Company Man

Dead And Buried

Because we live in a Litigious Society (i.e. because we live in a Broken Society), I kept a full archive of The Files from The Final Days (whatever that might mean). But I have almost nothing readily available. It just doesn't matter. It's not part of my day-to-day life.

What follows is a partial listing of the type of thing I (only recently) removed from my Working Image (i.e. my main desktop environment).

• Commission Checks
• {Go on, guess the nature of the gig.}
• Players In The Game
• A Contact List for The Industry
  • {Having been deleted, I can only guess it was upwards of fifty pages long by the end.}
• Cold Call Cheat Sheet
• Who I called?
• When?
• For What?
• And For Why?
  • {Hey! Want to throw money away? Hire me to do Cold Calling. I really suck at it.}
• Orders List
• Net
• Commission
  • {Not everyone tracks anticipated earnings. It takes time and is never accurate.}
• The Nut
• Minimum Business Expenses
• Less Payroll
• Including Everything Else
  • Health Insurance
  • Expected Taxes
  • Professional Services
  • Office Materials
  • Really, Everything But Payroll
    • {I was quite proud of how far I had squeezed this down. We are talking fractional values of where it had started.}
• Timeline Cheat Sheet
• This is what happens when in the year.
  • Prepare Taxes
  • File Taxes
  • This Regulatory Requirement
  • That Regulatory Requirement
    • {Idiots (and they are idiots) believe we live in a Free Market. We do not. We live in a Regulated Market, wherein The Regulations transform The Market. And this transformation has not been benign, not by a long-shot.}

On Cold Calling

Did I mention that I sucked at this? I mean, I really did. It's not modesty. It's a personal awareness of my shortcomings and/or preferred work flow. Anyway, I have some notes on the process. And that bullet point list worked pretty well for the previous, so let's try that again. Shall we?

• There was a shift, somewhere.
• From: '[-----] don't buy anything.'
• To: 'We only buy as [-----] directs.'
  • {This isn't a Treasure Map. There have been and there will continue to be limits to my clarity.}
• Maybe 150 [-----] on my call list.
• 36 pages.
• +/- 5 [-----] per page.
  • {With [-----] being a generic substitution.}
• I made infrequent contact.
• Larger Firms had a procedure for screening-out calls from folks like me.
• I suppose some got past the screen.
• For the most, I never bothered.
• I got answering machines a lot.
  • But no one ever called back.
  • {Let us be honest. I was Cold Calling folks who had no real reason to take my call. And when they did, they called direct rather than waiting for some random incoming.}
• There is no data in the Cold Calling Notes worth preserving (those previously mentioned 36 pages, which differ from the aforementioned Players In The Game, which clocked in at +/- 50 pages, for those keeping track at home).
• The only time my notes helped was when [visitors] would come and I needed to set up a meeting (to appease said [visitors]).
• Then at least, I'd already have a few names.
• {And for the most, these few names consisted of all my wins. There weren't many. I'd pad the list with 'friends'... or at least 'friendlies'. }
• {If I was going to compose a How To, this would be an important subsection, as [VIP's] tended to over-emphasize the importance of this Song & Dance... or as some called it, The Horse and Pony Show.}
• How to improve on the Sales Call?
• I really don't know.
  • Anyone without a proven track record (which I do not have) would only be guessing.
• But if I had to guess:
  • Drink more?
  • Play golf?
  • I hear tell some folks liked to visit strip clubs.
    • {It's just not how I played The Game.}
      • {I am not a Party Guy.}
      • {I'm not really a Friendly Guy.}
      • {If I were such a person, I might have achieved a different level (or type) of success. Well, I might have. I may have, also, just burned-out that much quicker.}
        • {It really wasn't a Three Strikes And You're Out sort of situation.}
          • {Who has time for that?}

Random Notes & Asides

Let us do this short form. Meaning, there will not be a lot of extraneous explanation... at least for the first few entries. After all, it seems likely something will spark the flow. And from there, all bets are off.


At the end, I used an Online Fax Server. In other words, for the price of a new Fax Machine (every year), I could send any PDF or JPG to any phone number I wanted as long as I had an Internet Connection. It was handy... especially when on the road.

