Great Business Tool, Heck, Just a Great Tool in General

I just found this new website that allows people to share documents.  You can upload as many documents as you want and also browse through other people’s documents.  You can find all sorts of business templates from letters to contracts to budget calculators.  There are also many finished docs that you can read or use for reference.  Not only that but you can also comment, review and share the documents.  You can even save your documents privately online for personal storage. 

Here’s how I got lucky and found this site:

I’ve been in the workforce full time since I graduated college so I’ve got about 100 versions of my resume saved on my computer waiting for any occasion to whip it out and send it off to potential new employers.  Lately I’ve been thinking very strongly about going out on my own so that I can answer to myself at the end of the day instead of another irrational person who I make rich.  That’s beside the point… The point is that my wife has been staying home and taking care of our kids for the last few years and although she has tons of experience, she has no employment history and no resume. 

We have been talking about her going to work for a little while so that I can dedicate some time to start something of our own to pay our bills and feed our savings.  We knew that to find work, my wife needed a resume and having no employment history it wasn’t going to be the simplest task.  When faced with a situation like this, I like to look at what other people have done and try and emulate the best example.  In this case, it was to find a resume template for “workers returning to the workforce”.  The first place I looked was on Microsoft Word where I found a nice selection of templates to choose from.  The problem was that my computer is in the shop right now, I’m working on a loaner and for some reason, Microsoft didn’t allow me to download the template because it could verify my account.  I’ll save my frustrations and thoughts on Microsoft for another post but for now, I’ll tell you this little challenge was good luck.

I Googled the name of the resume template I was looking, clicked on one of the top links and I was taken to docstoc.  I was a little hesitant to sign up for yet another service but decided that I have not much to lose and a whole bunch to gain.  The sign up process was really simple, I found the resume template I was looking for and downloaded it.  Last night we put together a pretty impressive resume for a person with no “real” experience. 

I didn’t pay much attention to the site until this morning when I got a welcome letter in my inbox from the Community Manager at docstoc.  The subject of the email was “new docstock message from Kat”.  I get these types of messages all the time from sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc… so when I saw it I decided to take a look.  The message was pretty much a regular welcome letter but it was written as if Kat was just stopping by to say hello.  I’m not sure why but this welcome letter hit me a way that most other welcome letters miss completely. 

I went back to look at the site and I was sold.  A few years ago, I would have wasted hours cursing out Microsoft and dwelling over how I couldn’t download the template that I needed.  Now that I am working on my “luck”, I saw that not only was there a way around the problem, it also led to new “luckortunity”. 

Next time you get frustrated at a roadblock, think of this and how you can get around the problem.  You might end up being much luckier in the end.

 If you have any stories like this to share, please leave a comment.  I’d love to hear them.