Like-Minded

In this time in which we live, you can barely turn around without being exposed to a multitude of ways people find to express their opinions.  This not only has many positive effects but also intended and unintended negative effects. I have to laugh just a little bit as I am talking about this in a blog, a manner of communication that really hasn't existed for that many years, and was certainly not something that I knew about several years ago.  Now, there are a million ways that people can reach out, through Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and other ways that I'll never understand.

But sometimes we get a chance to land in a group of like-minded individuals. This happened to me over the last weekend. It was time for Wood Magazine's annual "Weekend with Wood," and this is truly a bunch of folks who are interested in and committed to improving their knowledge and skills around woodworking.  Really a group of like-minded individuals.

Okay, hold on a second. Really? Well, not really. Even though there was an overarching interest in woodworking and the skills it takes to do good work, as I listened to the group there were fully as many other topics as you would find anywhere else. I listened to a very impassioned conversation about Homeowners Associations. The four people involved were from different cities and different states, but were able to have a very animated conversation about their thoughts. The conversation could have gone on anywhere. And in the middle of it I found myself smiling. You may ask why?

It struck me that in our daily lives, in a time and a society that it feels as though there is NEVER a clear agreement, really all that you have to do is look for it, and when you see it you have to recognize it.  Now, if you are scratching your head, let me see if I can help to clarify with an example.  Suppose that you are at a dinner party and discover the the two most politically polar people that you have ever met are in attendance. You would of course expect that the conversation would become contentious, right?  Well, maybe ... maybe not.  If the conversation goes the rightt way, it may be possible that these people are also the biggest Kansas City Royals fans on... the... PLANET. Who knew?  It might be possible for these two to have a conversation and go through the whole evening without landing on what their political beliefs are.

So, what is my point here? I guess that I'm saying that sometimes we should spend the energy looking for the way we are like each other rather than the ways we are different from each other. I know that in the middle of that group at the Meredith Corporation this weekend there was probably someone I could have argued with over something that we both felt passionate about.  But, instead, we were all SO focused on woodworking that when other topics came up, they were really just as ponts of interest and nothing that would drive a conversation. It was very refreshing.

At this point I find myself challenged going forward to strive to find the commonality that I have with others, rather than looking for the differences and reasons to argue. It will be interesting to see how I do with that. It isn't necessarily the way that I have functioned up to this point. Wish me luck.

Numbers

I'm glad that I've always been comfortable with numbers and that math has come relatively easy to me. As I started thinking about where this came from, I was amazed to realize that it really tracked back to my grandmother.  This was my mom's mother, Josephine Helen Nauman Milburn. She was 94 when she died in June of 2000, still living in her own home. She was taking out the garbage at the time she passed away.  I am sure that I speak for many of us when I say that I certainly hope I have some of that karma in my life.

Grandma and Grandpa were very important members of my life, as they were to all of their children and grandchildren. When I was still relatively young, Grandma was still working in the Keokuk County Engineer's office. She had all of the knowledge to be an engineer, from the practical point of view, but didn't have the required educational background.  At least two of the people that she worked for told me that.  Anyway, at that time, the office was open on Saturday until noon.  On good weekends, I would get to wake up early, go to breakfast at the Town House Cafe with Grandpa and then he dropped me off at the courthouse to spend part of the morning with Grandma.  Our mornings were somewhat of a ritual.

During the course of the morning, we would make and fly paper airplanes.  In later years, when they went to paint the office, they found some of the planes on top of a high set of shelves.  You know, sometimes that just happens.  After our flight exercise though, Grandma would sit me down at a drafting table with an architect's rule and a set of colored pencils and we would draw house plans.  I was forever trying to figure out how to design a house with a round kitchen.  The problem wasn't really the kitchen, it was the rest of the rooms around the kitchen and what you did with those spaces.  To this day, I haven't come up with a good answer.  But, with this work, Grandma taught me about scale and how to draw plans "to scale."  I was probably the only 7-10 year old in Sigourney, Iowa that could accurately read and understand all of the scales on the rule that I was using.

