Building a Business After a Layoff: What I Made My First Month

September was weird. I got laid off on the last day of August after spending about six months knowing it was probably coming. So technically I was unemployed, but September did not feel like the scary version of unemployed yet. I still had my last paycheck coming. I knew severance would arrive in October. I had planned enough that I was not immediately panicking about how I was going to pay the mortgage. For the first time in a very long time, I had something I am usually terrible at giving myself: room to just rest. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Part of me thought I should take a minute. Process the last couple of years. Sleep. Clean my house. Figure out what I actually wanted after eleven years of building a career inside somebody else’s company.

My ambition apparently had other plans. Within about five minutes my brain had moved on to: Do I find another corporate job and get my stability back, or do I use this weird little window I have been handed to finally see if I can build something of my own?

I have spent most of my career being the person who cares too much. I work too hard. I get too invested. I see things that could be better and have a very hard time pretending I do not see them. That can be exhausting when all of that energy belongs to somebody else. So September became an experiment.

What happens if I put that same energy into something I own?

No manager deciding whether I am too much. No corporate politics I have never been particularly interested in learning how to play. No waiting for someone else to decide what my work is worth. Just me, my ideas, my experience, and enough financial breathing room to try.

I have no idea if it will work, but by the end of my first full month, I have an answer to at least one question:

Will someone actually pay me to do what I love?

Untrained Momentum brought in $650 gross in September.

And I am so proud of that. I built something. I found people who needed help AND would pay for it. I did the work, sent the invoices, and people actually paid me.

Unfortunately $650 is not the number anybody puts in a YouTube thumbnail.

Nobody is making a video called, “I Made $650 My First Month and Spent a Bunch of Money Getting There” and it goes viral. It is definitely nowhere near the roughly $120,000-a-year salary I was used to and $650 was not even what went into my pocket.

My September expenses that I can verify right now were about $161. That included business insurance, software and Stripe fees. It also does not include about $1,000 I spent over the previous six months dabbling, buying things, trying tools, changing directions, setting up my LLC and generally figuring out what I was doing.

So the $650 gross was closer to $489 before taxes, before mileage and before putting any value at all on my time.

The time is where the math gets a little ugly and where my ADHD really shows up.

I spent hours building websites, fixing DNS problems, setting up email, building a CRM (yes, I actually built my own because apparently just buying one would have been too easy), researching leads, writing proposals, learning new tools, creating automations and troubleshooting things that should have taken ten minutes but somehow ate an afternoon. Sometimes a week. I also was doing the actual client work in between all of that. This is not an “I make $10K in my sleep” story.

This is my real startup story.

That distinction matters to me because I do not want to become one of those people who says, “I made $10,000 this month,” while quietly leaving out what they spent, the 80 hours they worked, the software trials they forgot to cancel and the fact that good things usually take actual work and that the $10K month they’re selling you on may have happened exactly once..

September revenue did not have to carry my household. I still had that last paycheck behind me That made it safer to experiment, safer to make mistakes and safer to spend money on things I thought might help me grow.

I know having that breathing room is a privilege. I want to use it, not abuse it.

October feels different. My paycheck is done. I do have severance coming October 15, and I am lucky to have runway. I am not sitting here wondering whether the lights will stay on next week. I have time. I know that is a huge advantage. But severance is not income I created, and I do worry about what I will be doing next year at this time. That is the part my brain keeps getting stuck on.

I want to know whether I can actually build income that belongs to me. Not because a company employed me for years, but can change their mind at the drop of a dime. Not luck. Me. My work. My business. Again next month and every month after that. I am terrified that September was a fluke or the max I will ever make in a month.

One client paid me $550 across two pieces of work and indicated there would be regular work eventually. Another paid me $100 and fortunately half of that is monthly recurring revenue. Those were real clients and real problems I solved, so I am not discounting them, but two paying clients do not make a reliable business model yet.

Then there is another part of that fear I probably need to admit. Right now AI is everywhere. Vibe coding is everywhere. So are the “start an AI consulting company this weekend” videos. Sometimes it makes eleven years of technical experience feel less valuable than it did five months ago.

I know what I have done. I have coached executives. I have studied project management, Lean processes, technical systems, software configuration and security.

And my experience did not start or end in corporate America. I have been a single mom for twenty years. I have gone from homelessness and welfare to school, a career, kids in sports, a home, and now trying to build businesses of my own.

I know I have something valuable to offer and I know I am resourceful. I am still working on believing that enough to sell it consistently.

I do not know if the outreach system I have spent all this time building will turn into paying customers. I do not know if the people opening my emails will eventually buy something. I do not know if the local relationships I am building will turn into stable work or just a bunch of nice conversations.

I know a lot more than I knew a month ago, though.

