Fired to Inspired: The Comeback Blueprint

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: What if getting fired wasn't the end, but the beginning of your greatest purpose? Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I'm Kelly Callahan-Poe. Today's episode is called Fired to Inspired, the comeback blueprint with Merry Korn. Merry is the author of Fired to Inspired, coming soon in 2026, the CEO of MPK Enterprise Holdings, the former CEO of Pearl Interactive Network, a for-profit social enterprise employing over 1,300 people across 30 states who face barriers to employment. Welcome, Merry.

Merry Korn: It's an honor to be here, Kelly.

Kelly: So in the field of advertising and marketing, we've all been laid off at least once in our careers, some of us many times in our careers. But your story is unique. Can you take us back to that moment when you were fired and what was going through your mind and what made you decide years later that this story needed to become a book?

Merry: That's such a great, excellent question. So I was a single mother with two kids who were just a few years away from going to college. And when I was fired, it was like the ground beneath me just collapsed because I didn't have a plan B. And I was incredibly humiliated and vulnerable because I'd only been on the job for two months. And in the book that you mentioned that I wrote, I own in hindsight all the things I did wrong. I mean, I did a lot of wrong things, but the worst thing I did is I took the job without doing an internal excavation of who I am, what my mission is, what is my purpose. Because quite honestly, the attraction of the job was a really nice title, what I thought would be nice looking offices and decent pay. But you cannot hang your hat on a career, something that it's like you get dressed every day, you go to work every day if your heart and your soul is completely misaligned. So the biggest mistake I made was taking the job, but getting back to your question, I was terrified. I was lost. It was the scariest moment in my life because the very next day I woke up with what the hell do I do now?

And it was a fear that was so all-encompassing. If I hadn't had two children who depended on me, it might not have been as great, but it was a combination of humility, vulnerability, scarcity, terror, all mixed into one.

Kelly: But you've taken that experience and you've turned it into a platform and you have three pillars for turning a career setback into a breakthrough. Can you walk us through them and can we talk about each one?

Merry: Absolutely. So let's talk about overcoming fear because for all of your listeners who've been fired, it's humbling, it's humiliating, especially when you go to social events and people say, hey, what are you doing? Are you still with that company? How's your new job? And to respond at a social gathering with...

Well, I'm not there anymore, but I thought you started two months ago. I did. Elizabeth Lesser wrote a book about this ground zero moment where she refers to it as the egg cracked in your life and she talks about how you have a choice if you could fly or you could fall off a cliff how I was feeling and I remember walking through an alley really close to where I live and just praying really hard, just praying, God, please, please just tell me what to do and here's the deal, God.

I promise you, if you give me a hint of what I'm supposed to do next, because I am lost. I am, look at me God, I am on my knees, I am begging you, tell me what to do. And I said, here's the deal, you tell me what to do and I will make it up to you and I will dedicate a good part of the next part of my life to teaching a course on overcoming fear. So before I forget, Kelly, there was a book that a friend gave to me that was just perfect timing. And the book was called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. And it's also a workbook. And that book was a lifesaver. But getting back to the voice in the alley, the voice in the alley said two words. The voice said "Medical associations" and I'm like what? Medical associations, so I didn't question it because those were the words I went home. I got on a call and I called. The vast majority of CEOs of medical associations in the Ohio area and I started to do what's called informational interviews.

This is what led to the founding of the company and informational interviews I did up until I sold the business just a year and a half ago. But getting back to fear, there are many techniques for overcoming fear and I'll just talk about a few of them. Again, I highly recommend the book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers.

Among them is prayer. Even if you don't believe in God, it's kind of comforting to think that you could just turn this over to a divine force. It's free and you can do it all the time.

