The Beginning….
My world is built around me in a cosmos of circuits, cables, power supplies and monitors. This is where I have been for many years. A geek? Yeah… most would probably call me that. The funny thing is that there are a lot of people that don’t even know where that name comes from… they just remember people in school who seemed to understand electronics and proved that they could be quite good at complex things being called “Geek”. The term actually comes from long before computers were readily available to anyone (roughly 1876, and it was referring to a carnival “freak” who would open the side show attractions usually by catching a live chicken in front of the audience, biting its head off, and swallowing it… no I’m not that kind of geek.)
Anyway, here I am after 4 years in Florida, trying to figure things out. My mind is somewhat mushed. How do you look at your life and try to compile all you have done into a few pages just to impress someone that more than likely doesn’t know the first thing about what you understand?
Let me simplify…
July 9th 2008 there was a meeting. I was told a week earlier that I had to attend. No matter what I had to be there even if it meant that I would have to call the company and have them put me on speakerphone just so I could be in attendance… that wasn’t necessary.
At 9:30am I entered the conference room as I had many times before, only to see that the room had been arranged as though this meeting was going to be a presentation of sorts. Within 10 minutes the management meeting began. The president of the company stood before us, leaning against the wall that we were facing and the first words out of his mouth, “Welcome to the meeting… How should I begin? I guess I should say this is where I make my money….”
As you can imagine the meeting was not what we wanted to experience. Our location was being shut down in 60 days. We were told that the company had been doing well in late 2006, for the first time in years it was in the black and it was finally starting to profit. Then the company decided that it wanted to have its own accounts. They didn’t want to be a company that maintains other companies accounts… they wanted to see their profits increase as any company would, so they took out a loan and bought up a number of accounts that they would now own.
Over the next year the company would screw up these accounts so badly that they would ask us to bail them out. The screwed up the billing, they screwed up the sales, they screwed up the installation, and they made a lot of people angry. How did we bail them out? They would dump the billing calls onto our operators and ask them to make phone calls to the customers and ask them to make a payment over the phone… or inform them that the company made a mistake and did not bill them for 4 months and now those months have accrued and we want the money. They also turned some people into an answering service to respond to those that people that were calling up screaming about an alarm system that was supposed to be installed and the techs ripped up their ceilings and walls, never finished the job and haven’t been back in days. Or the occasional call we would get from an apartment owner that would ask who the hell we think we are installing an alarm system in an apartment that was being rented, without asking the owner of the apartment if they wanted or would allow an alarm system to be installed? So yeah, they weren’t the ones that took the brunt and most harsh attacks from these people, we did… and then once we diffused them we would send the complacent person on to the main office to handle someone that is now more calm and ready to listen or talk. They thanked us for it too… did they compensate us? Hell no… but we did get a “thanks”.
Now here we are half way through 2008 and we have just been told that because of the mistakes that they made, our facility is being closed. The company decided that they would remove the core business and to keep their investors happy they would focus on nothing but the accounts they bought.
Apparently some people just don’t learn.
Why is it a mistake to do what they are doing? Look at the company Sunbeam. Most people have heard of it but there are many people that could never tell you what they do. Sunbeam was a company that began making home appliances in 1910. The company survived through the depression, and continued right through over the years until the 1990’s when it began to see some serious decline in its business. In 1996 the company hired a man name Albert Dunlap to become the companies CEO. Over the next year he became known as “Chainsaw Al”. The nickname came from his management style… in the first year he fired most of the management and hired all new management. He sold or closed 2/3 of the 18 plants that Sunbeam owned, and he fired 6000 employees. He ruthlessly went through the company as a chainsaw would cut through lumber. His rules of running a successful business were:
Get the right management team
Know your business
Pinch Pennies
Get a real strategy
These concepts were all well and good except for the fact that he was unsure how to rebuild what he destroyed properly? A company that had been around longer than he had been alive was not going to come back fresh when you kill new technologies, terminate your core competencies, and then spend money that hasn’t come in yet. To cover for his efforts of ripping apart the company by the seams he bought up 3 brands to add to the Sunbeam name, Coleman Camping Gear, First Alert Smoke Alarms, & Mr. Coffee Signature brands.
It would 2 years later than the Sunbeam board of directors would fire Dunlap. It took 2 years for the board to see that his actions would sink the company. It would be in 2001 that because of Dunlaps actions the company would file for bankruptcy protections, and it wouldn’t be until 2002 that Sunbeam would come out of bankruptcy only to have to change its tarnished name to American Household Inc.
Anyone that knows business strategy would know that you don’t kill the core of your business and expect to come out clean.
What could have been learned by Chainsaw Al’s mistakes?