When we were done with that, the next thing was to use the ten column calculator in the office.  This thing was a MONSTER.  It seemed like one of the biggest pieces of equipment I had ever seen, let alone used.  And in a day when very few calculations had to be carried out to ten columns, I am sure that it was also a very expensive piece of equipment.  But, being the lucky young man that I was, I got to sit there and figure out how numbers went together and of course what you had to add to overflow the capability of the calculator.  You know, you always have to figure that out.

Now, as if this were not all enough to cement a love of numbers into my brain, Grandma also had a couple of number games that she liked to play.  One was to come up with a mathematical "equation" that would describe someone's birthday, and the other was to do the same thing with their license plates.

I will give you an example.  Let's say that someone's birthday was September 27,1993.  We would work through this and come to the decision that all you really had to remember was that this person was born in '93.  From that you could remember that they were born in September (the ninth month) and on the 27th (9 x 3).  We played this game all of the time, and honestly, I still use this trick to help me remember people's birthdays and other special days.

After Grandma started me down this path, somewhere along the line someone taught me the Pythagorean theorem - A2 + B2 = C2 - and I was off and running.  Still today, with this basic interest in math and these tricks, along with a little understanding of percentages, I get through a lot of situations with ease.

Last week, as a group of intelligent men that I work with were trying to calculate the volume of a cylinder, I was able to estimate it as a cube and come to an answer while we were still on-site.  I know that one of the gentlemen I was working with is probably still in his office crunching numbers, but I'm sure that my estimate was close enough. Though they talked about finishing the conversation after they'd done all of the calculations back in the office, I knew we had plenty of information to move forward.

I appreciate having the confidence and assurance that the quick calculations I do in my head are generally correct. It has made my life a whole lot easier and sometimes a whole lot of fun. Thanks for the help Grandma Jo.

Small Green Stone

There are numerous ways we remember people, and lots of things that enter our lives and then are just around, sometimes for no real known reason. I have many of those in my office, my home, and my shop. These are the items that ... if we died, nobody would have a clue as to the story behind them, or the value that they hold for me.  One of these items is a small green stone.  It weighs very little and has a tendency to move around my desk. I hold it and roll it over in my hand at times when I am thinking about something.  Many might call it a "worry stone." That's a good name for it.

Over the years I've had the opportunity to work with a great number of individuals - from the old Payless days, through distribution, to today at Diamond Oil. I learned much from these folks and I hope they learned as much from me.

One particular group was from when I worked at Huttig in Kansas City. This group of people distinguished themselves by taking a facility that was losing a lot of money to becoming profitable in just two years. We got a lot of attention from others who tried to figure out exactly what we were doing and why it worked. It was the people, which is always the answer. Let me tell you about some of these individuals.

My Production Manager had come from Guatemala to make a better life for his family. Alary never met a challenge that he couldn't overcome.  As I continued to add production to his schedule, he complained in passing fashion and then dug in and figured out how to get it done.  He threatened me a couple of times about it, but always just got it completed. I still grin when I think about his words: "Meester Martin, I beech-slap you if you..." Add whatever challenge I set before him.

My operations team was made up of a lot of people, but Benny and Jamie were two of the folks that really got it done.  They were the people who made sure all of the orders were pulled and completed every day, and got the product on the trucks and routed so that everything was delivered.  This was one of the largest jigsaw puzzles that you could ever imagine, and they took it on day after day.  Pretty amazing.

Then there was the inside sales team.  Dawn, Donna, Joe, Grif, Andrelee, Dave and Roy.  They took tremendous care of the customer.  As we worked to change the way that the branch responded to its customers, this was the group that stepped up to tell the story and bring back the customers that we had lost with bad service and bad pricing.  They did the work one customer at a time, in conjunction with the outside sales team. These teams spurred our growth until we were moving forward again.  As individuals we were all flawed and had our quirks, but as a team, we were just about unstoppable.

