Sounds like you are heading in the right direction. My thoughts and prayers for you and your businesses. Are any one of these going to be a work at home business?

Doc...

Whatever you do, I know you will do great with your charm and intelligence!!!

Wish you the very best and thanks for so many kind words...

                         

givennsz.....thanks and yes!

Doc... the firing company.. i'm gonna say hmmm, i know it can be difficult for anyone who has to do that, but would you also have an alternate say like, reforming, counseling, or maybe repremand, job referals.. because as we all know people go postal, i'd be even more mad finding out the company i worked for didn't have enough balls to fire me theirselves you know what i mean?  but the jury selection sounds really good lawyers sometimes don;t have enough time to do this they can concentrate more on thier client and the trial upcomings rather then the jury, they also have more organized list of each jurors characteristic and personality..nice service to bring forth, good luck with it Doc!

Doc, you kill me! You must have read National Lampoon years ago when they did a cartoon about this very thing. This guy started a biz which was to fire people. It got kind of funny in one part where the guy was saying "Screw you and your 25 years" I tell you I about died laughing for your plan to start such a company...Good luck!!

In regards to the "Jury Selection" this has been going on for quite awhile. Might be tough to break into, but I'm sure you can make a go at it.

Doc, I would never wish anyone's budding new enterprise to fail unless it was just blatantly unethical or threatened to personally cause significant harm to me somehow, but this business about a firing consulting company comes pretty close. It seems to me you are just talking about profiting from the misery of others, which I guess plenty of other sectors of business do also. But the whole idea still leaves a bad taste in my mouth - unless you actually can make this necessary and inevitable process a better experience for those involved, especially the ones on the losing end.  Even so, you will only be doing what, in my opinion, the companies themselves should be doing on their own; simply because those perfectly capable organizations find it distasteful, or too time consuming or whatever their reasons are. If I were on the losing side of the equation and knew that this practice was occuring (hiring outside agencies to do their dirty work) I would certainly be wondering why my company was so financially strapped that they have to resort to the layoffs yet have the funds to bring in an outside agency to do it for them. I can imagine it being a net financial gain (or reduced loss) on the companies side to do so, but I'd also have to wonder how much my and my peers severance packages (if any) are suffering for it.

That being said, I can say that I have been caught up in the middle of a nasty downsizing experience which was not handled very well at all by some of the people involved. I came out of it ok, but some of my collegues didn't fair so well. There was a lot of underhanded behind the scenes machinations and some just downright vindictive actions toward the end. Some people were blindsided and forcibly removed from the building by police escort in the middle of the workday, simply because they had voiced dissenting opinions or made waves by going over someones head on certain issues. Others were made to believe that they were being retained and moved to another similiar dept. - only to be interviewed in order to simply to interrogate them or mine them for information (under the impression that they already had a position in place in this new dept) and then promply fired after the interview. My supervisor, who was normally a pretty calm stable guy, came pretty close to going postal over this. All of this was fueled by a lot of old personal rivalries and animosities and an apparantly incompetent HR department that should have mitigated some this fallout. So I suppose an entirely neutral third party might not have been a bad idea in this situation. Assuming you can provide this to dysfunctional companies like this, I hope you have a lot of sucess and can make these situations win, win, win.

Well I wasn't questioning your motives for doing this - sorry if I gave you that impression - nor your right to do it or support your family of course. I guess I was reacting more to the need for such a service to exist at all. But as my experience shows, it certainly does. I'm sure there are probably more in house personnel departments that don't have either the resources or the motivation to do this sort of thing - and do it right - than do. Your prescence in those affairs will no doubt be an excellent corrective for this, so I hope you have much success doing it.