Full-time worker, new father, and he still managed to start a new business
By Vickie Elmer
Monday, August 16, 2010; 30
When Nicholas Hartigan started his company, he also was working full time as a contract employee for the Justice Department and spent 10 hours a week commuting to work. His wife, Amanda, was a teacher who had started work on her Ph.D.
Their company, Off Peak Training, was created around the idea that many people want to earn professional certifications but can’t prepare for tests or learn about the work during the day. Many of Off Peak’s workshops and boot camps are scheduled after 5 p.m. and on weekends.
Anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting a company under the boss’s nose could learn a few things from Hartigan and his partners, all of who kept their day jobs while contributing to the training start-up. One of the first things they did was to gain support from the top management where they worked.
“If you don’t get buy-in there, you’re going to get pushed down” by a mid-level manager, said Hartigan. So he assured his employer’s chief executive: “I want to be upfront with you. … It’s not going to conflict with your company and it’s not going to conflict with the client.”
Most co-workers had no idea he was growing a business in his off-work hours. “They knew me as the person who left at 4 o’clock to try to beat traffic,” he recalled.
He returned business calls after 4 p.m. and spent a couple of hours a night developing the company’s brand and goals. He gave up most Saturdays and Sundays, too, working 25 to 30 hours a week on Off Peak Training.
“I’m a scheduler. I schedule everything,” said Hartigan, a habit he picked up while interning and working for a scheduling software company.
He even scheduled the heaviest dual workload, while his wife was pregnant and in the baby’s first year. “My goal was by the time my son’s 1 year old, I’m going to be on my way to running this business full time from Reston,” he said.
His son is now 16 months old and Hartigan relishes working from home — after quitting his job in May.
Christopher Talmont, a close friend of Hartigan and a business partner since early summer, has worked since 2007 to help establish Off Peak. When Talmont was laid off, he spent about three months developing the curriculum and manual for their project management course and boot camp.
These days, Talmont works full time as a project manager for a government contractor working on an Army Corp of Engineers project. He was recruited to work for the contractor while teaching a boot camp — and took the job when the chief executive gave him the flexibility to spend a week or so each quarter teaching full time.
The contractor’s job gave him the financial footing to teach for Off Peak Training free and earn equity in the company instead of pay, Talmont said.
In another year or so when the government contract expires, Talmont figures he will join Off Peak full time. But he might continue with some overlap: His day job contractor is interested in using their business on some projects.
“The biggest constraint that we run into is time,” said Talmont. “Great ideas are flowing.”
Off Peak Training’s classes now include information technology security and IT auditing certification preparation and classes on the nuances of Microsoft SharePoint and project management programs. About half of them are scheduled after business hours, Hartigan said.
The first classes were held in 2008 in his living room, when he admits he kicked his wife and young baby out so he could train friends and friends of friends. Now they’re held in organizations’ conference rooms and in hotel conference space, mainly in Reston, where Hartigan lives, and in Sterling and Herndon.
Since devoting himself full time to Off Peak, Hartigan works 50 hours a week now instead of 80, though many of them are still evenings and weekends — since that’s when his partners are free to collaborate. He spends more time connecting in the business community, though he finds sales challenging. Last month he took a sales training course and sees himself getting comfortable with promoting his company — especially since his livelihood now depends on it. “I like being an information resource,” he said.