• I learned that some people will pay me to solve boring problems that come easily to me. Nobody paid me because I had the prettiest logo. Nobody asked whether I had perfectly optimized my brand colors. They paid because something was broken, confusing, time-consuming, or sitting on their list for too long, and I could make it easier. I am not even sure either one of my customers looked at my website or read any of my content.

• I learned that being busy and making money are not the same thing. That one stings a little.

• I learned I can fill twelve hours without trying. I can improve a website a hundred times, research another tool, help somebody for free, troubleshoot a nonprofit problem, build another automation, tweak another page, or spend half a day trying to make a system smarter. At the end of those twelve hours, the bank account can still look exactly the same. I have to get much stricter about that.

• I learned that commission-only work, free work, and "this could turn into something" work can quietly eat the hours I should be spending on my own businesses.

• I learned I like helping people. I am very good at seeing what could be fixed but that does not mean I have to personally fix everything I can see.

I learned what most all of us probably know or have been told but often forget, somebody else's potential cannot keep outranking mine.

• I learned that revenue is not profit, and profit is not a paycheck. I knew that intellectually. It feels different when it is your $650 revenue but not actual profit. There is something humbling about looking at a payment notification and feeling thrilled, then watching the fees come out and finally reconciling what is left against the expenses.

Maybe the biggest thing September gave me, though, is the realization that I am not willing to go back to building my entire life around somebody else’s company just because this part is uncomfortable. I do not want a job search to become my backup plan every time I get scared. I want to use the runway I have to find out what happens if I really give this a fair shot. That means October cannot just be another month of building. At some point the systems have to produce something, and more importantly failure, if it happens, is 100% on me.

Untrained Momentum has to prove that the machine I have been building actually works. The lead lists, the warmed-up email, the outreach, the websites, the CRM, all of it. Emails have to turn into conversations. Conversations have to turn into customers. And the customers I already have need to stay happy enough to keep paying me, refer somebody, or come back when they need something else. I cannot keep measuring Momentum by how much stuff I built for it. Eventually I have to measure it by whether it makes money without me chasing every dollar by hand.

Untrained Matriarch is a completely different bet. I have people reading. I have people opening emails over and over. Some of them click. I wrote the book. I have the program idea. I have years of things I have learned the hard way that I know could help somebody else. But none of that automatically makes it a business. Now I have to find out whether the people reading actually want to do something with me. Join a meeting. Buy the book. Pay for accountability. Reply to an email. Tell me what they are stuck on. Matriarch cannot just become another website I lovingly rearrange while nobody buys anything.

Then there is Mecosta County Kids, which started as a useful local resource and keeps showing me little signs that it could become something more. I like that one because it feels useful first and business second. I just have to resist my usual urge to see one good idea and immediately turn it into twelve. For now, it gets to grow and prove what it wants to become.

I have also learned I need to stop treating every new idea like it deserves its own business. These are not even all my ideas. They are just the ones I have decided deserve my attention right now. That may actually be the hardest part for me. So no, I am not calling September a success story yet. I am calling it a lesson. I proved I can make money outside of a paycheck. I proved at least a couple of people will pay me for what I know how to do. I proved I can build quickly, learn quickly, network, solve problems and keep moving even when half the technology decides to act possessed.

What I have not proved is that I can make it repeat.

That is October.

And if I am being completely transparent, I am nervous. I keep thinking, what if those clients were luck? What if nobody new comes? What if I built all of this and the lead machine never starts producing? What if I look back in November and realize September was the easy month because I still had a paycheck and October is where reality showed up?

I do not have a motivational answer to that yet. Not for me, and definitely not for you.

The only useful answer I have is to keep the numbers honest, keep testing, and tell you what actually happens, and I want to make that a promise to you as a reader.

You are still going to get the practical stuff you came here for. The side hustles I find, the things I research, the money-saving ideas, the weird little opportunities that make me stop and think, “Wait, could somebody actually make money doing this?”, but you are also going to get the real part.

If I make money, I’ll tell you what I made. If I spent half of it getting there, I’ll tell you that too. If something completely bombs, you’re going to hear about it. If I waste money on a tool I thought would save me time, I’ll tell you. If an idea works better than I expected, I’ll show you what happened. And if I spend three weeks building something nobody seems to want, I am not going to quietly pretend it never happened and come back with a post about believing in yourself. I think there is enough of that on the internet already. I am building these businesses in real time while raising a family, trying to get my house and life under control, figuring out what deserves my time, and occasionally wondering if I have completely lost my mind.

So that is what you are going to get here too.

The good numbers. The bad numbers. The ideas that work. The ones that absolutely do not. The things I would do again and the things I wish I had never put my credit card into. You can learn from the research. You can also learn from me screwing it up first, and maybe knowing I have to come back here and tell you what happened will help keep me from giving up.