YOUR ALUMNI

Absolutely Fabulous
Alumna turns career changes into fab jobs

She’s been an editor of a magazine, a seminar speaker, the communications director for the Law Society of Alberta and worked for a dot-com during the boom. With that kind of lineup, it’s little surprise that Therese “Tag” Goulet (BA’81, MA’86) is now helping other people find their dream careers.

Fresh off of her bachelor’s degree, Goulet decided she wanted to write a book on how to find a job coming out of university. Ironic for an early 20—something who had landed only one job, but less so considering that Goulet had always been entrepreneurial and a go-getter. “As a kid, I once made my own money and even tried to spend it,” she jokes.

Goulet says she did a tonne of research and raised the capital to publish the book herself in 1982.
“ It got good reviews, but it sold terribly. I sold about 1,000 copies and ended up donating 9,000 others to schools and libraries across the province,” she reminisces.

Ever positive, Goulet said the experience was nothing but beneficial.

“ When you really screw things up and do it wrong, there’s a lot of learning in that.”

A series of interesting jobs followed, but when her sister, Catherine, approached her several years ago about starting a business, they put their heads together to come up with a solid business plan on something they could both lend their past experiences to. FabJob.com was created just as the dot-com crash hit, but it didn’t deter the pair from feeling the Internet was the right spot to start their company that gives advice on how to break into a dream career. They started with e-books and went from there. “We started small, but we really plugged away at it the first few years,” says Goulet.

The venture paid off. Their company has sold millions of dollars worth of books, largely in the U.S., and the sisters are now widely recognized as leading experts in career advice. They are career columnists who have appeared on MSN.com, Oprah.com, and the Wall Street Journal online. Most recently, they were featured in the September issue of Woman’s Day. Through FabJob, they’ve published more than 75 career books, e-books, and CD-ROMs.

Goulet says they’re ready to go even bigger and are planning to take their books into the malls. But not into the bookstores. “We are envisioning a new way to sell books,” says Goulet. “We want our own retail outlets, and we’re starting with small kiosks in malls in Vancouver and Calgary.” The recipe has already worked for them: a big idea, then start small and grow.