Work, Identity and an Unreliable Narrator?

This week's topic is about work and career, but as an extension to that we will be talking about identity. For men, a lot of the time, work is an identity if not our chief identity. I am not excluding women in this, but really dealing in some age old generalities. If a man goes into a social situation and meets another man, typically within the first couple of questions you will be asked what do you do for a living (or some variation). For a woman a lot of times the question revolves around children. 

When it comes to work, growing up, except for that brief time of wanting to be a professional baseball player, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had the spirit of an entrepreneur. I remember seeing a need in my middle school cafeteria that I tried to fill. Isn’t that the heart of an entrepreneur? To see a need, fill the need, enrich the lives of your customer and in turn earn the profit to make a living. Well our middle school only had cafeteria food. No vending machines full of candy, gum or sodas. My bus stop was directly across from a gas station convenience store and while sitting, waiting for the bus one cold morning, I was struck with an idea. Load up with gum and candy before school and then sell the gum and candy for a profit at school. For that season, it worked great! My best seller, as I remember it, were Eye Poppers. A sour gumball that I could buy for a dime and sell at school for 25 cents. Packs of Bubblicious would sell for a dollar (a 100% profit if I remember). I would sell sodas also, but without a good way to keep them cold, people complained. I tried refrigerating them and then wrapping them in foil to try to keep them cold, but with no luck. Once, I had the great idea that I could put the sodas in the freezer the night before instead of the fridge. This is when I learned that ice expands, waking up to a freezer full of frozen soda, ruined product and big loss on that day's profits. I still took some of the cans that only bulged and didn’t explode to school to sell. Customers weren’t having it. That was my last day in the soda business. I continued on with candy and gum until some competitors entered the market and maybe I subconsciously realized that middle schoolers from a low to middle class area were not a great target for a steady stream of extra money.

Skip forward a bit to college. My initial thought was that I was going to become an accountant, but, and no offense to the accountants, but the actual doing of accounting seemed extremely boring. So I switched toward athletic training, which was a compromise I had toward my mom who wanted me to be a Physical Therapist. After a semester of almost failing some sciences classes and looking forward to the number of science classes I would have ahead of me (including a cadaver dissection, which, as a guy who is having a hard time looking at the 4 inch incision I have in my forearm from a recent surgery, probably a little squeamish to participate in a human dissection) I decided/remembered 2 things. I remembered I am not a fan of science classes, whoops. Second, I decided to switch back to a business major, but a more general management degree. And even better, there is a concentration in Entrepreneurship. Finally back on track …

After college I was hired on as the first “Business Development Manager” for a franchise company called Signs By Tomorrow. My job was to provide consultation to franchisees around the country in Operations, Management, Marketing and Sales. I also traveled around the country helping to open new stores. I got to see what made the good stores work and the bad stores fail. In total I was at Signs By Tomorrow for almost 4 years. But something happened at about the 2 ½ year mark that was a turning point that set me on the course that put me where I am now. 

This is probably a good time to jump off for a quick aside. Last week on the podcast I talked about a psychological phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect. For a more detailed look at the effect give a listen to last week's episode but a simple synopsis is that when someone has a little bit of knowledge in a subject, they tend to have an unproportionable level of confidence. For example, the 16 year old starring in the school play, thinking they belong on Broadway or the line cook at Chili's thinking they belong on Top Chef or the baby-faced franchise consultant that thinks they can move their family to a new city and take over a closing store and make it thrive. Now, confidence is not a bad thing, but can blind, overconfidence, can have real consequences.

With Signs By Tomorrow, as I mentioned, I traveled. About 40% of the year, I was on the road. And when I travelled, it was typically for 2 weeks at a time. This was difficult as a newlywed, but manageable, but at 2 ½ years we added a baby to the mix with the birth of Zach. The stresses of traveling with a young wife and newborn reared its head almost immediately when I was on a trip 2 weeks after Zach was born. Our whole company was in New Orleans for an Annual Meeting when we caught word of a blizzard heading toward the Baltimore area (where I was living at the time). After a story that involved changing flights, closed airports, driving on closed highways, burying a rental car in a snow drift as a gunned it into my condo parking lot, I stumbled across the condo threshold not having slept in 36 hours, but home (the rest of the company were stuck and trailed behind by 3 or 4 days). 

