"On the road againGoin' places that I've never beenSeein' things that I may never see againAnd I can't wait to get on the road again"
Willie Nelson - "On the Road Again" Released 1980.
Or, probably more apt in my case, this opening line of Canned Heat's 1968 hit "On the Road Again":
"Well, I'm so tired of cryingBut I'm out on the road againI'm on the road again"
After months of uncertainty with some ups and downs, as well as some starts and stops, I've finally landed on my feet again and I am starting to travel once more. It's been August since I haven't slept in my bed at home and it will be interesting to see how I handle sleeping in a hotel once again without my wife at my side.
Since my last entry in Road Tips at the end of March last year a lot sort of happened. The day that entry was published, I was certain that I was going to take a job with a local company doing an 8 to 5 job. But I got a phone call from a friend who worked for a large consumer electronics loudspeaker company. He was getting "kicked upstairs", so to speak, to become the company's Eastern Regional sales manager and he needed someone who knew his territory to take over his accounts. Since his territory was basically the same footprint I had been traveling for nearly 20 years, it was a natural fit.
After some starts and stops - mainly because this company was part of a larger corporation whose motto was "Hurry up and Wait" - as well as some lengthy negotiations, I accepted the position in late May, almost two months after I was first contacted. It was - by far - the longest time period from the initial contact to the final acceptance that I had ever been involved in.
In hindsight, I probably should have seen what was coming.
My first trip for the new company was their annual national sales meeting - talk about going into the fire with both feet - that was held in Louisville. Their dinner banquet was actually held at Churchill Downs, a place my wife and I had visited years ago when my sister and her husband were still living in the area. Although we didn't get a chance to go through the museum, it was still sort of neat to have access to the suites that looked out over the track.
A thunderstorm had moved through the area as we were being bussed from our hotel downtown to the racetrack. But the track is so carefully groomed and drains so well that there was absolutely no water standing anywhere after the heavy rain. I've seen the track at Churchill Downs many times on television over the years that it was sort of surreal to see it devoid of people and horses.
The company required me to have an "on-boarding" session in July at their headquarters in Indianapolis. I went over there just after the 4th of July and after I went to Indy, I drove up to Chicago to call on accounts with my friend whose territory I took over, and who just happened to be my regional boss. Things looked good for me and I was happy with where I was at.
There was a subsequent trip to St. Louis, Springfield, MO, and Kansas City, as well as a return trip to Chicago, then up to Milwaukee. By August, however, I started to sense some concern from the main corporate office. First of all, they decreed that there would be no travel until further notice. Weekly sales team meetings via Zoom took on a tone of pressure and desperation. A number of independent reps were let go in early September and it appeared that they were going to put more work on the back of the factory reps like myself.
A somewhat ominous letter was sent out to all employees by the Executive V.P. on a Friday in mid-September. It was basically a "we've had to make some decisions and some cuts will continue to be made." I called up my buddy and asked him what he knew about all this. "Hell if I know," he said. "I just saw this for the first time, too!"
The following Wednesday, I was working in my office and my buddy called me up. He said, "Hey, man, I have (so-and-so) from Human Resources on the other line."
I knew exactly what was going on. I was getting let go - last one hired/first one fired. I said, "You have got to be SHITTING me!" He wasn't. And neither was the lady - the same one who helped me through the set-up process when I was hired less than 3 months prior. It was almost surreal. I was unceremoniously kicked to the curb by this multi-million dollar company.
It turns out that I was part of the first group of 12 or 15 people who were cut by the company - some who had been with the company for over 15 years. And it wasn't that I was underperforming - I wasn't. In fact, my two whole months that I was with the company, I was 47% and 71% over budget (goal) - the only territory that was performing that well.
I found out after the fact that the parent corporation of the company I was working for lost $14 million dollars in the 1st quarter of their fiscal 2023. It didn't help that my company had sales that were $11 million below goal during that period. While I was doing well, the rest of the company wasn't. The "big box store" sales were especially hard hit when Walmart/Sam's Club and Costco cancelled monthly rolling orders due to overstock issues with Best Buy cutting back significantly on their orders in the summer.
Then, to add insult to injury, I found out that since I had worked for the company for less than 90 days (84, to be exact) that I would not be eligible for severance pay or for any continuance of benefits. Now, THAT was a real kick in the ass.
For a couple weeks after, I can remember going out to our sun room, looking out the window into the yard and just laughing out loud at how surreal and strange this turn in life had taken. But at no point was I worried about my next job. I don't quite understand why that was, but I actually slept well during that period - much better than I did when my old company who I had been with for nearly 20 years cut me loose in 2021.
Finally, I put a message on LinkedIn letting my business contacts know that I had been caught up in the wholesale lay-offs at my company. Almost immediately, I had a number of people reach out to me. I had a number of potential employers who said, "You got screwed on that deal." And I also found out that not a lot of people in the industry cared either for the company I had briefly worked for or for the Executive V.P. who made the decision to let me go.
(As an aside, neither did my friend. He ended up leaving the company less than a month after he was forced to fire me over the phone. He was pissed because after they made him fire me, they took away his regional manager position and put him back into the territory he had before. He's a sharp guy and he didn't see a future with the company. After he left, he called me up and said, "They may be calling you to see if you're interested in coming back." By that time, I had something else on the hook - actually a couple things - and I would have loved to have laughed at them and say, "No f---ing way!" But that phone call never came. And I was fine with that.)
I had four or five things in the offing and a couple of them were really serious. Then in early October I got an e-mail from the owner of a German electronics company my old company distributed products for. He and I had always gotten along and he was reaching out with an offer to think about.
My old company who I'd been with for nearly 20 years had gone through a change of ownership in 2019. They jettisoned a number of companies that we distributed and kept a handful of others. One of those they kept was this company who reached out to me. They are very well known in the professional sound industry (recording and mastering studios, primarily) and are an up-and-coming in the home audio field with their amplifiers, preamplifiers, headphone amps, DAC's and phono stages.
They felt they weren't getting the "love" from my old company and they wanted to go direct in North America. They had a product manager, a logistics warehouse and account receivables in place for the North American operation. The only thing they were missing was a sales manager.
Long story short, they asked me to run their North American operation in late October of last year. We negotiated and came up with a number that was amenable to both sides. I came on board in early November and we took over North American distribution on January 1, 2023.
The start up of a new operation always has hiccups and glitches, but the guys over in Europe seem to think that it's pretty much gone as smooth as they expected. I didn't know what to expect, I guess. A lot of the work has been administrative - getting dealer information and applications, reaching out to dealers to establish new relationships, inventory control, taking orders, and looking for potential new dealers.
Once I felt comfortable enough to leave the office for a couple three days, I made plans to go to Chicago to see accounts there. That was a drive, but there's going to be a lot of airport time in the future as I'll be heading to places such as Montreal, Miami, Nashville, Detroit, New York City, Toronto, and Portland, OR as well as Southern California and New England. Nashville could be a drive - I can stop in St. Louis and/or Indianapolis along the way. But for the most part it's back to the skies.
I hope to be able to start to share some of my adventures, depending upon my time which seems to be at a premium as I try to take on a new job with responsibilities in two countries. Be sure to follow my Twitter feed as I'll be sending along pictures and updates as time allows. In the meantime, please enjoy this great looking pizza from my recent trip to Dino's Pizza, one of my favorite places for pizza in Chicago!