EPISODE 63

There are two classic theories on how to manage a salesperson.  The first, which is almost suicidal, is to promote your best producer to a management position.  The thought behind this is that he or she will train the rest of the sales staff to be successful too.  The reality though is that you risk killing off the most reliable income stream in your whole organization by taking your number one salesperson off the road. The other theory holds that you take the largest accounts away from your best salesperson and hand them over to a manager to oversee.  You then give that salesperson another territory and set him or her loose to close new accounts elsewhere.  The risk is far less that you will kill the income stream to the company that way, but you could very well burn the salesman out in the process.  With these thoughts in mind, I did a quick SWOT analysis of my situation.  SWOT stands for Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats.  This may sound like something you’d do in a sales and marketing class like the ones that Bosco, Allan and I had offered, but the fact is, taking a calculated look at what a new challenge might offer is always a good idea. 

STRENGTHS:  I was the number one producer for the company.  No one had ever sold as many marketing plans, sales seminars, Web subscriptions, micro-cameras, or whatnot as I had.  For that matter, no one had even tried.

WEAKNESSES:  My greed had gotten me into trouble in the first place, but my arrogance had been what had really allowed to me fuck myself.

OPPORTUNITIES: Keith saw that I might be able to sell advertising and marketing materials in new markets, thereby bringing in new accounts for the product salespeople to work on. If the company did end up sharing the income with me, it could amount to some real money, if I lasted long enough.  Eventually, I might be allowed to share in that, hopefully before the 48 grand payoff I’d been offered ran out.

THREATS:  The company was forcing me to give up the very rich markets I had developed.  To my mind, they had taken away the cream and left me with the cow pies.  My sales numbers were going to tank.  For that matter, how long was it going to take before some bright individual in the accounting department went over the quarterly report and discovered that I was being paid an additional stipend that in no way reflected my actual sales?

The more I thought about the situation, the less I liked it.  I was 47 years old, making a nice pile of money.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that I was 47 years old and I was making a pile of money. I remembered how my father and all of his friends got tossed out of their jobs back in the late 1970’s.  My father had worked for only two companies his entire adult life and so it was a shock when he was let go in 1978. What was most remarkable was seeing that while he and all of his friends were all getting canned, younger folks, in their early or middle 30’s were snapping up jobs from those same companies.  It was if all of the owners had decided to trade down, hiring younger, less experienced workers for less money.  When my uncle got tossed out of his job on Long Island, he’d been so pissed off that he filed a discrimination suit against his employer.  That had been a particularly blatant case.  The kid who replaced my uncle was 27 years old and my uncle had been 51 at the time.  The company settled out of court, but my uncle was never able to find another job that paid him as much as he’d made before. 

I saw this same pattern repeated over and over with all of my father’s friends.  The smart ones, the ones who had socked away some cash for retirement, or the ones who had pension plans that they could access, had used that capital and gone into business for themselves.  My father had cashed out his pension plan and opened a garden nursery.  He was pretty good at it too and after the initial horror of watching his cash reserves almost completely disappear over an 18-month period as he grappled with learning the business, he found himself making a very good living.  He did so by convincing local landowners to allow him to plant his fruit trees on their properties.  He leased the land from them for a small fee, but because the tree farm he planted on the land earned an “agricultural use” designation for the landowner, the property taxes were assessed at the farmland basis, which was a fraction of the residential rate.  In this way, the landowner got a double dip with the rent that my father paid and the low property tax rate while my father was able to grow all of his own tree stock without having to purchase the land.  The more I considered this and compared it to my own situation, the more I realized that I was only a matter of months from coming up against the same employment crisis that my father and my uncle had faced.  Eventually, someone in SlipNot’s accounting department was going to ask an obvious question:

“Why are we paying this guy so much money if he brings in so much less business than he did last year?”

I suspected this query might well be followed up by the observation:

“He’s a prick too!”

I figured that I would be out on my ass in no time after that. 

I ran all of this by Allan right before leaving for the day.

“Yeah, man.  I think you’re right,” he said.  “They’ll be looking for an excuse to toss you out.  I mean, that whole thing with telling Keith to go fuck himself was bad enough, but then telling him he owed you money like it was his fault…” 

He started to laugh.  “Michael, this could be the best thing to happen to you.  Think about it, man.  You don’t like doing this anymore.  Shit, besides me and Sasha, you won’t have anyone to even talk to in another few months.”

“I won’t argue that.”

“What you’ve done is classic!”

“How do you figure?”

“Man, I told you!  Nobody ever gets fired from SlipNot!  Nobody!  This place is one big dysfunctional mess.  Fucking Richard is involved in making decisions on everything from who to hire, to what vendor we use to buy toilet paper.  That’s nuts!  Keith is never here, but he hovers over everything by telephone and email.  And Bosco!  He thinks he runs the damned company because nobody else is really concentrating on who our clients are and what in the hell they actually want.  It’s priceless!  Michael, your only real mistake was to stand out.  Nothing pisses people off more than someone who comes in from outside an organization who knows he’s good at what he does and then goes around acting like a hired gun.”

And of course, that was exactly what I had done.

“I guess I need to get out before anyone notices I’m still here.”

“You talk to Sasha?” Allan asked.

“Not in the last couple days.”

“She called me while you were in with Richard.  She’s worried about you, man.”

“What did she say?”

Allan waited a few seconds before answering.  “She asked me if I knew if you were looking for a new job already.  Maybe she wants to hire you. Given what’s happened, it might make sense.”

“I can’t work for Sasha.”

“I thought the two of you were pretty tight.”

“Yeah, we are.  But I can’t work for her.  You know what kind of an asshole I can be.”

“I’ve had to put up with your shit for almost two years and we’re still friends.”

“Right, but I work with you, not for you.”

“You should still call her back.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on November 10th.

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