The second tool for overcoming fear is exercise because when you lose your job you don't feel like you have any control whatsoever but over your body you do and if you can't afford a gym membership walking is free running is free. You could probably watch all kinds of YouTubes but first of all, it's good for your mind. It's good for your body and it's good because you have to have some sense of control over your life. Just two more techniques and we can move on to the other pillar. The other one is to do something for someone else. So you can get so stuck in your head that all you're thinking about is, my God, my God, my God. And this fear can be paralyzing and it could keep you stuck. But you don't have to stay there. There's a whole slew of techniques, but do something for someone else. Another book I highly recommend is The Power of Now written by Eckhart Tolle. And he wrote this book about the fact, and this is when he was on the cusp of feeling suicidal because he was so overwhelmed and you cannot control the past. You don't know what the future will hold. But if you just take a breath and do what the Buddhists say to do, which is focus on this moment, breathe in this moment. It's a wonderful coping technique. And the final one is to appreciate what's good. So you lost your job or you're stuck in a job you cannot stand.

If you rephrase the fact that you're now on a journey of discovering what you do next and look at how lucky you are that you know how to use your fingers, you have eyesight, you have your brain, you have the people in your life you love, you have to focus on what's good because Kelly, as you mentioned at the beginning, I ended up starting this social enterprise that hired the most disabled people with the greatest barriers to work, they taught me, the people who are blind and had no use of their hands, they were so excited to work.

And I even had some employees who couldn't get out of bed. They had to have people get them out of bed and they were fed with straws and they were grateful to work. And that was humbling and a great, great lesson. So that's the first pillar is you have to get unstuck from that fear because if you can't get out of that space, it's really hard to move on.

Kelly: You call it suck it up, overcome the fear, correct?

Merry: Well, that's a good way to say it. I don't mean to sound harsh. I don't mean to sound harsh, but you got to get over it. You just got to because otherwise you just stay under the covers and you don't get out of bed. And most people can't afford that mentally, physically and financially.

Kelly: You had some deep inspiration in terms of overcoming fear with your mother. Could you tell that story?

Merry: Yes. So there were two inspirations for what happened next, but we'll start with my mother. My mother was a Holocaust survivor and one of the bravest people I knew. So at the age of 13, she was put in a car that was headed to the death camps.

And while she was on the train with her sister, she saw the apparition of her grandfather who said, you have to jump from this train. You have no choice because if you don't, you will die. And so my mother and her sister jumped from a train that had SS guards with machine guns. They jumped from the train and they survived.

So my mother was in the camp and as an interesting side note, she was at Bergen-Belsen, which is also the same camp as Anne Frank and she always told me my whole life that she thought that Anne Frank worked at the machines next to her. They both worked on thread machines. So near the end of the war, Hitler evacuated the camps and led the death marches.

So if you were on a death march and you didn't keep up you were shot and my mother knew she wouldn't survive that so she ran away and hid in a barn and just the virtual fact that she ran away she at any moment she could have been shot and she knew that. So fast forward she met my father. They divorced. She came to this country with $125 to her name and she was a single mom with two kids under the age of eight. So as I'm going through all this journey of, my God, what do I do next? I channeled the bravery of my mother because giving up is not an option. You could say suck it up and move on.

Giving up is not an option. It just isn't. For anyone listening, it's never an option. But my mother was a great role model. Because she lost everybody in her family.

Kelly: So, I mean, most people don't have that as a role model. That's extremely powerful. The second pillar that you have is related really, which is know your purpose, right? Can we talk about how you found your purpose through this experience?

Merry: Yes. So the biggest mistake I made was taking the job in the first place. And it was a mistake because I was burned out on my previous corporate job, high paying. I wanted a change. I took the first job that went along because I just wanted something. I was completely burned out of my first job, disengaged. And I didn't do the work on myself to do an internal excavation of who am I?

What makes my heart sing? What am I passionate about? What is my purpose? What is my mission? And Kelly, everybody on this earth has a mission. And I believe it's your God given right to do work that really resonates with your heart, with your soul, with your purpose. And one of many mistakes I made was taking the job that was totally disconnected from who I am.