Cutting costs isn’t impossible, anyone can do it, but there are better ways than to hack & slash jobs
Both New & Old Employees matter
Motivation is extremely important
Keep those around that know your business & product
Trade relations are extremely important
Don’t believe what you read from management books!
So here we are in 2008, the president of the company I work for is closing the facility that handles the majority of its business. They are selling off all of the liquid assets and doing god knows what with its hard assets. To be honest, because there is no board of directors to take the reigns back and make this company powerful again, I give the home office a year or less before it collapses.
But Ryan, why would you have such a grim outlook on the future of the remaining portion of the company? Honestly based upon what I have seen in the last 4 years I have come to discover that when your head office is lead by a ship of fools then running aground is inevitable. Need proof? Here are a few things that I found out about the company that give me such strong beliefs....
1) The CEO of the company does not live in the same state as the home office (He flys to the office every week stays in a hotel, rents a car, and then flies home a few days later.)
2) The person in charge of Telephony in the home office spent over $300,000 on a telephone system for our location that DOES NOT work with the most vital component of the business. He bought it because of its popularity, and it seems to be preprogrammed for Hotels but not for security monitoring. The system still does not work and cannot be returned... he still has his job.
3) They still have billing problems with their customers.
4) They are still having people go door to door to sell alarm systems... this means more irate customers and no front line to diffuse their anger.
5)They have no core business to pick them up and a major debt that they can't possibly repay any time soon.
So here I am… back to the beginning….
After giving 4 years to a company and pushing to do everything I can to improve it… and if you saw the condition of everything when I first started you will know that everything has improved.
Now I am in a unique position… I still have a couple weeks in which I will get a paycheck, I have revamped my resume and I have been distributing it in every direction. I have even been setting up interviews (I gotta say I am sick of hearing from recruiters though…. They are paid to get me in the door, the only issue is they don’t always know how to work it out so I get the benefits or the salary I need to survive).
I am also in a unique position because my lease on my apartment is up this coming month. So I have to figure out what I am going to do. If I fight hard enough I will find a job in the area and I get to keep the apartment that I really like. It’s in a great area, the price is right, and I have no problems with any part of it. The only thing that seems to be killing me is the fact that I am really getting sick of Florida. Yeah it’s a pretty place, it’s nice to visit, but I gotta say it can really get on your nerves after a while.
I feel a little better in the respect that I have been hearing back from various companies now that are interested in having me interview. It means that I have enough knowledge and skill to represent myself in a professional way, and that they see that I am not some inexperienced kid that hasn’t cut his teeth yet and is trying to make a name for himself.
The strangest thing is that when I was first told that the facility was going to be closed within a couple days I got sick. Suddenly got this violent strain of some kind of virus which I believe was strep throat. The symptoms were all there and it felt like things did when I was a kid (and I got strep all the time as a kid). So I finally recover after a week… I go through everything including losing my voice for 5 days. Now that I am supposed to be better I don’t know why the sickness hasn’t quite stopped. It’s been a couple weeks and I still haven’t fully recovered yet. I know I haven’t….. I’m doing everything I can but I still have this sickly sweet smell that fills my sinuses so I can smell it when I breathe… it happens every time I get sick and until I recoup 100% it doesn’t go away. Then again neither does the dizzy spells, or the coughing fits, or the feeling that sudden desire to worship the porcelain god…. While I haven’t gotten that far the feeling sits on me for hours at a time before I go to bed.
Yeah life can be a funny thing… its said that it is the only game that no one wins. It is the only thing that anyone can’t accurately explain. Life is like a business, a select few control it, there are some that are rich, many that are not, and some that just choose not to do anything and yet they are still around. It’s one of those few things that will give you the illusion of being ahead of the game momentarily before dragging you behind the 8 ball without so much as a moment’s notice. Don’t believe me? Ever spent a number of months saving every penny you could just so you could afford something special? Perhaps you may have sacrificed a number of things that normally bring you happiness just so you could have one thing that was truly special. So you saved, and you scrimped and you managed to put enough money aside so that on the next paycheck you could afford what you have been waiting for… suddenly your car has a major problem , or you get a ticket, or god forbid someone in your family is suddenly on their death bed and you need to fly home to see them… (I use these examples because in the last 4 years I have had all of them happen to me, not that it doesn’t happen every day or that I am some kind of unique case because I know I’m not.. but these are all examples of how one minute you are ahead and the next minute you are caught in the undertow of life).
Well… you’ve made it… my long winded schpeel is over. Am I a better person for it, no, not really. Do I feel as though I have accomplished something? Well aside from giving me a chance to spill a variety of topics onto electronic paper I don’t think I’ve changed anything. My mind is just as much a mush as it was when I started… I’ve applied for a few more jobs and I’ve heard back from a few more places… asking me when I will be in the area for an interview… damn recruiters…
I think if given the right amount of time I could figure things out…
