change the world. My head space was “get me out into the woods. I’m done” and this time it’s “get me out into the woods so I can resume living my life that I put on hold when I moved to Charlotte” and this does discount all of the things we did (including having a baby) while here but this chapter won’t be forgotten and I’m looking forward to the next one that will have us in NH for a decade or more.
Thanks for reading. I have more to write about Charlotte, CK and King Arthur Baking but those will have to wait a bit. I a house to unpack.