"Responsibilities describe where you stood. Outcomes describe what changed because you were standing there." Sherman Mohr

You Know You are Getting Fired or Quitting

Fired or quitting, take these practical steps

Let me suggest a new way to look at your job history. Some of you may have owned part of your company or have been self-employed. Most who read this will have been employees, not employers. Job history equals career history.

Imagine your entire career, every account you saved, every team you built, and every fire you put out at 11 p.m. that nobody thanked you for, is a business. Not a metaphor. An actual company, with revenue and margins and a balance sheet.

Now imagine you are about to be fired or quit the company, and the only marketing document you have is a one-page list of the departments you worked in.

That is a resume. And that is what most people over fifty walk into their next chapter carrying.

Start with this understanding, you are not short on value. You are short on evidence. After twenty or thirty years, you have created more measurable outcomes than a 32-year-old could invent in a pitch deck. But the proof of it is scattered across systems you're about to lose access to, buried in the memory of colleagues who are also moving on, or already have done so. 

Your history is locked inside your own head where no hiring committee, board, or client will ever look. When you leave, the door closes, and the file cabinet stays behind.

So let's talk about how to take the evidence with you,  and how to turn it into a story that opens the next door instead of just closing the last one.

The transition from one career to the next, be it consulting, a fractional role, a board seat, or an encore act, fails most often at the level of framing, not effort. People send more applications. They tune the font on the resume. They "network." All fine. None of it addresses the actual problem, which is that the market cannot buy what it cannot see.

The shift that changes everything: stop describing what you were responsible for and start proving what you created. "Oversaw marketing operations" is a responsibility. It tells a buyer nothing, because responsibility is just proximity to a job. "Grew a business unit's revenue seventeen-fold from a standing start" is an outcome. It tells a buyer you can do the thing they are trying to hire.

Responsibilities describe where you stood. Outcomes describe what changed because you were standing there. Only one of those is worth money.

Let me share an anonymous example. A real one, details generalized.

A president of a small marketing unit inside a tech company spent about four and a half years running what turned out to be the only revenue engine the parent company had. When it came time to position that tenure for the next act, consulting and fractional-executive work, she did not write a resume. She built what she called a Value Creation Record: a short, evidence-backed document that reads less like a job history and more like the memo you'd hand an investor.

The headline numbers were strong. Service revenue grew from roughly $22K in the first year to a peak around $390K. Gross margin went from negative to 95%. The unit produced about $1.19M of cumulative revenue on $280K of deployed capital, roughly $4.26 of revenue for every dollar in.

But the numbers are not the lesson. The structure is. And that structure is copyable no matter what you did for a living, whether you ran a P&L, managed a warehouse, staffed an ER, or kept a school district's payroll from collapsing for eighteen years. Here is what she did, translated into moves you can run.

1. Do the archaeology before you leave. The single most expensive mistake in a career transition is waiting until after the exit to reconstruct the record. The moment you turn in the laptop, you lose the QuickBooks exports, the CRM history, the email trail, the dashboards, and the primary sources that make a claim believable instead of nostalgic. Our example traced every figure to source accounting exports. She could do that because she pulled them while she still had the keys. If you are "about to be" in transition, your assignment starts today, not on your last Friday.

2. Claim outcomes, then attach evidence to each one. For every important thing you did, write the result as a number and then name the source that proves it. Not "improved efficiency" but instead, I "cut delivery cost from 126% of revenue to under 5%, per the year-end P&Ls." The evidence tag is what separates a professional record from a LinkedIn humble-brag. Anyone can claim. Few can cite.

3. Use ratios, not just totals. Totals are impressive and forgettable. Ratios follow you along the journey. "Grew revenue to $390K" is fine in one context and meaningless in another. Your generation of "$4.26 of revenue per dollar of capital" and "27x improvement in delivery-cost efficiency" survive the jump between industries, because a ratio describes how well the machine runs, not how big it happened to get. A fractional CFO, a hiring board, a prospective client, all think in ratios. Speak their language.

4. Reframe volatility as evidence of a system. This is the move most people miss, and it is the most powerful. In our example, the top client of the firm was fully replaced every single year. On a resume, that looks like instability, lumpy revenue, churn, a red flag. Reframed truthfully, it is the strongest proof in the whole document: revenue grew and margins expanded even though the number-one account had to be rebuilt from scratch annually. That's not a fragile relationship carrying the business. That's a durable system generating demand on demand. Your career has "bad-looking" years too. Before you hide them, ask whether they are actually your best evidence of resilience, dressed up as a problem.

5. Translate every result into a transferable capability. A buyer in your next field does not care about whatever your old world was. They care what it proves you can do. So end each proof point with the portable version: zero-to-scale revenue building, capital efficiency, margin engineering, turnaround execution. The specific story is the evidence; your capability is the product. You are not selling your past. You are selling the repeatable thing your past demonstrates.