Even after a conversation with my boss about cutting back on travel after Zach was born, the company was booming and I ended up traveling more than ever. 50% of Zach’s first year, culminating in a 19 day day trip to the Chicago area, where, 1, I flew back in the middle for Zach to be baptized and, 2, spent my birthday in a sad Riverboat casino, with a near stranger that I was sent to Chicago to train. 

A combination of things happened that led to the next move. In the summer after Zach was born, we were close to buying a closing store in the Kansas City area. We had no money, no assets, so actually buying it was not an option. But another franchisee was in talks to buy the store, hire me to run it and I would buy it over time. Didn’t work out, but laid a seed and stroked my ego. Then my performance slipped at work, culminating in a meeting with my boss and the company owner, which got pretty tense. My boss almost fired me on the spot, probably at the same time I almost quit on the spot. The owner asked us to cool down, take the weekend to think about it and we would talk on Monday. On Monday I told them I was going to leave and they graciously told me that I could stay until I found something else. Fast forward to April 17th 2004. I got a call from the franchise salesman telling me that the store in Charlotte, NC is closing for good April 30th and they were offering a deal with owner financing (remember, still no money) for someone to take it over. So on May 3rd, Julie and I were the owners of a Signs By Tomorrow store in Charlotte, armed with tons of confidence and what turned out to be not a lot of knowledge.

Owning a business was always a struggle. Long hours, not enough money, lots of stress, but I was home every night and I had a feeling of accomplishment. It was my identity. We had ups and downs. At its peak, we employed 6 people, at its lowest you would find just me selling, designing, producing, installing. We were at a peak when the 2008-2009 recession hit and the housing crisis loomed large. 60% of our business was gone seemingly overnight. I couldn’t hold it together anymore and we closed the store 2 months after our 4th child Zadie was born at the end of 2009. We had no jobs, 4 kids and were in financial ruin. 

What happened from there is a story for another episode, but the ramifications financially reverberated, really until last year. The ramifications mentally and relationally, well … I didn’t have to worry about that overconfidence anymore. I landed on my feet after a bit with the company that I am with now, SignArt, who were a customer of mine at Signs By Tomorrow. I have worked my way into a sales position, with decent security and good money. Work has become something that is comfortable which has its benefits after the panic attack inducing stress that I experienced in the 5 years of owning my own business. But in reflecting, as one often does when they hit their 40’s I realize that I have lost something along the way. I lost that middle school zeal for seeing a need and providing a solution. That feeling of meeting a new business owner at the point of most excitement and most stress, right before their endeavor launches and knowing that something I built, will help ease the stress, at least in the advertising of their big grand opening event. I think working with Julie, launching her podcast, launching this podcast, has given me a taste of that feeling I had back then. 

It takes time and it takes experience to do life well. I was a good gum and candy salesman and I was a bad gum and candy salesman. I was a good consultant and I was a bad consultant. I was a good business owner and I was a bad business owner. I am a good husband, a good father and I am a bad husband, a bad father. We are not our worst moments and we are not our best moments. It is not that black and white … 

One more thing … If you haven’t heard of this literary method, let me introduce you to it. It is the idea of an Unreliable Narrator. This is the idea of someone telling a story as truth, only to find out that the narrator was not being completely truthful or was lying outright. Good examples of this would be the movies The Usual Suspects or Fight Club. Books like Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn are examples in literature. Now, nothing I said early was a lie, but I did leave some things out. The money for my Candy and Gum sometimes came from my parents … without their knowledge. I spoke of closing the business, like it was my choice. Truth was the franchise, the landlord and the State of North Carolina all decided the date on that closing. The time when I was working alone in the store … I was working without heat or hot water because I could not afford the gas bill. In the time between closing the store and last year, my house was in foreclosure 3 times (never lost it) and I had a car repossessed in the middle of the night.

Why do I bring this up and how does it fit in this podcast series? Well it is really for 2 reasons. It is not for pity, people everywhere are going through similar and worse things that we did. The first reason is that very few people know the things that I just told you. What I said will come as a surprise to people very close to me. Everyone has stories like that. There is more to people than what they show the public. People are not the sum of their worst moments or traits. Second, you have to understand that the person telling a story has control of the information flow. One of the lessons that I have learned and continue learning every day is that we are ultimately responsible for the beliefs that we hold. There is information coming at us from so many directions, from so many sources and it is important for us to know and understand who the narrator is and what they are trying to accomplish.