(OK… ladies and gents, grab your coffees and sit down. This one might be long.)
(TLDR: After being in the wild for 2, 3 years after my divorce, in the same month that I met Inna I was offered a job doing one thing and within a month turned it into the position of my dreams.)
Team, it’s been a great month. Really, starting in December is when things began to turn around, and life has been going swimmingly since.
As some of you may know, I was divorced back in December 2019, right before COVID. The divorce, and the pandemic, gave me the time and impetus to… as writer and podcaster Bill Simmons once said… smoke too much pot, date the wrong women, and figure some shit out. Definitely did #1, not too many of #2 - most of the women I dated were great people - and worked a lot on #3, both here, in real life, on my substack, etc.
I worked a variety of jobs during this time, anything from Uber driving to doing research for Wells Fargo under a contracted position, but nothing permanent or long-lasting. Which was fine… for a while.
Regardless, by 2022, it was a little worrisome, my being in the doldrums this way. I was never one to worry about age discrimination, I knew that I was good enough and smart enough to make a genuine impact in the right organization, and I am the sort of person who will be busy until the day I drop (I hope!) - retirement is not even on my mind. It’s just how I am. It’s how my family is. It’s how we all were.
And what am I good at? What skills do I excel in?
I can plan and organize like a mother-fer. I can make decisions and never look back. I make mistakes, we all do, but having been raised in the family businesses and enterprises since the age of 4, envisioning processes and plans, from the strategic to the tactical, financial and operational, is something I’m good at.
For example, I had a thread about a couple who stole $15k from our HOA and how I took the lead in getting that money refunded to us within 2 months. I had dinner with someone who was tangentially involved in this and he said that there was no way he could have done what I did, that he would not even know where to begin. But to me it was obvious. And it usually is. Like the U-Haul situation. The solution to that one was so obvious to me it didn’t even take a day.
I’m probably bragging about a skill most people have, lol, but this does run in the family - there are 19 of us in total from my four grandparents down to my child and nieces and nephews and 14 of us are professionals or entreprenuers or both (my sister owns and practices in a very successful family practice in Knoxville, TN, one of her kids is clerking for a US Attorney before starting her own practice, the other daughter is a mathematician who loves Galois.)
Anyway, sorry for the preamble, let’s begin the story…
The New Job
I start calling people I know. I have lunch with Jim where we are talking about his marketing company, Reaching Neighbors, here in San Antonio. Well, it’s his wife’s company - Brenda is the President, is in day-to-day operations, and Jim is involved in sales. RN is largely in the business of direct mail for real estate, mortgage brokers, and similar vectors.
So we met for breakfast this past December and start talking business and I, as I do, just started kicking around ideas. We landed on one idea in particular, discussing it further, whereupon Jim asks if I’m interested in developing this market: sales or client relations or something like that. I responded with ‘let me think about it’, but my idea was pretty good - I am definitely interested in seeing if we can hammer out an agreement.
He calls me up a few hours later and says “Hey, Brenda has this production issue she’s trying to solve - would you mind talking to her and seeing what you can do?”
Long story made shorter: She signed a contract with a solutions provider which was too big for a company with RN’s resources (5 people, 1 President). The President was the implementation point-person for the company and she has very little experience with these sort of systems.
One year later, this solution still could not process the orders for our six! (6!) products.
We meet, she discusses the issue, it seems clear enough, and I come on board the very day I tested positive for COVID. That’s fine, it’s a remote position, and the only symptom I had was the initial loss of taste which led me to suspect I had COVID, so got lucky there.
So I go into a deep dive of research, both about marketing companies in general, about this SaaS system which is giving us fits (not going to name them), about other things. I am also reviewing the corporate operations, watching how people worked and what they did. In addition, we have a team in India which was not paying attention to Brenda, so I had to… shall we say… discuss communication best practices with them, etc.
So about two, three weeks ago I start putting together a “Vision” document. Largely summarizing my findings, it was more forward-looking than the sort of easy (and worthless) “here are the mistakes of the past” documents put together by business consultants. There were some items on there about organizational issues re: the structuring of human resources, but the largest part of it was an outline of a 5-year vision to grow the company to $20 million from the current $1.5m.