6. Put the honest context in on purpose. Not everyone does this but if you do it, and your future client or employer values integrity, you’ll be glad you did this. Our example's document included a "Methodology & Honest Context" section that stated plainly: the consolidated company was still net-negative over the period, the capital was real and not zero, the partial year was annualized and labeled as such. She volunteered the caveats.

Why would you hand a buyer ammunition to be used against you? Because credibility is the entire game, and credibility compounds. An inflated claim collapses under the first hard question in diligence, and takes every other claim down with it. A claim that has already priced in its own honest context cannot be knocked over, because there is nothing left to expose. Understating on purpose is not modesty. It is the most aggressive credibility play available to you. The person who says "here's exactly where this number is soft" is, paradoxically, the person you believe about everything else.

Six proof points are a pile of bricks. The narrative is the mortar.

Your story needs a throughline. A single sentence that explains what you do, told through what you've done. In the example, the spine is roughly: "I build durable revenue engines from a standing start, efficiently, and I do it through downturns." Every proof point hangs off that sentence. The revenue growth proves it happened from a standing start. The capital ratio proves how efficiently it was done. The annual client turnover and the market downturn prove it was done through downturns.

Notice what that does. It converts a scattered work history into a thesis about you. When the story has a spine, the listener stops evaluating whether you had a good job and starts evaluating whether they need what you're clearly built to do. That is the entire idea, and it is available to anyone willing to sit down and find their own one-sentence spine.

If you can't write yours yet, that's not a branding problem. It's a signal that you haven't finished the archaeology. Go back to the evidence until the pattern in your own career becomes obvious to you. It's there. Twenty years leaves a pattern whether you noticed it or not. Remember, your author, Sherman Mohr, is here to help you if you need it. 

Inaction always feels free and never is. Even if you don’t plan on leaving your job, you should be doing this every six months to a year. Once your first Value Creation Record is built, you can easily update it every quarter. It will help if you stay in your job come review time. 

I have a friend that works in a high pressure environment in healthcare. She isn’t C Suite but she’s not admin either. She’s a solid mid-level grinding type of implementation pro running multi-million dollar integrations and projects. She knows the division’s numbers and her part of the responsibility for making those numbers happen every year. I have known her to tell a supervisor at review time exactly what her contribution to the division’s success was and how much that contribution meant in dollars. She has told her boss more than once at review time, “Look, you need to go back and see if you can get me more. I know I’m worth it.” 

If you skip this, you don't fail loudly. You fade quietly. You send resumes into a void and interpret the silence as ageism, or a bad market, or bad luck. Some of that may even be real. But underneath it is a fixable problem you never addressed: you asked the market to infer your value from a list of titles, and the market, being busy and skeptical, declined to do your homework for you.

The over-fifty professional carries a specific and unfair burden: you have to prove that decades of experience is an asset and not a liability, and you have to do it fast, against a story the culture has already half-written about you. A pile of evidence, ruthlessly organized and candidly framed, is how you rewrite that story before someone else finishes it for you. Not with confidence. Not with "energy." With proof.

You already did the work. Two or three decades of it. The only thing left is to refuse to let it stay invisible.

Block two hours this week, before anything changes about your access,  and open one primary source from your current or most recent role. A P&L, a sales report, a project tracker, a performance file. Pull three numbers that prove something changed because you were there, and write each one as a single sentence with its source attached.

Three sentences. That's the whole first step, and it's the one nobody does.

That is the first page of your annual report. The company is you. It's a good company. Somebody should finally write it down.

— Sherman G. Mohr

Founder, Over50Pros & Front of the Check

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These URLs will provide ways to implement what was shared in the featured article.

The Power Of Quantifiable Results: The XYZ method for prepping your next resume.

The Brag Document: Keep track of your accomplishments with a Brag Document

Steps Before You Quit: Keep information to keep prior to quitting.

Rick Moore, 55 — 32 years in the Air Force → founder, The RGM Group
After three decades culminating as a Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, Moore didn't market "leadership." He named the one specific, valuable thing he'd mastered — federal defense-budgeting processes — and sold exactly that to companies chasing DoD contracts. "I've been able to leverage the knowledge that I gained in the military to continue to serve the Air Force."
The move: claim the specific capability, not the title. (Kiplinger)

María González, 62, - founder of M&A Supplier Diversity Consultants, who retired from a career in procurement for the state of Massachusetts and then launched a company in 2019 to teach small businesses how to land government procurement contracts.

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If you don’t brag on yourself, no one else will.

I promised last week, I’d post up my claiming of outcomes. They are below. The truth is that this exercise was transformative for me. I felt validated in the work I’ve done over the last 6.5 years in ways I didn’t prior to doing the exercise. If you want more confidence, assuredness, and tools to leverage for your next move, take the steps to claim and document your accomplishments.

There is more, but here are the highlights:

What This Record Proves

For consulting and fractional-executive positioning, the tenure evidences six transferable capabilities:

And as always, if you need help with anything related to topics in the newsletter or transition over 50 years old, schedule a call.

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