The Layoff Lounge: Cover charge and hope

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- "We may as well talk now."

Jeremy Gocke is waiting for his rental car in Los Angeles. He's not getting it as fast as he needs it. This is not the service he expected.

"Not exactly."

For somebody who has founded a company called the Layoff Lounge, Gocke appears to do less lounging than luggage these days. He's soon to get on a plane for Atlanta for the launch of a 10th city chapter of the Layoff Lounge, an Internet-based program aimed at those careerists author Ruth Luban calls "corporate refugees."

The 150 to 300 people expected to show up at Atlanta's Crescent Room are to be charged a $10 admission fee ("it helps control the crowd size," Gocke says) to hear business coach Mariette Durack Edwards speak on "How To Get What You Really Want in Your Career."

QUICKVOTE Have you participated in a job-networking program of -- or like -- the Layoff Lounge? Yes, it was a big help. Yes, nothing came of it. No, but I'd like to. No, and I'm not interested. View Results

And although the 29-year-old Gocke founded Layoff Lounge primarily as an Internet job-networking service, "We're seeing people show up today," he says, "from all the major corporations."

It's not just for dot-commers anymore.

•   Motorola is closing two wafer-fabrication lines in Arizona, a move expected to trigger an unspecified number of layoffs.

•   Corning's cable systems have dismissed 900 people, bringing that company's total layoffs for the year to 6,800.

•   Charles Schwab Corp., facing a 36-percent drop in daily trading volume, says more cuts are coming, to follow staff reductions of some 3,900 jobs in the past year.

•   Citigroup has announced that 3,500 jobs will be axed in the financial-services company's cost-cutting efforts.

The list gets longer daily.

"And of course we're seeing advertising, PR and marketing people, especially," at Layoff Lounge events, says Gocke. "When times are hard, they're always the first to be let go."

Hanging on

Letting his own staff go is what led Gocke to establish the Layoff Lounge. His MobileContact Media, a wireless messaging firm, was folding last December. He'd already watched his male-media and -marketing site iBachelor.com sink in the deepening dot-com devastation.

By February 22 of this year, Gocke was mounting his first networking event under the banner Layoff Lounge.

"It was supposed to just be a Southern California event," Gocke says, a big IT-oriented networking fest in Los Angeles. "But I figured, 'I can probably survive another couple of months and see where this goes'" when he found that inaugural event drawing a huge crowd -- and generating some noisy, national word of mouth. The son of an elementary school superintendent and a nurse had found a new focus for his entrepreneurial impulses.

Subsequent chapter licenses were issued to "city directors" as events were held in Boston, Massachusetts; New York City; Dallas and Austin, Texas; Orange County and Silicon Valley, California; and more events were planned for Phoenix, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; and Houston, Texas.

The revenue stream for the program is twofold, Gocke says.

•   There are those admission fees paid for by the laid-off attendees of city events. The "city directors" who establish regional chapters pay for their licenses through deductions from the admission fees.

•   And the Lounge is sponsored by several corporate sponsors, chief among them Headhunter.net, which along with Monster.com is one of the Internet's mightiest and most enduring "job awareness" sites. Headhunter is joined in sponsoring the Lounge by Delta Road, a career coach network; Resume.com, a career-services outfit; and Resumesion, a purveyor of interactive resumes.

Layoff Lounge has a parent company, Gocke's K12 Productions. Another recent K12 outing brought a group of entrepreneurs together with venture capitalists in a type of pitch-audition setting that could send actors screaming into the night: Each entrepreneur had exactly 60 sweaty seconds to sell an investor on his or her idea.

While nobody's forced to stand and deliver that way at a Layoff Lounge event, Gocke's not waiting around for any cues. When the job market improves -- Gocke does talk of "when," not "if" -- he says he expects to be there. The current collection of Layoff Lounges is to be expanded to include new chapters in San Diego, California; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; Miami, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

"And we're launching in China in October," Gocke says.

The layoffs are hitting China?

"Well, there it's more of a recruiting problem than a layoff problem," Gocke concedes. It turns out he has a foot in that door thanks to an old high-school friend who now works with human resources issues in multinational corporations with China offices. The fall program is to be mounted in Shanghai.

And in a way, Shanghai will be a prototype for the redesign planned for the Stateside post-Layoff Lounges.

"When the job market rebounds, the 'layoff' aspect will be passe," Gocke says. "So we'll have a Technology Lounge, a Marketing Lounge, a Hiring Lounge -- probably the closest to the current model."

In other words, Gocke expects to retool his Lounge infrastructure to serve career specializations. This West Point graduate with a BS in systems engineering -- a man who worked White House and Pentagon communications while in the Army -- doesn't appear ready to see a third company be shot out from under him. This one is built to adapt.

"OK. It's really time these people gave me my car. You wouldn't believe it -- there are like 100 people in line here."

Don't be surprised if one of those Layoff Lounges comes back as the Car-Rental Lounge.

"When" the job market rebounds.