SlipNot’s original offices were in Long Island City where the
company had a lease that finally ran out in 1994. It had grown rapidly from a 4 million dollar
a year company with 16 employees when they first leased space at the old place
in 1984 to one that grossed over 12 million in 1993 with around 30
employees. They leased warehouse space
in Long Island City too, but they were ready for a big jump by ‘94 and so they
bought a seven floor commercial building in Manhattan, on 44th
Street, between 1st and 2nd Avenues. This put SlipNot just a few blocks away from
one of the busiest spots in the city, if not the entire country, Grand Central Station. By the time I started work
there, they had almost 100 employees and were grossing over 45 million a year.
When I first decided to take the job at SlipNot, I got on the
phone to every living soul I knew who lived in or near the city, asking for
advice on how to find an apartment there.
As it turned out, a couple I knew very well was moving to Paris for a
year and wanted someone to sublet their apartment on 79th Street,
just off 3rd Avenue. Jimmy
was an old college buddy of mine and he made his living jumping from company to
company, doing some kind of obscure database management. He’d already worked for Mitsubishi, Porsche,
and Heineken over the previous 5 years.
His new project was with Renault and he didn’t want to lose the option
on his rent controlled, two-bedroom unit – so I came along at just the right
time. Everything seemed to come together
perfectly, at least for the short term.
I used to take the Lexington Avenue subway to Grand Central
each morning, unless the weather was nice out, in which case I walked. I preferred the walk, even in the heat of
summer. I really enjoyed the energy of
all of the people moving along the sidewalks, going to and returning from their
various tasks. SlipNot’s building had a
huge open garage bay at ground level that led all of the trucks carrying its
product into and out of New York from the Shipping and Receiving area just
inside. There was an old-style freight
elevator that was operated by an employee that SlipNot inherited from the
seller as part of the purchase deal. The
elevator operator, George, had been a middleweight prizefighter until he took a
shot to the side of his head in a bout that had left him in a coma for 8
weeks. When he woke up, his speech was
slurred and he had trouble focusing on even the smallest of tasks. The Chief Operations Officer of the film
production company that had sold SlipNot the building was a big fight fan. He’d seen George in the ring a few times and
the two men had become friends. The
diagnosis was that George had narcolepsy.
The COO convinced his bosses, the partners that owned the film company
to take George on as the elevator operator.
True, he would fall dead asleep while running the elevator, so they
installed a system of alarms that would wake him every time he got to the floor
he was heading for or if someone needed him to take the elevator someplace
else.
SlipNot had agreed to the caveat and George became loyal
employee of the firm once the closing on the building was affected. He took to his new employers and his fellow
workers well, although he did occasionally ask where the old people he’d worked
with had gone. He was really a very
gentle man and he could be a lot of fun to talk to and joke with. Until he nodded off, which always eventually
happened.
What was puzzling to me though was that while SlipNot made
perfect use of the ground floor and its open spaces to take and send shipments,
the decision had been made early on for all of the inventory to be stored on
the 6th and 7th floors.
The 6th floor had originally been used as a sound stage. The production firm had shot a long-running
soap opera there for close to 25 years.
It was the cancellation of that TV show that forced the partners to
consider putting the building up for sale.
It proved to be a terrific move for them. SlipNot gave them a very competitive price
for the building and the production company had flourished after their move to
their new offices in South Carolina.
But back to the 6th floor. There was an enormous amount of open space
there and SlipNot busily filled every inch of it with adhesives, stock hair
pieces, solvents, shampoos, dyes, and a myriad of other devices and products
dedicated to the restoration of men’s and women’s hairlines. It didn’t take long before the inventory
began to overrun the place and so it was decided to expand warehousing to the 7th
floor as well. One issue though was that
samples of products and the inventory of advertising media were also stored on
7. Tapes and discs of TV ads, magazine
and newspaper ad slicks, sample photographs, DVDs, CDs, and reams of ad copy
competed with shelf space with all of the other inventory, as well as samples
of shampoos, volumnizers, conditioners, and other hair treatments products.
By now, you can visualize why this setup was less than
ideal. While products were indeed very
efficiently received at the ground level, all of it had to be taken up George’s
elevator to either the top or the second from the top floor for storage. If a salesperson (located on the 3rd
floor) wrote an order for 50 hairpieces (located either on floors 6 or 7) and a
TV ad program (found somewhere else on 7), it had to be picked by two separate
warehouse crews (located on each floor), then sent down on George’s elevator to
shipping where the two separate batches would (hopefully) be packaged together
at ground level for shipping to its final destination. To say that orders got screwed up from time
to time would be an understatement.
The reception area at SlipNot was on the 4th floor
and it also housed the offices for Human Resources and Bookkeeping. This wasn’t the best of plans either as most
people who actually came to visit SlipNot had little or no reason to
communicate with either of these departments.
More often than not, visitors were clients from out of town and they had
either come to consult with their sales rep (one floor below) or with upper
level management (one floor up). This
resulted in the visitor spending a great deal of time on the freight elevator
(which was the only means of traveling from one floor to the next without using
the stairs) and with the usually snoring countenance of its lord and master,
George.
**********
The next installment will be posted on November 11.
If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO
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