Thompson's Colorado Needs A Job

I've spent a lot of this summer reporting on Colorado.

Today, I need to report something about myself.

I'm unemployed. I'm on food stamps. And after years of working, I received exactly one week of unemployment benefits from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

What I'm asking for

I'm looking for a full-time job: 30+ hours a week, paying $20 an hour or more, anywhere on the Front Range within two hours of Longmont by public transit. I don't have a car, so that's the real boundary. Boulder County's living wage is closer to $27, but $20 is the floor that keeps me afloat while I keep building.

If you know of an opening, manage a team that's hiring, or can make an introduction, please email me at nickthompsonreports@gmail.com. A warm introduction is worth more than a hundred applications.

I know that because I've applied to more than 200 jobs across the Front Range since May. Chipotle turned me down. An upscale Boulder wedding venue interviewed me to run the place. A communications job has taken me through two rounds of interviews. Software screens résumés, but a person who knows me can see what I'm good at.

Where I'm strongest

• Legal intake: I signed more than 1,000 cases in a year at a major Kansas City personal-injury firm and converted more than 94 percent of qualified leads in 10 of 12 months.
• Insurance sales: I'm AHIP-certified and have worked in health, Medicare, and property and casualty insurance.
• Journalism and video: I'm an Emmy-winning TV reporter. Since May, I've built Thompson's Colorado from scratch: 30+ written stories and 30-40 original videos, which I reported, shot, edited, and published myself. That work has drawn about 600,000 views on social media and 9,000 on the website.
• Weddings and events: I've worked as a wedding DJ, and that's the lane where I recently got an interview to run a venue.

One note: many intake jobs here prefer bilingual Spanish speakers, which I'm not. I'm looking for roles where that isn't required.

Why I have no safety net

CDLE determined that the jobs I voluntarily left did not meet the circumstances Colorado law requires to qualify for benefits. There's a statute, and my reasons for leaving didn't fit it. The result is that I have almost no unemployment safety net.

That's a problem in Boulder County. MIT's Living Wage Calculator estimates that a single adult here needs about $27 an hour, or roughly $56,000 a year, to cover basic needs. Since moving to Colorado in July 2025, I've spent only about four months above that line, at American Family Insurance, where I made $28.31 an hour.

The rest has been instability, failed sales jobs and attempts to build something better.

I left a good job to come here

Before Colorado, I worked legal intake at DiPasquale Moore, a high-powered Kansas City personal-injury firm with a huge advertising presence. I was on pace to make around $80,000 a year.

Then my car was stolen twice by the same person in winter 2025. My credit was bad, so replacing it meant subprime financing on top of an insurance quote of $400 to $500 a month. Staying started to look financially irrational. Carless Colorado looked cheaper.

So in July 2025, I moved to Longmont with essentially no savings and no car. For more than a year, I made it work.

I'm also not an innocent bystander in this. I left jobs. I moved states without much of a cushion. I took chances on roles that turned out to be bad fits, and I walked away from situations I didn't think were sustainable instead of waiting until the next paycheck was lined up. Some of that was principled. Some of it was impulsive. Some of it was me badly misjudging how easy it would be to replace income here.

I take responsibility for the instability. But it's the combination of my choices, bad fits, a difficult labor market and a few genuinely rough situations that put me here.

Five sales jobs that didn't work

Being good at sales doesn't mean every sales model works.

A local health insurance brokerage. Huge amounts of outbound dialing to low-intent leads. The economics never felt stable enough to build a living around.

CoverRight. I left because I believed I was being asked to sell insurance in states where I wasn't properly licensed. I wasn't willing to treat licensing casually.

AutoPay. I thought I'd help people refinance expensive auto loans. Instead, leads came through Credit Karma in a way that felt misleading, and pricey GAP coverage and service contracts were being added to deals. It felt less like helping people and more like maximizing the sale. I didn't want to be part of that.

American Family Insurance. The only Colorado job that paid above the living wage. But training lasted two and a half months, the shift ran 1 to 9 p.m., lead flow dropped off after about 6, and our quotes were often uncompetitive. I didn't hate insurance as much as that particular combination.

A local manufacturing certifications provider. In July, I thought I'd finally gotten out of sales. I was learning microsoldering and trying hard to build a future around a job I'd never imagined doing. Then I was fired shortly after starting. My boss was away for a week, and I didn't show enough initiative to teach myself in the meantime. I was trying hard to care about the work, but I wasn't proactive enough, and I understand why they made that call. I'm not naming the employer because this isn't about attacking them.

I had no meaningful savings. I was car-free. Rent was still due.

Thompson's Colorado was supposed to be the bridge

I graduated from journalism school and spent years as a TV reporter, eventually at KTVI in St. Louis. That chapter ended after an arrest in 2018. Afterward, I rebuilt my career on phones: insurance, customer service, sales and legal intake. I survived. Sometimes I excelled. But surviving a career isn't the same as wanting it.

Thompson's Colorado started around May partly as a vanity project. It became my attempt to build a bridge back to the work I originally wanted to do. I've covered transit, education, housing, a local child care tax, Longmont Cruise Night, a crepe shop, local government, and the strange mechanics of living car-free in Colorado. I've interviewed people, shot and edited video, built the website, published newsletters, chased records and sat through meetings.

People have watched. A Reel can hit tens of thousands of views. Someone can recognize me at a bus stop.

None of that means the rent gets paid.

The audience part worked. The career pivot, so far, has not.

I don't regret coming to Colorado. I moved here car-free because I genuinely believed it made more sense, and for 14 months I made that bet work. Right now, it's faltering.

But I fought like hell to get here. And I'm going to fight like hell to stay here.

If you can help

If you know of a full-time job (30+ hours a week, $20 an hour or more) within two transit hours of Longmont, or you can introduce me to someone who does, please email me at nickthompsonreports@gmail.com.

Thompson's Colorado needs a job.