And by the way, I mentioned before this call that there are two or three or four books I could recommend to people who are not sure of, my God, what do I do? Where do I go? So amongst some of the books, and I won't belabor it, but there's some great books. And some of them I'd like to mention is The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, Designing Your Life. I love this one. I Don't Know What I Want, But It's Not This.

Believe it or not, Blue Ocean Strategy, because whoever you are, whatever you do, you have to have something unique about you. Kelly, I mentioned I was a government contractor. I did call centers for the federal and state government. It's not enough to do whatever it is you do, but it's what makes you different. Whether you're looking for a job or you're wanting to launch or create a new business.

What is it about you that is so incredibly different from the herd? So anyway, those are just some books I want to recommend, but it's so important to ask, excavate, who are you really? And as I mentioned earlier, I'm going to have a workbook on my website that's downloadable on finding your life purpose. But whether you use my workbook, which will be free, or you get these books, it's so important if you don't know where to begin, get a career coach, get some of these books. There are a ton of books on what is your purpose, what is your mission. But whatever you do, don't just take a job to take a job because you feel you have to because life is short. Find something that resonates with your heart, with your soul.

And the third pillar is the art of informational interviews. So Kelly, a big part of my life I've spent in this desert of what is my life purpose going from one job that was meaningless to another job that was meaningless? And then I signed up for a course with a career coach where we did team informational interviews. Essentially an informational interview is a call where you have a script and the script I started my business with to the CEOs of medical associations is, hello, my name is Merry Korn. I have 20 years of background in sales and marketing and healthcare. And I just want to schedule about 20 minutes of your time to talk about how my skills and my interests and passions lend themselves to the needs of your association. It's that simple, well crafted pitch.

A big part of doing these informational interviews is if you ask 100 people, 20% will say yes, unless they're warm leads. And when you do those informational interviews, learn everything you can about the person you're going to meet with and about the industry, about the company they work for. Do not ask for a job. You don't ask for contracts. What you do is ask for advice, ask for wisdom, ask for what skills you don't have.

Essentially what you're doing is you're creating a relationship that, by the way, could absolutely end up in contracts, which it did for me, or and by the way, could end up in the job that you really want. So those are the three pillars of fired to inspired.

Kelly: I can vouch for the third one because I've used the third one extensively when I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and I didn't have any contacts on this side of the coast. And it led to all of the jobs that I had and just reaching out directly to very senior people to ask for advice. Everyone wants to give advice. So I think that's very wise.

Merry: Thank God for LinkedIn and thank God for AI. Because if you're not good at crafting your script, have AI help you work on it. I mean, these are tools that weren't as well developed when I started out, but they're wonderful.

Kelly: Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about the enterprise, the social enterprise that you built specifically for, that employed people that society had written off and what happened to you inspired your mission?

Merry: Okay, so I wanna mention another inspiration was the movie and the book Schindler's List. So for those of people in your audience that are not familiar with Schindler's List, Schindler was a German. I believe he was a German industrialist, a great businessman, and he discovered that he could save lives by creating work where, by the way, people - he didn't care about profit. All he cared about was he didn't care about the widget. He just cared about saving lives. So I'm a clinical social worker by background who loves business. And that movie had a major impact on what happened next. So, and I hope you don't think this is too hokey because I'm not talking about religion. I'm just talking about a spiritual, a spiritual quest.

All along my journey, there were conversations that I had where there was a synchronicity. People came along that were synchronistic. But strange things happened that forged the path.

So here I am alone, single, absolutely terrified. And I start making the informational interviews and I call the CEO of a medical association. Six weeks later, he called back and he said, I don't have a job, but I'll give you sponsorship dollars for every sponsorship you bring to our association. I did the math. I couldn't afford to raise my kids on sponsorships for one association.