So you ask, what does this have to do with a small green stone?  When I roll this stone over in my hand, these are all of the things that I think of and more. This stone reminds me of all.

But most specifically it reminds me of Grif Davies.  I'd known Grif when he was the sales representative for Magic Woods when I worked at Payless.  He sold me hardwood lumber and specially items and was always there to help. Years later, when I landed at Huttig, he worked as an inside seller for me. I remember sitting down with Grif for his annual review and asking him what his goals were for the upcoming year. He told me that he wanted to live to the next review, going on to tell me that he was going to need a lung/heart transplant in order to get there. Over the coming months, we all worked to support him in all the ways we could.  He ended up gong in for the surgery and although things started out well, as we all followed him through his "caring bridge," we hoped for the best. But in the end, his body was unable to overcome all of the indignities that had been done to it over the years and we lost him.

When we went to the funeral, there was a basket of these small stones at the entrance to the sanctuary. Each stone was unique and a handwritten note from Grif. He wanted us to take a stone and use it over the years to remember that day and the friends that were there with us.  It has always done just this for me.

I know there will be a day when someone goes through my things and tosses this stone in a box to go to Goodwill, or to the curb. But like so many things for so many of us, it really is just a symbol. This little green stone isn't just a rock to me. It's something that helps me remember.

Cherish the things in your life that are more than they appear to be.  There value will rarely be understood by anyone but you.

Ice Cream

In past blogs, I've talked about how one person can make a difference. Everyone who knows me knows I truly believe this, and there are more examples of it than there is time to recount, but I also have owed you a story about ice cream since a blog (One Person) I wrote in March of 2014. Seems to me that this is the time that I should share that story.

For many years, I worked for Payless Cashways. At one time, we were labeled the "Sweetheart of the Industry," but before it was all done, we had worked our way through two Chapter 11 reorganizations and then one Monday, found ourselves with a negative cash flow we couldn't overcome. At the beginning of the decline we were 150 stores and $1.54 billion in sales. I remember our President holding up a screwdriver at one meeting and telling us that there was nobody in the company that could tell us how many of those we had sold in the previous year. At that point, by the way, we were blind, but very, very profitable.

Over the next number of years, we continued to add capabilities to our computer systems to be able to mine more and more information from our system under the guise of making better decisions. We had a great deal of metrics and information at our fingertips, but in the end, it didn't really matter. The company seemed to do its best when the decisions were made at the local level by individual managers who were completely responsible for most of the decisions made in the store. Although I am not completely sure of it, this seems to mimic the current Hy-Vee model - which seems to be highly successful.

Enough of my soapbox. On to the ice cream story. In later years, after we decided to embrace the Professional customer in our "Shift Right" strategy, we ended up trying a lot of different things to try to generate immediate cash and draw/keep customers in our stores. One thing we tried was ice cream novelties. Items like "Drumsticks" and "Bomb Pops", and my favorite, the ice cream sandwich made with chocolate chip cookies as the outside of the sandwich became popular. I found these to be a delightful afternoon snack. When we first added ice cream to the stores, I was at Store 16 in West Omaha. I remember telling the person who delivered our stock that I didn't ever want to be out of that particular item. Being a good supplier, they made it happen. Over time, the company asked me to move to Texas and run a district down there. I set up my home store at Store 21 Contractor Supply in Garland. I had the same conversation with my new ice cream supplier and after a couple of mis-steps, he was able to get it right.

Time marched forward and somewhere along the line, we had a meeting in Kansas City with all of the leadership of the organization in attendance. Millard Barron, our CEO, was very much into the numbers and he had carefully watched all new product lines. Ice cream had been one of them. In a breakout session to discuss some of these initiatives, the comment was made that for a long time Omaha had been the number one seller of ice cream, but then for a reason that was hard to identify, the Texas Contractor's Supply had taken over the lead.

