GENERAL(‘S) REINVENTION – PART TWO

As we finished up Part One of my story, I was stepping into the general manager’s job at a metals recycling business in western Massachusetts and had just learned reinvention lesson number Six (companies in trouble are more likely to offer you a job). Here’s a quick review of the six lessons:

REINVENTION LESSONS 1-6:

1.  Share your thoughts/plans with you wife or significant other if they’ll be affected

2.  Develop a comprehensive plan

3.  Temporary accommodation and restaurant meals are expensive

4.  It’s who you are today that counts, not what you’ve been

5.  Networking beats cold calling

6.  Companies in trouble are more likely to hire you

Lesson Seven followed quickly: Timing is important. It was early October 1991 in the Berkshires and Leaf Peeping season was hitting its peak—not a good time to be looking for temporary accommodation. Luckily I found a house on the side of a mountain not too far from work and settled in just in time to learn Lesson Eight: It snows in the fall in the mountains of New England. I got over-boots and an overcoat and was ready to walk from the road up the drive to the house when it was messy.

I did some more analysis of the scrap steel market and discovered that we were losing money on our main product, scrap steel from the automobile bodies we processed. As a sidelight we were running scrap steel from a co-generation plant in Connecticut through our shredder to clean it up—we sent the trash from the separator back to the co-generation plant to use as fuel. The manager of the plant in Connecticut called to say his union work force didn’t like picking through the stuff for possible explosives (empty propane bottles from camping equipment were the main culprits) and I learned Lesson Nine: Your problem is my opportunity.

We brought back three laid-off employees and set up a conveyor belt line where they could look for and remove the explosive stuff. The new arrangement had two big advantages: we got paid for our screening work; and our guys were more interested in finding propane bottles and empty gas cans than the union guys had been, since it was our shredder that was at risk.

My boss called one day (we were doing better but were still not in the black) and asked me to go talk to the electric company about possibly getting a break on our rates—there was a state plan to save local jobs that had gotten some publicity. Lesson Ten is to follow up on suggestions (particularly your boss’s suggestions) even if they involved talking to the company who cuts off old ladies’ power in the middle of winter for inability to pay. I did, and we got a minimum six months of power at half price—which was about $20K a month, since our conveyors and separators all used big electric motors.

Not long after Christmas I called the CEO of the company I’d been talking to in New York to relate that I’d been learning about doing business on the “outside”, had had some success, and would be available to do consulting work if he needed any help. Lesson Eleven is to not burn any bridges unnecessarily—I hadn’t—because you might want to go to the other side of the creek again sometime. The CEO related that the other candidate for the job hadn’t worked out and that he’d like to talk to me again. A month later I was moving to the Rome-Utica area of New York to become the President of PAR Government Systems Corporation (PGSC).

I remembered Lesson Eight and leased a four wheel drive Explorer to handle the snowy winters. My wife loves gardening and after years in government housing with restrictions on what we could do in the yard, we settled on a house with five acres, three of it landscaped. Lesson Twelve is to walk before you try running. Three acres of grass that grow two or three inches a day in the summer turned out to be more than we had bargained for. Subsequent houses had much more manageable yards.

The Air Force wasn’t the only thing that was shrinking in the aftermath of Desert Shield/Desert Storm. The government’s Research and Development budgets were also being downsized, and contracts were becoming much more competitive. PGSC had been on of the “Big Dogs” at the Rome Air Development Center in years past, but now the Lockheed Martins and SAICs of the world were trying to vacuum up even small opportunities.

We needed to use our expertise to develop new products and to find new markets we could penetrate. This experience led over time to Lesson Thirteen:  I’m not good at marketing, sales, and business development. I knew these three areas were one of the keys to our success, but I knew I couldn’t carry the ball by myself—I needed to hire someone who could complement my skills as a manager, and I did. I remembered Lesson Five and called a friend who recommended a great business development and marketing man.

About this time the Base Realignment and Closure Commission started one of its biennial reviews of military facilities that were redundant, and the flying operation at Griffith Air Force Base, where the Rome Air Development Center was located, popped up on the list. I began working with the group of civic and business leaders who were trying to keep the flying operation in place—the operation represented about four thousand jobs in a community with a population of twenty-five thousand.

The flying operation was eventually shut down, but I learned Lesson 13 by being part of the rebuttal group: Sometimes the back door is the easiest way to get in. The laboratory people that we’d been trying to get contracts with had been very cool toward us during my first year in New Hartford: I was the new guy and didn’t know the local people. By working on the drive to prevent the base closure, I had become one of the “good guys” and all doors were now open to me.

I was hired away by a firm in Kalamazoo before I could really take advantage of my status. The Kalamazoo part of my story will be part three of the General(’s) Reinvention.

Here’s a recap of our thirteen lessons:

REINVENTION LESSONS 1-13:

1.  Share your thoughts with you wife or significant other if they’ll be affected

2.  Develop a comprehensive plan

3.  Temporary accommodation and restaurant meals are expensive

4.  It is what you can do now that counts, not what you’ve been

5.  Networking beats cold calling

6.  Companies in trouble are more likely to hire you

7.  Timing is important

8.  It snows in the Northeast in the fall

9.  Your customer’s problem is your opportunity

10. Follow up on suggestions others make (especially your boss)

11. Don’t burn your bridges unnecessarily

12. Walk before you run

13. Sometimes the back door is the easiest way in