And my fiance, who was my boyfriend at the time, said, I have a great idea. Hire this woman who's a quadriplegic. She hasn't worked in 10 years, but her mind is good. She doesn't have use of her hands, but she'll stay. Because call centers, which is essentially what I started, had the highest turnover rate, probably higher than McDonald's. People last a day, five days a month. So my first bonafide employee was a woman named Linda. A quadriplegic, had MS and had been a former teacher, hadn't worked in 10 years. When I started the business, I used to travel to employees' homes and meet them. So I met her, I live in Columbus, I went to Cleveland, Ohio. I met her family and by the time I left, they cleared off their dining room table and set up a workstation for her.

And by the way, there's so much great technology that people who have disabilities, whether they're blind or paraplegic, can work from home. So, and keep in mind, Kelly, when you're fired, it's amazing how courageous and gritty you are, because you don't know what you're doing. You just, you just do. So I went to her home and her parents literally, she could not get out of bed by herself.

So her parents had to get her out of bed. She couldn't feed herself. She fed herself with a straw. We put her to work on the first client contract. She raised over $140,000 in sponsorship sales within, I think it was the first four to six months I hired her. And I thought, you know what, I'm on to something. Then it was suggested that I hire a quadriplegic veteran who came back totally fine from Vietnam.

He accidentally fell off his roof while he was cleaning the leaves, paralyzed from the neck down.

And I hired him to make outbound calls to people to re-up their insurance. And Kelly, this man changed my life and changed the course of the whole company. Because here is this disabled vet who does calls that nobody wants to make, cold calls to get people to re-up their insurance. It's not a pleasant job.

But he was so motivated that there were days he couldn't get out of bed. So he had the rehab engineer create a hospital table over his bed for days. He couldn't get out of bed. He didn't want to miss work. So when I talk about this divine hand, I started hiring more and more people with severe disabilities.

And someone at the Ohio Rehab Services Commission found out what I was doing and they said, here's this is that divine hand. We have $80,000. We won't give you the money, but we will spend it any way you tell us. So you could just keep hiring people with severe disabilities. So I asked for three things. I asked for technology that would enable people who are blind or paraplegic to work from home.

I wanted a phone system. I asked for laptops for all 10 employees because they wanted 10 hires. And I asked them to help me screen people to hire. And up until then, like I said, I didn't know what I was doing. And they said I had to have a business plan to qualify for the grant.

And for your listeners, that business plan is everything. You have to do your numbers. You have to know what you're doing. The business plan will be the blueprint of what you're doing and what you're not doing. And lo and behold, I started growing and growing. But the problem with association sponsorships is they were short term jobs. So I would hire people who had been looking for 10 years, seven years, and then the work would come to an end because it was sporadic work.

And that's when that divine hand took me to a webinar on the beauty of government contracts. And the beauty of government contracts is they could be very large and they could be very long-term. And I sat at that conference and I was salivating. I was like, I can get competitive jobs, competitive pay and insurance and long-term jobs. So this appealed to the business part of my brain and the compassionate social work part of my brain. And that's when I focused on getting government contracts.

But that's when the company took off and I literally went from within 90 days, it wasn't an overnight success. It took seven years to get my first big government contract and it was big. It was 350 employees over 10 years and no other space affords women business owners that type of opportunity. So that company grew to 1,300 employees in 30 states and I sold the company.

Kelly: Beautiful story. What are, for someone who's listening right now who's struggling, who has faced a job loss or a major career setback, what's the one mindset shift you'd encourage them to take that would change everything?

Merry: Do all the work to overcome the fear because you have no option. That is just not an option. You can't dwell on it. We all have setbacks. If I leave you with anything, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened because I got to do work that I passionately love that completely resonated with my heart, with my soul. So, instead of viewing, my God, I lost my job as a setback, see it as an opportunity to dig inside of your heart, your soul, find what you really want to do and spend the rest of your life loving what you do because you deserve it and you have a mission and use it as an opportunity to live your mission.

Kelly: That's beautiful. Well, thank you so much for your insights today, Merry. I will include all of the books that you mentioned and the workbooks in the transcript on twomarketingmoms.com. Don't forget to subscribe and share and thanks for joining.

Merry: Kelly, it was a joy and you were so well-prepared. Thank you.