There in front of many people I'd known for years - many that I respected a great deal and many who respected me - it was pointed out that the thing that changed was that Jim Martin had moved from Omaha to Texas. This wasn't necessarily the best way to have pointed out that one person can make a difference, but it certainly did that for me, and here, twenty plus years later, as I recount the story to you, I still find a bit of embarrassment welling in my throat. Never forget that one person can, and does matter. Okay, laugh a little bit, if you haven't yet.

Now I've admitted the story and it's out there. There are a couple of other pretty wonderful things I need to share with you.

First, this is my 100th blog. When I wrote the first one, I wondered how much I would possibly have to say. Although there have been times I've been hard-pressed to find something to talk about, I kept after it until I am now at 100. I'm sure some of you are laughing right now at even the thought that I might not have something to say, anytime, but it was a concern for me.

Second, this week I sold my first item through my Etsy store. I know that there isn't much there, but a person found something they liked enough to ask me to build one for them. This feels like high praise and fits with the fact that I've had a good year producing items out of the shop that others seem to like. We'll keep that going. And, just as a little view toward the future, I've also been asked to produce a teardrop trailer for someone. This should be fun.

I hope this 100th blog finds you all healthy and happy. Let me know what's going on with each of you.

Fun

You may have noticed that I've been gone for a while.  It seems I should try to explain.  As we entered the first quarter of this year, everything got really busy, all in a really good way.  I started a new job with Diamond Oil, which is fantastic, and took on the largest woodworking project that I've ever done.  I worked with Youth and Emergency Shelter Services to help them outfit a library.  I cut, assembled, finished and installed 34 sections of shelving, twenty-nine two-foot sections in the library itself and others for into individual offices.  The last of the finish went on today.  There are still seven units to deliver, but for the most part it's done.  Now I can get back to other things, like the Adirondack chairs that I owe to a friend. Then I need to figure out what's next out of the shop.  Obviously my roll-top desk is taking a back seat to everything else.  It is nice to have the shop really rocking, though.

The other thing I've been doing is to some interviewing for a company.  It has been a great deal of fun to talk to first-round candidates from all over the world and is part of what made me think about this blog tonight.  One of the questions I've been asking is, "Tell me about a time that you had fun at work?"  Really a pretty simple question, but it's made me think.  I have to tell you, I've been really fortunate to have had several groups I worked with that I had fun with.  This really goes all the way back to the early pool crews that I worked with.

In the mid 1970s and the early 1980s, I was the manager for a municipal swimming pool in my home town.  The summers there were always a ton of fun.  We all worked hard, and strived to make the customer experience safe, and fun, but behind the scenes, we had a ball.  I can't even tell you all of the pranks we pulled on each other: hiding personal items, or even freezing them into a block of ice in the freezer, or soaking a member of the team with water when they were asleep on the nice warm concrete.  With all of that though, we all agonized at the end of  summer over not seeing each other every day, and could hardly wait until the following summer when we could do it all over again.

Fast forward to the Payless days.  We all enjoyed the teams we worked with so much that it was not unexpected for each of us to receive calls from home asking when we were going to finally show up.  Sometimes we were in the office discussing ways to be more profitable, or we had taken the gathering off-campus - post-work hours.  It seemed that every Payless Cashways had an adoptive bar we all called home.  In West Des Moines it was a place called Lori's and they actually developed a punch card system for us.  Buy 10 pitchers of beer and the next one was free (not free but included-see my blog on this).  It's really amazing how many great ideas were developed on the back of cocktail napkins.  Honestly, at one time we re-organized the entire $1.54 billion company with a plan that started that way.  The Payless experience may not have ended well, but many of the friendships and the lessons learned there are still part of the way we work today.

