After getting laid off, I took my next role just to get revenge.

I worked as a product manager for an automotive supplier. Things were great for about 8 years until we got new manager when my employer got bought by another company. Despite being the top performer on my team, they decided to lay me off. I was NOT happy about it, but that’s the nature of at-will employment. The severance package was just OK, but I had to sign a 12 month non-compete to get it…whatever.

I spent that year figuring what I wanted to do going forward. I also stayed in touch with a lot of the people at the OEMs who had been responsible for buying the parts I was supplying. We didn’t really talk about business, but we stayed in touch because after all those years working together, we’d become friends too. So we still played golf, went to hockey and baseball games, and just went out to lunch now and then.

I was still deciding whether I even wanted to go back to that kind of work or just do something else altogether when a recruiter reached out to me and asked if I’d be interested in the same kind of role at a direct competitor to my former employer. I was kind of ambivalent, but figured I’d at least talk to them. Turned out that the role they had was not just for a similar role. They were looking for someone to manage the same kind of parts and go after the same customers I’d had in my previous job.

In the end, they made me a great offer which equated to about a 30% raise over my prior salary. I didn’t take the job because of that, it helped, but my primary motivation was revenge.

So far, in the past couple of years, we’ve managed to take about $80M in annual sales away from my former employer. I’m not done yet either.