Far from a disaster, the COVID-era “Great Resignation” signals a new economy where the “little guy” holds the cards.
“Four million people quit their jobs in July of 2021 alone,” entrepreneur and business mentor Dylan Ogline said. “A lot of them aren’t coming back, and we’ll be better off for it.”
Ogline, founder of the seven-figure digital marketing agency Ogline Digital, is talking about the “Great Resignation,” which culminated in 10.9 million job vacancies in July of 2021.
But while big employers and the government, accustomed to an eager tax-paying workforce, are scrambling to get them back, Ogline can only laugh.
“People are waking up,” Ogline said. “They’re realizing that there was never any such thing as ‘job security’ in the internet age, and now they’re treating the jobs that overworked and underpaid with the respect they deserved — which is ‘not much.’”
Maybe he feels a little bit vindicated. Ogline dropped out of high school to start his first business when he was 14 years old. A self-described “unemployable entrepreneur,” he is a prosperous small business owner at the age of thirty-two, with a lean team of 12 who makes his living by helping other small businesses grow.
After decades of being told to get “real work” (even after Ogline Digital crossed six figures and he was hiking across the world, living the laptop lifestyle), he thinks the Great Resignation will produce a whole class of people just like him.
He’s ready to help them do it, too. Ogline’s side project, Agency 2.0, is an entrepreneurial education program that helps people start their own solopreneur agencies.
“People are realizing that, with the skills they have, they can do better on their own,” Dylan said. “Be consultants, start agencies, work as freelancers … They can make more money that way and live a better quality of life.”
“The market is hungry for that kind of entrepreneurship. New entrepreneurs are afraid that they will be left sitting on their thumbs with no income, but the reality is that they will probably have to turn away work.”
Ogline believes this is a virtuous cycle for all involved — the new solopreneurs, as well as the small businesses they serve.
How, exactly?
“From the perspective of my business,” Ogline said, “We are not a full-service agency. We only provide a few very specific marketing services, which work particularly well for a very specific niche, and that’s all we target.”
“If they went to a big full-service digital marketing firm, they would be priced out of that market,” he continued. “We provide a solution they can actually afford, which actually works. It’s small businesses helping other small businesses succeed.”
The only ones who suffer will be the large employers who find that their old “carrot-and-stick” routine no longer works as well as it used to.
“Wage costs will rise … and that’s a good thing,” Ogline said. “The companies will have to adapt, and some might not be able to make the transition, but wages have lagged behind the cost of living for decades. It was never sustainable. Something had to change, and I think the Great Resignation might have given that change a big push down the hill.”