When I was in Kansas City, I received a call from a gentleman that I had worked for at Drake.  He was the VP of Student Affairs and invited me to a Drake Alumni event.  The keynote address was by the CEO of Hallmark.  At one point in his speech he talked about the fact that several of his people, even some of his direct reports were in the room.  He went on to say that if they were not in love with their job, were not enjoying their job, they should quit their job.  I remember thinking he was a bit crazy at the time, but with more and more time, I am beginning to think he was absolutely right.

So, over the past few months, I have been asking the question about having fun at work. I have been listening to people's stories and the inflections in their voices when they tell the stories, and it continues to tell me how important it is.   I have had the blessing of having a great deal of jobs that were fun, and I find myself in one again today.  The folks at Diamond Oil are great and the challenges, although sometimes very large, are all things that can be handled.  So, tomorrow, as a new week starts I will have a smile on my face and be ready to go.

I sincerely hope that the same is true for you.  If not ... you may want to consider changing something.  Have a great week.

Four Years

Well, the end of the year has caused me to start looking back at a lot of different things, thinking about the upcoming tax season and all of the fun that comes with it.  Interesting.  Even as I wrote the words 'tax season,' a wave of memories flooded through me.  After my father died, the part of the legal practice that mom was able to keep was the "J Leo Martin Tax Service."  This was the family business that really got me through college and launched on this ride called "being an adult."  Tax season at the Martin household was a real ride, probably much like that for any of you that had or have a tax professional in your life.  I remember Christmas as the lull before the storm. You could just tell that mom was thinking about what was coming at her.  In later years, when I was in college, I even helped by setting up all of the accounting pages that she used to run the business.  It was all part of the preparation that happened around the holidays.  Quiet times but pensive, thinking about the immediate future.

Then, after the first of the year, all hell broke lose. Mom almost immediately started working the bulk of every day, 18-20 hours. Her office was in our basement, but it's not like we saw very much of her.  We also needed to remember that when we got home at the end of the day there were still a couple of hours that she would have clients. We always had to remember to be quiet.  Additionally, there was work that came with the business. I was responsible for making sure all of the snow was off the drive before I went to school. This required some really early mornings. and of course, as we all remember, we had a lot more snow in those days than we do now. I had to empty the trash cans out of the office every night and burn all of the contents, as nothing from the business could accidentally show up somewhere else. Since so many more people smoked then, it was always possible that someone had flipped a butt into a trash can and it would turn into a fire overnight.  More than once Mom or Saundra carried a burning trash can outside. This was the reason Mom only used metal trashcans.

January 2011 - Not much there yet.

Anyway, lots of instant memories about the tax business, but it provided us a good life and it allowed mom to be free in the summer when we were off school.  Okay, back to the real topic of this week. As I was thinking through all of the end of the year stuff it struck me that as of December 2014, I'd been in the Toybox for four years.  Wow.  That time rolled right by. A nice thing about this though, is that in just one more year, the interest rate on the loan for the Toybox drops significantly. That is a great thing. But - probably just me being way too pragmatic. On the more personal side, the place helps to keep me sane. Whether I am working on a big project for family or friends, or just messing around sharpening a chisel and figuring out how to organize the place, I love my time in that space. It is my true point of balance.

Four years ago, when I started out there, it was nothing but a shell and through hard work, and some disposable income, it came to the point that it is today. But that isn't the end of the story. It will continue to change, evolve, and recreate itself based upon the kind of woodworking that I do. Or, and this could happen, whatever size flat screen gets handed down out there and ends up on the wall. Entertainment and work really need to go hand in hand, at least I think so.

January 2015 - Big changes. Kind of exciting!

As for the Toybox and its current happenings, I have just taken on the biggest project in my life. I am helping YESS equip their new library with shelves. Today was the serious start to the work. I cut up 38 sheets of Roseburg D-3 maple plywood and turned it into several hundred pieces that will come together in the next month to be shelf units. Also, for any of you who are woodworkers, that product is beautiful for what it is. The face is a whole piece face (no splices) and the back, although showing more dark wood, is still really good. So, if you have any maple projects coming up, consider it. I even took the time today to give the Roseburg Forrest Products rep a call to tell him how good it looked. I figure that they receive enough bad calls, once in a while they should get a good one.

