“You Wrote Me a Letter”

While I often write about money I also write about my personal experiences.  One of my favorite posts was about how one seemingly small step out of my comfort zone changed my whole life.  Today I want to write about a pivotal email I wrote seven years ago that led to the biggest promotion in my career and to the slightly early retirement I enjoy today.

 

My entire thirty plus year career was with a single company.  But I also worked for three different chemical companies during my career.  Say what…?  No, it is not a clever riddle, I just worked for a company that was sold off twice while I worked there.  Corporation A owned our company when I was a summer intern and later a graduate engineer.  Corporation B bought our company from Corporation A six years later.  Corporation C made Corporation B an offer they could not refuse and my company once more became part of something new.  This post is about my last four years of work, at Corporation C and how taking action to do one little thing made all the difference.

By the time Corporation C bought the plant I had already done just about every job imaginable for our company.  I was an intern, an engineer, a senior engineer, a supervising engineer, an engineering manager, a plant manager, a Vice President of Operations and the Vice President of Government Affairs.  My career had been a fast and steady climb up the corporate ladder and had only recently been derailed slightly when I was transferred from VP of Operations to the Government Affairs position.  It isn’t that I didn’t like being in a lobbyist role.  I did, it was fun and extremely different than my previous work but it was clearly a step down and the kind of sideline role given to a fast riser who has topped out in terms of his advancement potential.  As a super competitive personality type I did not like being shunted off to the side.  Also, the position was something of a luxury for a company our size and was very vulnerable to being eliminated during future hard times or if our company was sold to a larger corporation.

And of course that is exactly what happened when Corporation C decided to buy our company.  I was in a precarious position because Corp. C already had a Vice President of Government Affairs and probably did not need two of us!  For the first time in my career I was scrambling to save my job.  Fortunately, I had just discovered that there was a possible way to get a thirty million dollar tax break for the company and was able to convince our new masters that we should take a shot at it.  I was assigned to work with one of their executives and between the two of us we turned about 12 weeks of work into a $36 Million profit!  It was a huge win, one of the largest of my career, and it did get me noticed by the CEO. However, it was obvious he was all about the future and did not think I would be able to repeat that once in a lifetime bonanza.   And to be truthful it was not likely I would ever stumble over something that big again.

Six months later the CEO and his team put together a list of redundant people.  I was on the list, as was our company attorney, and several other people that had duplicates in the Corp. C ranks.  He called each of us in for an interview, actually he visited us in our offices instead of the other way around.  He just walked in with no warning and asked me “What do you do here, and why should you stay?”  No pressure, right?  As a lobbyist I usually had a glib answer for any question but I was kind of stumped.  The fact was I never volunteered for the job and always felt my skills were better used running the company than influencing legislators and regulators.  That apparently showed through whatever lame answer I made and I could tell he was mentally crossing my name off the list of people to keep. I left that interview feeling very defeated.

The last thing he asked me was “How did you get so beat down?”  I was floored because until that moment I did not realize that I had been feeling “less than” for the last few years.  I knew I had been diverted off to the side, away from where the really big decisions were being made.   But I was winning a few fights and what about the $36 Million I had just brought in?  But he was right, I had gone from being a shining star at the company to being in the administrative backwaters.  I was the guy who had run the whole place, and this 40 year old CEO could not imagine how anyone with talent could allow themselves to get derailed from the fast track. He walked out and all the things I should have said flooded into my brain…too late.

I have to step aside from this story to tell you about my dad.  My dad was a believer in writing letters (this was before email!).  If a company did something really cool, he would write the CEO a personal letter.  He loved to fish and it occurred to him that fishing gear tackle boxes ought to have wheels on them like rolling suitcases.  So, he wrote the CEO of the leading tackle box manufacturer a letter suggesting that. The CEO wrote him back and said they agreed and to expect a package in the mail.  They sent him the factory prototype of a huge rolling suitcase type tackle box that they decided against making, because it was too big, but they wanted him to have it.  Another time I was riding in my car listening to a guy who used to have the radio program with the most listeners of any program in the world, Paul Harvey.  He mentioned my dad’s name in one of the commercial breaks, and then he mentioned my name and my brother’s.  Ten’s of millions of people were listening as he went on to explain that my dad had written him a letter about a product he advertised, a Bose Acoustic Wave machine. It was a very nice compact stereo system in its day, that Dad had given to me and my brother and it made for a great commercial.  Those are just two times, out of many, that come to mind when my dad, a man who wrote letters, got surprising results.

 

Back to my story. I was looking at being fired from the only company I had ever worked at.  A company where I had gone from part time intern to running the entire operations. A prestigious company that was a household name in the region with billions in sales and hundreds of employees.  Getting fired because I was redundant and irrelevant!  What to do?  I thought about my dad and I wrote a letter.  I wrote an email of course since letters are kind of 1985, but same thing.

 

The email opened with thanking the CEO for pointing out something I had been blind to.  I had indeed lost my mojo accepting a job that did not inspire me.  But I had talent, I knew the plant, the logistics and the people and I could lead.  I told him if he gave me a job, any job, I’d show him.  That’s pretty much all I said, I made no excuses.

 

A few days later he walked into my office again, unannounced as usual, with just one thing to say, “You wrote me an email.” And then he walked out of my office, that was all he said.  Later that day his number two guy came into my office, sat down and asked me if I’d agree to run the company again.  I said yes and that started the most exciting, profitable and intense part of my entire career leading up to my early retirement four years later.

 

Life swings on such little things.   Early in my life everything changed when I stepped out of extreme shyness to act in a play.  And then decades later after a terrible interview I threw a desperation long pass toward the end zone and life changed again.  Most people placed in the position I was in would have been fired.  Because they wouldn’t have written the email.  I certainly would not have sent it except for my dad, the man who wrote letters and achieved surprising results.  Maybe you need some surprising results in your life?  Sometimes it pays to go to straight to the top with what is in your heart.  What do you have to lose?

 

What about you, have you ever written an email that made all the difference?

 

Did you ever face a crisis, and then realized what your dad would do, and did it? 

 

Please leave a comment by clicking on the title of the post.