My Corporate Experience, Starting Over AGAIN!!
I went to work for ServiceMaster which was a national cleaning
franchise. ServiceMaster offered me 200 dollars per week salary,
against 20% commission. The commission seemed more exciting to
me than the 200 dollars per week salary.
After I was there for about 2 weeks, I noticed a man working in
the warehouse. He labored with little excitement. I went out to
talk to him to see what he was doing.
This man and I was the only two workers besides, the owner, his
wife, and the secretary. He explained to me he was doing a smoke
job. I looked in the box, and there were items from a house that
had smoke damage.
He seemed very depressed. "I wish I had your job, he said. At
least you get to drive around and see people and listen to the
radio. I am stuck in this warehouse." This man was a great
artist, and his main work was marble sculptures.
The city of Denver had purchased one of his sculptures for
downtown, and paid him $30,000.00 for it. I don't remember this
person's name, but I felt sorry for him. For most of his life,
he was about 50 years old at the time, people had always
purchased enough sculptures from him to provide him a good
living.
He told me that always he had sold about $30,000.00 to
$50,000.00 worth of sculptures in a year. But people just came
to him and purchased them. He was not a salesperson. The
previous year he did not sell any sculptures and he ran out of
money.
He was like a fish out of water, and had to come down from his
mountain home to the city to find work. I did not know what to
do for him, but he said he would be happier doing my job, and I
was willing to switch with him.
I did enjoy cleaning carpets, but I decided I saw more potential
in what he was doing.
The owner agreed to let us switch jobs, but he explained that I
would no longer have a salary guarantee, only a commission. I
asked how much the commission would be, and he told me 50%.
That sounded fine to me. I started my own system in the
warehouse, to see how fast I could get all the items cleaned. I
categorized each item by the type of cleaning it needed, and the
types of chemicals I had to use to clean them.
This worked quite well, and using the factory type system I
cleaned all the items quickly. This pleased my boss, and the job
received no complaints from the customers. The quickness of the
job, and the satisfaction of the customer caused the insurance
company to offer my boss other jobs.
After a while I decided that since I had a system down, I could
hire people to help me do this job. So I called a local
temporary job agency, and asked for a couple workers.
I gave them a brush, or towel, or tool they needed, and showed
them how to do one technique. Using this method, I was able to
get a job done in 2-3 days that used to take 2 weeks or more.
I would spend a couple days after each job just looking busy in
the home we were working on, to make sure the home owners were
happy with the job. I felt it was better to be there when
something unsatisfactory was discovered by the homeowners, and
take care of it then. This helped to keep the insurance company
pleased also.
This resulted with even more work, and I hired even more
temporary workers. I remember one morning I was at work in the
warehouse and had 6 temp workers busy on my production lines.
The owner of the business walked in the door and gasped! "Where
did these people come from?" he almost screamed. I told them I
had hired them. "You can't hire this many people!" He exclaimed.
I could see that this many people was stretching the size of the
business he was willing to build.
"Don't worry" I told him, "Their pay comes out of my 50%". He
stopped, turned around, looked at me, smiled, and said, "OK".
That was the last I heard of that.
There were some days that even after paying the workers salary
out of my commission, I would make as much as $1000.00 for one
days work.
I knew this would scare my boss, as he was not used to seeing
big ideas like this. So the extra days of follow up with the
homeowners would help make it seem that I did not make so much.
These days I did not accomplish anything except to make myself
look busy, and to be there to take care of any complaints the
homeowners might have. This did help stop any complaints from
going to the insurance company.
However, even with this procedure, after about 8 months, my boss
called me into work and told me that we had a problem. I asked
him what the problem was.
He told me that I was now making more money than him and his
wife combined, and that did not seem right, as he was the owner
of the company. I asked him how that could possibly be, as he
was paying me 50% commission, and all the labor was coming out
of my commission.
I told him his 50% had almost no costs coming out of it except
the financing. He had to be making more than me.
He said that yes this was true, but he and his wife's salary
were set to be the same every month, and since mine wasn't, my
salary had grown to be more than their salaries. Now keep in
mind this man was the owner of the company, and could decide to
give himself a raise if he wanted to.
So I asked him, "Then why don't you give yourself a raise?"
This comment did not set too well with him, and our conversation
ended up with me asking if he wanted 2 weeks notice, or should I
just leave now.
He told me he did not need 2 weeks notice, so I said goodbye,
and proceeded to leave. On the way out the door he asked me,
"where are you going to go? There are no jobs out there?" He was
shocked that I was leaving.
I said, "I don't know, I guess I will sell something". However,
this time I had decided I was going to do something BIG. I was
excited to get out there and find out what it was going to be.
You can read all the chapters of "How I Went From a Shoe Shine
Boy to a Millionaire and Found Passion for Life" by going to http://salessuccessmagazin
e.com. These stories are copyrighted by Timothy L. Drobnick
Sr. 1995 thru 2005. Any person using this article must publish
it without modification and include authors bio and links.