I can heartily recommend GNU Cash for keeping the books. It's free. And although the accountant didn't know how to use it (not exactly a recommendation... for either), it was easy enough to print out the required pages. And that worked.

It sort of made me sad to set the Primary Email Account to Auto-Reply. "This mailbox is no longer monitored."

At one point, I was told (by the representative of an important business partner) that they were Putting Their Energy Elsewhere. It doesn't really matter the reason. And I'm sure they had plenty. Less Energy from them led to Less Energy from me, which led to even Less Energy from them. It hardly matters who went first or why. Once the downward spiral began, it became a race to the bottom. The only really amazing thing is how long we pretended to do business with each other before we (collectively) finally realized the other (each other) had already checked out. Please feel free to disagree.

In retrospect, part of my deconstruction of the above has been a certain realization about the nature of failure and putting out fires. The downward spiral lasted way too long... because those whose job it was to track such things had even bigger problems to attend to. "Yes. Yes. But that's a slow burn. I got a raging inferno over here." Of course, that's the positive spin. The truth remains that years went by without any meaningful effort to Increase The Energy.

Sorry, but this is not the place (call it a venue) for more detailed observations.

"That's Your Problem." It was never stated as such. But that was the upshot. And I solved the problem... by not solving the problem, but by mentally cataloguing The Problem as Theirs... with each of us maximizing the short term profits as the ship slowly went down. Sorry, this was my reality. I'm sure everyone was a bit right and wrong in their own way.

A corollary to this was watching The New Hot Shots Slash & Burn their way through incredibly short tenures prior to promotions, transfers, or in other ways moving on. The metaphor I like to use for this is Selling The Farm. It works. It makes money. And often, it's the right decision. But it becomes amazingly difficult to plant a crop the next season without any soil left to turn. Get it?

When paying on Commission, I would recommend prorating problems. Often enough, I was caught in the middle, both sides refusing to budge, deciding I was the weak link and reducing my cut. I'm not saying this was never justified. But when fault can be identified and it isn't my fault, making me take the hit is... well, I'd say abusive. But really, it's just not conducive to getting Future Edge Case Business... you know, if that's what one wants.

It's really nice when folks want to come to you and throw business at you. Perhaps if I had to do it over, I'd take a lot more zero commissions just to solve problems and Cultivate Preferred Customers. Or, no. If I had to do it over, I wouldn't bother. A Zero Commission means one is either selling to or for the wrong person.

The Public Facing Persona is The Company. If a company has a crappy customer service agent, for all intents and purposes, it's a crappy company. One might want to keep that in mind when determining the Pay Scale. It has been my experience (having worked for Minimum Wage time-and-time again), that folks willing to work for Minimum Wage are hardly ever worth that much. Yeah, it's not a solid idea. But there's a point to be taken. Hire from the bottom and you'll get what you pay for.


My final entry in this section (all of these sections arise from different note files and/or needs) relates to a time (long after I had retired) when I was in a restaurant sitting next to a group of folks who (obviously, as I know my business) were engaged in making money the same way I had. I did not feel any nostalgia nor desire. In short, I was Missing Nothing.

Just A Job

That remark above (about Missing Nothing) is truer than one might believe. I often say that I don't care about what I did. And I don't. At one point, I tried to make a list of success stories. But it got nowhere.

I do not care about what I did.

I do not care if what I had been paid to do had ever gotten done at all or completed by someone else instead.

It was a way of making money.

There was absolutely nothing else to it.

No Pride.

No Accomplishment.

No Nothing.

Anyway, I tried to make a list of successes. Hey, this is what I did. But it turned out to be a Zero Length List.

I did what I did for money and that is the beginning and end of it all.

Ironically, when I tried to put together a list of failures, I was much more successful. But that's not the type of list it is ever prudent to discuss... not that they are secrets or anything. Overwhelmingly, problems took the form of "We do not wish to pay for Services Rendered, because..."
      Followed by some reasonable explanation.
      Or absolutely any rationale as may come to mind to a person wishing to avoid making payment.

If I weren't cynical before, I'm sure the endless list of excuses would have been enough to tip me over the edge.

After all, if one can get a discount by complaining, one now has a vested interest in complaining.

Heck, complain enough and one might even get a Year End Bonus out of it.

Make Of It What You Will

And yet, walking away was the easiest thing I ever did.