Enough rambling. Four years down, a whole bunch left, I hope. And believe it or not, I am approaching 100 blogs. Bet some of you never thought that I actually had this many words in me, right?

Brilliance

I was looking through a list of items today that I keep to help me think about "stuff."  I was actually looking for an idea for this blog, and something must have tripped my thought process, because I came up with something that is worth more than a moment's notice.  The word brilliance - not like a light bulb, but a person, because I've been fortunate enough to know a few of these people throughout my life.

First, it only seems right to tell you about my grandfather. He was truly a brilliant man, even though he barely had a sixth grade education.  He could read and write his name, but I remember the time he lost his driver's license because he'd forgotten to look at the expiration date. We both figured out very quickly that he wouldn't to be able to take on the test to get re-qualified, so instead, he drove for the next ten years without a license.  But in so many ways, he was brilliant.  He had an incredibly wide knowledge of mechanical things and how they worked, and he had an incredible ability to pull people into the conversation and interest them in that knowledge,  I remember one summer when we went to Fort Belmont in Minnesota. When Grandpa was done, he had a regular herd of kids with him, learning about cider presses and grist mills.  He was able to share the things he had learned in a lifetime with the rest of the people around him.  For me, he instilled a fascination with the tools and machines that make the world work in me and taught me all of the basic concepts to let me know how things work.  He was brilliant.

The second person I know who is brilliant is my sister.  She was the one that always made me feel as though I was just a step or two behind.  Just that much smarter.  She was valedictorian of her high school class and years later when she graduated from law school, she got snapped up by a firm that only hired top 10, ivy league attorneys.  They told her they discovered that those people were good with the books and the research, but unable to talk to clients. With my sister, they got both - brilliance in the technical arena and an ability to talk with their clients.  I think both of my children came from this stock of the family, because we just keep uncovering how smart they really are.

Finally, I want to tell you about Bravo.  He was brilliant, but not necessarily in the way that one might want to be known.  Bravo lived on my street while I was growing up - in a dilapidated old home with a bunch of trashed vehicles and other stuff around it.  It was one of those places that kids made up stories about, mostly about the horribly frightening person that lived there and what he would do if he caught you on his property. The truth was very far from that.  Bravo was actually very nice and always spoke to both my sister and I if he was outside when we came home from school. His brilliance came from the manner in which he lived.  Bravo never showed that he had anything.  As was typically the case in small town Iowa, the locals took care of Bravo. The local restaurants fed him and everyone worked to do what they could. Now, the interesting thing is that during WWII, Bravo had made a fortune in scrap. He made the money, but never spent any of it, and never let anyone know that he had it.  The community took care of him, and only found out the truth after he passed away.  I'm sure you've known someone like this.  You may call them shrewd rather than brilliant, though.

We are surrounded by brilliant people.  We know those that are book smart, and those that are street smart, and those that are even a little bit "crooked" smart.  It takes all kinds, just like the rest of the world that we live in. It is all of those differences that make the fabric of our lives so very interesting.  I've said it so many times and in so many ways, but this is what keeps me young at heart.  I love looking at all of the ways people approach the lives they live.  Ways that they can be proud of, and so can their family; ways that they may not be so proud of but that gets them through.  And, one of the most interesting things of all is that on any given day, some people can slide back and forth between the various approaches - almost chameleon-like.  It really does take all kinds, doesn't it?

Okay, so what is up in the Toybox these days?  Well, I've had a nice influx of project come in as the new year begins. One major project is for a non-profit.  I'm very excited (and a little nervious) about this. The nervous part is just like with anything else - I truly want to do a good job for them. The second project two Adirondack chairs for a friend.  Not only will I get to build them, but there is probably a time that I will be able to sit in them and have a glass of wine.  Wow, I love woodworking.