Kenny Tomlin

I don’t claim to be a poet but grew up on Dr. Seuss.  Keep that in mind when reading the following satire:

Here lies Sam
The kindest man
Inside this paupers grave

And many cried
The day he died
Because of all he gave

But not for long
We’re those who wept
To worry of their fate

For one by one
Within a month
They joined him at the gate

Kind Uncle Sam,
He asked one man
“What happened when I left?”

Your brother Rush
And cousin Chuck
They made us pay our debt

And with no skills
In which to work
Or effort with to try

One by one
We starved to death
And slowly most all died

But those who made it
A few weeks
And thought we’d past the test

Well Chuck and Rush
Who kept their guns
They finished off the rest

We loved you Sam
You were the man
Free handouts, what a hit

But Chuck and Rush
Who you said “trust”
Now own ALL our shit

Angered Sam
Devised a plan
God would help him out

But Sam forgot
That prayer was not
encouraged or allowed

To an eight year old boy my grandfathers garage was a playground without equal. Boxes piled upon boxes creating a maze of opportunity and discovery. The smell was unmistakeable and unmatched; the blending of plastic, sugar and cardboard. Every box packed full of jawbreakers, gum balls, or capsules full of trendy trinkets that would have eventually made their way into the vending machines in the front of a supermarket if they didn’t first end up in my backpack.

Only second to the discovery that my grandfather had the coolest job in the world was the discovery that there was a market for this “junk” at school and that good money could be made during recess and on the school bus. Like a fake Rolex dealer on the streets of New York I would sneak my goods into a lunchbox and sell, sell, sell. Cash deals only, nothing more than $1.00. I may have started the first Dollar Store? Some days I was banking more than $20.00! That was a lot of change to hold in the pockets of someone who weighed less than 100 pounds! And, with zero cost basis and no appreciation of the US tax system the margins weren’t too bad either.

All good things must come to an end. First we moved 3.5 hours away from my grandfather which meant refilling my stock became difficult. Second, slimy snot looking stuff became trendy and I was selling it for $1.00 per capsule. It started to find it’s way into teachers desks, gym shorts, lunches and lockers which began to create questions and blew my cover. I still remember the school principal axing my enterprise. According to him, more significant than the mess my goods were making was the fact that teachers were complaining to the principal that I was making more per day than they were.

Morals of this story:

1. Becoming a teacher is as much of a calling as it is a career. Good teachers don’t get paid near what they are worth. There are lots of ways to make more money than by becoming a teacher so don’t pursue teaching unless you can’t see yourself doing any other thing.
2. Those vending machines at the front of your supermarket are being filled by someone. Find out who and send your kids to their house (after a thorough background check) with an empty backpack. It cash flows way better than a lemonade stand and can be operated year-round.
3. Most importantly…learn to sell. I have always been able to make money because I have always been able to sell. No matter what you do for a living, selling will be a part of the job.

A couple of days ago I met with someone who answered a question I had for him with “that’s above my pay-grade.” He wasn’t trying to be disrespectful and had no intent of coming across as an idiot but with that answer he did both. If you ever answer in that way please know the listener interprets it as one of the following:

1. You truly don’t have access to the information necessary to answer my question and regardless of who you ask you will never receive that information. This makes you come across as unimportant and unambitious.
2. You don’t have access to the information necessary to answer my question and, even though you know who does, you don’t want to bother with getting me an answer. This makes you come across as lazy and unmotivated.
3. You do know the answer to my question but aren’t allowed to share the information with me and rather than just tell me as much you answer in way that feels less confrontational. This makes you come across as weak and immature.

Regardless of why you may choose to use that expression please know that one thing is for certain, as long as you believe and behave as if something is above your pay-grade it most certainly always will remain so.

@daveknox sent me an inbox zero challenge this week using the new app, Leap, developed and launched by a 2011 Brandery graduate. Not a chance that I’ll ever win such a challenge. I gave up trying to win the email battle a long time ago. However, I have found a method that at least has been helpful. For what it’s worth…

I have five folders directly under my inbox: Reply, Review, Retain, Travel and Projects. I put the number in front of them because I went them ordered in that priority.

Throughout the day as I receive emails I’ll either; a) immediately respond and/or delete them, b) move them to the Retain folder if it’s something I want to indefinitely keep but doesn’t require a response, c) move it to the Reply folder if it’s an email I need to respond to but doesn’t require an immediate response, d) move it to the Review folder if it’s something I’ve been copied on or if it has some type of attachment that I eventually want to review but will not require a response.

I travel a lot and found it helpful to put all my hotel, flight, car rental, meeting emails, etc. into the Travel folder. Inside that folder I have subfolders for each individual trip so it’s easy to quickly find the right trip information. The Projects folder is for all the different client and Rockfish Labs projects that I’m overseeing.  I move them to an archived directory once I’m no longer personally involved.

Most weeks I try to empty my Reply folder prior to Sunday. Sometimes on flights I’ll go through my Review folder and then either delete the message after reviewing it or move it to the Retain folder if I want to keep it. I don’t organize the Retain folder at all. It’s sorted by date and I’ll use the search feature to find any messages that I know I saved.

This method has helped me a lot but has not totally solved the problem. My inbox at times will still build up, especially when I’m traveling. And, I am really challenged with reading long emails and tend to procrastinate reviewing or responding to those. Imagine how much more productive email would be if, like Twitter, there was a character max for all messages. Maybe 1,140?

As a kid I was always interested in having some spending cash and would find a number of odd jobs to earn money. In junior high I spent weeks picking up walnuts and used the money to buy a first generation Nintendo. In high school I mowed lawns around town, dug ditches at a local campground, and stocked shelves at a grocery store to save money toward my first car. In college I sold vacuum cleaners to pay for my wife’s engagement ring and then later sold long distance service to pay for our new life together. After college I cleaned swimming pools in the morning and loaded UPS trucks in the evening in the heat of a Texas summer to get on our feet in Dallas after moving there to work on a graduate degree.

I came to my senses and put my graduate degree on hold for a bit and decided with a wife and young daughter at home it was time to find my first “real” job. After a few weeks of looking and with the help of a placement firm I had two opportunities. For $36,000 per year I could become the manager of a call center that supported pagers or for $10.00 per hour ($21,000 per year) I could join a small, rapidly growing company as an assistant to the Director of Marketing.

$36,000 was a TON of money to us in 1995. We were used to living on less than $10,000 per year for our first two years of marriage. But it was an easy decision. I knew that we could make it on $21,000 per year and I knew that my first “real” job would matter. It wasn’t about what I would make but what I would learn that would later influence what I could make.

If you are graduating this May and fortunate enough to find a startup or fast growing company that wants to hire you…take the job. They likely can’t pay you as much as a more established business will be able to but you are positioning your future with two advantages. First, if the company does well and you are a valued contributor then you will quickly be promoted and be given opportunities well beyond your years and experience. If it’s a startup and the company isn’t doing so well then they will need to depend on the team they have in place which means you will still be given opportunities well beyond your years and experience. Second, you will learn so much more about how companies operate, grow, conduct sales and marketing, meet payroll…and on and on and on. You’ll also learn a lot about yourself and what you’re best at which will give you a clearer perspective about what you want to do in the future.

It was at that $10.00 per hour job where I discovered the power of the Internet and multimedia to market and grow a company. This led to my next job a few years later at almost three times that salary and nearly double what I would have been making still managing a call center. It also led to the start and eventual acquisition of an e-commerce company in Dallas and more recently the startup and acquisition of Rockfish. I’ve often wondered how my career would have been different if I went for the money vs the experience when selecting my first job. Scary thought!