Build the soft place to land before you fall

A piece on side hustles, redundancy, and the case for building something of your own before you need it.

The first time the wind went out of me

In 2008 I was made redundant from ANZ. I had a small child, I was pregnant with my second, and I had drunk every drop of the corporate kool-aid. I was loyal. I was devoted. I genuinely thought I was important to the place.

Then I wasn't needed.

It took weeks for the shock to wear off. I tried to get another job while pregnant, which turned out to be a terrible time to be looking for work. Eventually I gave up and became a stay-at-home mum, which was the last thing I wanted to be.

I am much better with my children now they're teenagers. The toddler years were, let's say, not my finest hour.

Looking for work is not a full-time job

This is the thing nobody tells you. When you're between jobs, you can't fill eight hours a day applying for things. You'll send out a few good applications and then sit there at lunchtime with the rest of the day stretching out in front of you.

That's where it gets quietly hard. The structure of a working week disappears. The reason to get up disappears. The casual contact with other people disappears. You start measuring your worth by how many people reply to your job applications, which is a fairly bleak measure to live by.

I lost a job again after five years at Telstra. By then I had three kids and a clearer sense of what I actually wanted, which was to stop waiting for someone else to choose me.

Working for myself, on and off

So in 2016 I set up an HR consulting business. I've dipped in and out of it ever since. It turns out I love project work with a clear start, a clear end, and a clear thing to deliver. What I don't love is the gaps in between, when the last project has wrapped and the next one hasn't started yet.

Those gaps used to undo me. The same pattern as the redundancies, just in miniature.

What Coosage actually saved

I started Coosage as a small project alongside the consulting. I love flowers, I had a built-in audience through my teenagers' school formals, and I wanted something creative that lived outside the corporate world.

What I didn't expect was how much it would hold me up between consulting projects. When the consulting work was thin, Coosage gave me a reason to get up. There were customers waiting on me. There were orders to make. The week still had a shape, even when the rest of working life didn't.

It also gave me something to be quietly proud of. Something growing. Something mine. That mattered more than I would have guessed.

Start it now, before you need it

The world of work has changed. A job for life ended with my parents' generation. AI is now quietly shifting the ground under white-collar work in ways most of us are still pretending aren't real.

A side hustle is not the answer to any of that. You probably won't replace a corporate salary with one, and that isn't really the point.

The point is this. Having something of your own running in the background changes what happens when the main thing falls away. Your week still has shape. You still have customers. You still have a reason to get up. You're not staring at the wall on a Tuesday at 11am wondering what you're for.

The hardest part is starting, which is exactly what Picklo is for. You make something. You set up a simple order page in a few minutes. You send the link to your network. People want to support you, and from there, word of mouth quietly does its thing.

If you've been thinking about it, start now. Not because you're worried about losing your job. But because if the day comes, you'll already have a soft place to land.