Life Insurance

If you could turn back the clock on your career, is there anything you would do differently? We put that question to five successful careerists.

Profile: Getting started in radio was a tough gig for Terry DiMonte. As a student at John Abbott College in the mid-1970s, he knew he wanted to work in radio but couldn't afford to attend Ryerson (Polytechnical Institute's) radio program. A friend who had built a studio in his apartment allowed DiMonte to make demo tapes, which he shipped to radio stations across the country.

He got his break in 1978, at the age of 20. The CBC gave him a six-month job at its radio station in Churchill, Man. While he was there, he sent a tape to a rock station in Winnipeg, where he landed a job as the host of an overnight show.

"I couldn't believe my good fortune," he said. "I would do my show and then go across the street to have a coffee when my shift ended at 6 a.m."

"Susan called me at work one day and asked why I was still there and wondered if I was hanging around and chatting. I told her I was learning. She said she had taken steaks out for dinner. I told her to put them back in the fridge. It was the beginning of the end of a beautiful relationship. I decided that it was a choice between my girlfriend and my career. She moved back to Montreal."

"If I had to do it again, I wouldn't have let my relationship go so easily," DiMonte said. "When you let something slip through your hands, you do so at your own peril. To love someone who's your partner and best friend is a precious gift and very rare. If I could do it differently, I would not have been so cavalier about my relationship."

"My focus had always been the corporate market," Levee said, adding that as his career progressed, his employer moved its focus away from the corporate market to the individual market. "At the same time as London Life was focusing on private insurance, the corporate market was changing. I didn't feel I could do the best possible job for my corporate clients. So I became an independent insurance broker."

"I would have become an independent broker sooner, at the early stages of the evolving, competitive market in group benefits. I would have had the freedom of working for myself sooner. Had I done it 10 years earlier than I did, I probably would have been even more successful than I am today."

Profile: When Anne-Lisa de Forest joined her current employer 10 years ago, she was fresh out of university. The company develops software that adds features to existing email programs.

"I was 23 and had studied communications at Concordia," de Forest said. "I started in public relations but got moved into a sales position, which was an unknown area to me."

What she would do differently: "I should have listened more to my intuition instead of worrying about what others thought of my ideas. Everyone has the right to be heard and a lot of good ideas come from inexperience. I now listen to my intuition and have confidence in what I know."

Profile: After graduation from Concordia's journalism program in 1987, Grace spent a year working at The Chronicle before starting a two-year stint at the defunct tabloid, the Montreal Daily News.

"I would dearly love to have that on my resume. This would be a good step on my career path, and now I'm in a position to truly appreciate it," she said, adding that it would be a challenge to do a degree now because she's raising her 4-year-old daughter and often works Friday evenings and weekends.

Profile: Before moving to Just for Laughs five years ago, Leisa Lee worked for Donald K. Donald Productions and its successor, House of Blues Concerts.

INXS wanted to play a small nightclub rather than the forum. We had to ensure tickets went to the fans instead of scalpers, so we photographed the ticket buyers and they had to present their picture IDs when they turned up for the concerts."

On another occasion, Lee and her colleagues bought chicken soup at a diner near the Forum for the 40 diehard fans who spent three days queuing in the cold to buy tickets for U2.

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