I’m just starting to get my head above water. I spent 12 hours on the road last Friday, driving a van full of furniture from St. Louis. Normally, the drive takes me 5 or 6 hours but this time I made a side trip to Quincy, Illinois on behalf of a client. The additional mileage plus missing a turn on the Great River Road plus the side trip added up to a very, very long day.
While I was on the road I received a phone call telling me that another client was in the middle of a meltdown. There wasn’t much I could do about it while driving from St. Louis to Quincy to Chicago but once I’d reached Chicago or, more accurately, after getting four hours of sleep after arriving in Chicago around 1:00am I began to devote full attention to it and by late Saturday I’d gotten things pretty much under control with polishing up the details on Monday. At that point I was completely exhausted.
For the last five years I’ve been pretty circumspect about what I do for a living and I plan that to continue. Essentially, I solve problems for my clients. What problems, you ask? Whatever problems my clients have.
I’ve been part of the design team for a CAT scanner. I’ve helped to improve the inventory system of a major drug manufacturer. I’ve designed a project management system for an opinion sampling company with very unique problems.
I’ve helped the Federal Reserve get a handle on their accounts payable and worked on giving them better access to some of their files. I’ve worked on procedures for the Customs Service.
I was an approved service provider for the Chicago Public Schools.
I’m probably the only person in the world to have done a general systems analysis of a bowling alley. While doing that I visited more than a dozen bowling alleys all over the country, interviewing the proprietors and staff, watching the operations, reviewing their books. I was standing in a bowling alley in Fargo, North Dakota when we got news of the Challenger disaster.
I’ve sat across the table from CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies one-on-one at lunch in the company cafeteria, in the executive dining room, in toney restaurants, and dives. I’ve listened to after dinner speeches by company managers in English, French, and German. The most impressive executive dining room I’ve ever eaten in BTW is McGraw-Hill’s. That was thirty years ago or more and I have no idea whether it’s still the same today.
I recall walking into the office of one client twenty-five years ago. At the side of the doorway of their bookkeeper/office manager’s office was a stack of xeroxed copies of checks, three on a page, piled as high as my chest. The checks had been deposited and the stack was the “to be processed” stack. I made a mental note that my personal objective for this company was to keep the owner out of jail. The company is still in operation, working more effectively and efficiently than ever, and now keeps up to the minute.
Three years ago one of my clients, a small to medium business, had a serious problem. One of their Fortune 50 clients insisted that they become Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. Sarb-Ox was never intended for privately held companies of that size and my advice to my client was to go back to their customer, show them the signed and executed contract they had with them, give them my estimate for achieving Sarbanes-Oxley compliance (sizeable), and get a purchase order for the costs. My advice if their big client demurred was to sue their rear ends off for breach, get the full value of their contract plus damages, and retire to Tahiti. That was their attorney’s advice, too. My client elected to do as much as they could to achieve compliance without driving themselves into receivership and I shepherded them through that process, something they were unequipped to do themselves.
I won’t go into the details of the near-business-death experience that one of my clients experienced last week (other than to say that it was because they hadn’t taken my advice). Suffice it to say that they had a problem, I helped them through it, and now they’re over the hump.
I’m regaining my energy and plan to be back in full swing today.
Whoops. Just received a call from another client. Be back in a flash.
Dude, I so wish I could hire you to solve my business problems. There’s something about April 15th that always brings home with shocking force the realization of just how bad I am at business. I’m reasonably good at making money, and about as clever as the average 7 year-old when it comes to dealing with it once I’ve made it.
Speaking of taxes, I just finished mine today and found out my effective federal income tax rate is 0.21%. That’s not a typo.
Andy:
By strange coincidence I just found out my effective rate is 99.79%
Hey, wait a minute . . .
Let me guess Dave, you saw the Piasa Bird and lost directions in fright!
I’ve probably driven the River Road from Minneapolis to the Gulf at one time or another. That section from Alton to Pierre Marquette is one of the nicest. I don’t that I’d want to be driving a moving van along it though.
Making out the Piasa Bird at all is a lot harder than it used to be. When I was a kid you could make out the painting pretty clearly.
As to the actual Piasa Bird in the feathers, I’m not so sure. Didn’t see it this trip.
Oh, boy. So much to comment about. But this:
“The checks had been deposited and the stack was the “to be “processed†stack. I made a mental note that my personal objective for this company was to keep the owner out of jail.”
Had me laughing out loud. Been there.
One day perhaps I can tell you the story of a business we bought that had a mosque in the basement, a union employee threatening to kill the owner if he sold, and to rape the college age daughter of our new CEO………and that new CEO showing up day one with a guard dog and and packing a gun, and hiring an ex-Green Beret to go to his daughter’s campus as her body guard. True story. No shixt.
And they think business is easy.