The document was about 5 pages in length. It covered new products, how we are going to produce what we were selling, a rollout schedule (including a Gantt chart in the appendix, a JohnT specialty, lol), organizational changes that had to be made, some basic financial projections, the usual stuff. Just think through the process, and think about the processes that make the process work.
I also recommended we kill the current SaaS investment. It was a big decision, but my arguments were sound: this install is too broken for us to worry about trying to fix it (trust me.) I had conducted a phone survey of those companies which used this product successfully and found that they were all much bigger, and had actual tech people on the staff, than RN. This thing was way too complicated for our needs and capabilities.
And to replace that, I had to propose a series of incremental solutions, all plug 'n play (in their way). First get our core product line fixed, and then use online solutions to build out our marketing infrastructure, from hiring quality people to outsourcing key functions. I researched the hell out of the online options we can use to build out our marketing company, and like I said, a fair amount of work went into this presentation, all ready for our Tuesday meeting last week.
The day before that, however, was a company lunch. And I’m there, the new guy, and the conversation turns to business and, in time, I was asked about what I was working on. Well, I was working on a strategic three-year plan to completely remake this company which had yet to be proposed to leadership, but I couldn’t just say that, lol. So I responded with “A lot of things. I have a presentation with Brenda and Jim tomorrow to go over it, there are lots of exciting things in it, and I’m sure they will inform the team once decisions were made.”
Sitting back, relieved, thinking that would be the end of it. Nope. Nope, Brenda starts talking and throws the same question at me! Holy shit!
I ask “Do you want me to go over the presentation for tomorrow?”, and she said yes.
So I stood up. And for the next 7 minutes, I extemporized my presentation, hitting on every one of my points, turning and speaking to each person in the group for a few seconds each, as taught in Public Speaking 101. I told Brenda “last thing you need to do is look at another production spreadsheet. You’re the President. Hire somebody to run production and get yourself quoted in the San Antonio Business Journal”. I hit the schedule. New products. How these products and services were going to be produced and managed. When I talked about a person’s task set, I spoke to that person by name - “Denise, yes, lists will be impacted by automation. But we need someone to make sure the list automation is working on a day by day basis, so don’t worry.” Hell, I had to add in a couple of lines about how these changes weren’t going to force them out of their jobs, but I did let them know that their jobs may change because the systems running them are changing.
I concluded with some stuff about how this was a positive for all involved, sticking the landing by invoking the company’s name on the final two words of my presentation - “… and this is my vision for how to achieve our mission of Reaching Neighbors.”
I sit down.
Silence. 3 seconds. 5. 10. Finally Brenda turns to Laura and asks her her opinion. Laura then says “that was the most amazing impromptu speech given under pressure I have ever seen.”
And it was, it was truly a highlight of my professional career. Because it showed that the doldrums were receding, that I lost none of the skills that helped my parents firm grow to $30 million in sales back in the 2000s.
And because the rest of the lunch was spoken as if my plan was already the plan.
People were saying “when we”, not “if we”. Even Brenda was relieved that I had killed the SaaS program - it’s not a great write-off, but let’s face the future and put the past behind us.
The next day, in the leadership meeting, we went over the plan in detail. I had set up a meeting or two with my pre-selected providers and Brenda and Jim were impressed. We still have to deal with the issues of our current recalcitrant SaaS program, at least until phases 1 and 2 of the plan are complete (April 15th).
I legitimately cannot describe to you how happy I am, how relieved I am. This is as perfect a situation for me as I could have found, a small business who wants to grow and is willing to change in order to do so as well as pay me handsomely (including equity) as we achieve this. Inna (see above) was laughing the other day, saying that all I do is have meetings, send emails, and talk on the phone. Well, yeah! And it’s great!
For someone steeped in the Protestant work ethos of the American striving classes, someone who just knows what needs to be done to accomplish something, coming from a family of doers and having, so far, been the laggard, a situation which weighs heavily upon my soul no matter how many people telling me it doesn’t matter…
Not any longer. My time has come.