I have been completely out of touch recently… I haven’t been keeping up with my “commitments”.  I told Gamjams.net that I would work diligently at recruiting Ambassadors.  I should have been doing more at re-designing Fat Frogs Bike’s website in a CMS that doesn’t require Perl.  (seeing as the host doesn’t seem to want to work at making Perl actually work on their virtual Debian install) I should be training for my break as a Cat 4 racer.  But, I just have been in a funk.  It’s truly amazing what stress can do to a person!

The last several days have been mixed with ups and downs.  Some of the downs have been pretty low too… When asked what one of the hardest things I have had to do as a manager was it was an easy choice.   I had no other choice but to tell tell the story of how my shop foreman and I had to break the news to several employees that the owner had sold the company and they only had a couple days pay left before  they would be out of work.  That’s right Merry Freaking Christmas, your job is gone and you are out of work!  The economy has tanked, the government was thinking of giving money to the automakers to bail them out, the company I worked for sold out, I could go on and on.  I was pretty down!

Yesterday was bad…  No prospects, nothing.  Then today.  A few of the people that work for me have some very good leads and I stopped by and had an AWESOME interview with the president of a company.  Very relaxed and open.  I felt like I was back in the “good old days” talking about how an equipment rental business is supposed to be run.  What it takes to make a company grow!  I finally realized that I have spent soooooo long being restrained.  Being forced to follow some old school ideas.. I have not been myself!  It doesn’t always have to be about making that dollar!  Sometimes you have to think of your own sanity and go with what you know!

I used to LOVE sitting down over a few beers and discussing the future of the rental industry with fellow rental folk.  That’s what kept me in it.  Joel Theros, Joe McIntyre, Bruce Dressel, Cliff Miller, and several other kept me fired up.  I came down here to Hampton Roads with that fire and until today didn’t realize what I how much of it I had lost!

Sitting down in that interview was an eye opener.  There weren’t the canned questions out of a book like: “What can you bring to my company if I hire you?”, “Give me an example of what happened the last time you resolved an issue with a difficult customer?”  This was a true discussion of what the industry was about, what was happening in the industry, and what was going have to be done to succeed!

I was pretty fired up after this one, to the point that I almost called and canceled the interview I had scheduled later in the day!

The second interview was with a local appliance dealer.  I like what I have heard about the company’s management and their philosophies.  I really liked the guys that I talked to.  They seemed to be straight forward and honest guys.  The position was as a Customer Service Manager.  The CSM would be responsible for fielding calls from customers that could not have their issues resolved by the sales people or branch managers.  Basically a last resort representative in customer retention.  Albiet, having an employee in place as a last ditch effort to save the customer is a great idea, but what happened to get the customer to that point?  More on the rest of the story later…..