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.

New Eyes

I remember hearing a comedian once talk about having kids and seeing the world through new eyes. A sunset was now "pink ink" in the sky and when your foot went to sleep, it got "all squiggly." At that time, we had children who were young and it was so very true. Rarely did we go through a week, and often not even through a day without having the opportunity to see something in a way that we'd never seen it before. This was truly a gift that I never realized even existed and it came with having children around.

Typically these moments of enlightenment were around things that were very loud, or very bright, but you never really knew where the next one would come from.  For instance, I remember that Megan had decided, based upon conversation that she had listened to between adults, that the little piece of grass in the middle of a boulevard was called a "cricket."  It took years for us to find this out. She'd overheard us talking about a metal cricket sculpture in the median near a friend's home and just assumed that was the word described the boulevard. We will never forget it. In the same vein, I remember Andrew believing that a car we had rented had the ability to adjust the radio volume to the "ambient sound level" of the car. Really it was just dad messing with the volume when Andrew could not see me doing it.

Fast forward about twenty years.  As of December 1, I have a new job.  And by the way, I love it. And by the way #2, I'm seeing the world through new eyes, or maybe just eyes that I had forgotten I had.  I've taken on the challenge of Operations at a distribution company in a line that I know absolutely nothing about.  Or do I?  It's amazing to me that the further and further I dive into it, the more it is like the lumber history that I knew so well.  Every time I turn around, we are working on something that I remember working on in the early days in lumber.  The difference is that now I am in the petroleum business.  But, interestingly enough, it is about buying inventory, protecting that inventory, selling it and getting it delivered to the customer, all the time making sure that we take good care of the employees and keep them all safe.

Just today the snow started to fly and I was transported back to a time when we worried mostly about getting our people to work safely, getting product to our customers and making sure that we could be ready to do it all over again.  By the end of the day, I think that we actually were able to accomplish all of that.

Of course, today I hadn't been home ten minutes when I got a call that one of the company owned trucks had been in a wreck.  Again, I found the old training drop into place, making sure that first and foremost, all of the people were okay and then making sure that everyone knew that it was only a wreck and we would take care of it all tomorrow.

So, even though I get to look at a whole new industry, and all new people, doing things that I didn't even begin to understand a month ago, much of all of this is so familiar that it takes me back to when I got to see the world through the new eyes of my children.  Now I get to see the world through the new eyes of the employees that I am managing, working to make the way they do their job easier and more profitable.  What fun this is going to be.

For those few of you that have asked if I am nearing the end of my career, ready to retire and do something easier, I tell you not just no, but hell no. I love what I do and I love seeing all of the ways that people figure out to accomplish things they need to accomplish on a daily basis.  I know there is probably a best way, and I look forward to figuring that out, but there so many different ways to get from point A to B that I love discovering them all. Come with me on this ride, and take the challenge yourself in the things you do every day. Find the joy in looking at everything around you as though you were seeing it for the first time - through new eyes.

Back Yard

In the time that Sara and I have been married, we've lived in several different cities and towns in four states.  Although there are no universals, I can say that one thing I've run into time and time again - and it never fails to amaze me - is that people don't recognize the things that are in their own back yards.  One of the first times I noticed this was on a trip to San Francisco.  First, you had to look long and hard to find someone there that considered themselves a "native" but when you did and you asked about the local sights, they hadn't been there. They had not been to Alcatraz, or out to Napa Valley, or in some cases even down to Fisherman's Wharf.  I remembered thinking it was amazing that they would have missed these things, but chalked it up to being a "California" thing.

Time passed and we landed in Dallas.  Although we were only there for a short period of time, I knew there was a lot that should be seen and experienced.  And in the middle of it all, there was the Grassy Knoll and The School Book Depository.  These locations were at the center of a moment in time that compared to few.  Twice in my life I remembered school being interrupted for something happening in the world.  One was the assassination of Kennedy and the other was the moon landing.  Now, here I was, at  the place where the Kennedy assassination happened. I wanted to learn as much as possible and take in as much of the feeling that I could about it.  In the time we were there, we went to this area two or three times with company from out of town and with people that were from Dallas. I was always amazed that the people who lived in Dallas had never been there before.  They meant to, but they had just never gotten it done.  They didn't recognize the importance of things right in their own backyard.  Well, maybe it was a California and Texas thing.

After Dallas, we worked our way back through Kansas City and home to Iowa.  We've been here about six years now.  And lo and behold, I found out that we are the same way here. I actually live the same way. When we were moving so much it seemed like we should check things out in these other places, but now that we settled back in to Iowa, I know that there are things here we are missing.

We have yet to go to the new High Trestle Bridge up in the Boone area.  I've been talking about going there for five years already and done nothing more than that.  It is not like it's too far, it is just that we haven't gotten to it.  We haven't been to the State Capital since coming home ... or the State Historical Museum.  All of these are worth the time that it would take to take in the venue.  We did in fact visit the Art Museum when Karen and Jaye were here because we knew that they would enjoy it, but that was the push that finally motivated us.

On top of the things that those of us who live here haven't been to see, it's really interesting the manner that we think about the things that are in the state.  For example, we have a great number of really quality educational institutions, even beyond Drake University.  Yet when you talk to Iowans, they often have a tendency to minimize or dismiss the local institutions as not being of the same quality that you find outside the state.  It just isn't true.  We have quality undergraduate degrees and graduate programs in law, medicine, engineering, and veterinary science that will line up against anyone in the nation.

Finally, while we are talking about this kind of thing, and I know I have mentioned it in the past, we have one of the finest State Fairs in the nation. Good food, great exhibits and if you have never been to "East Side Night," you have truly missed something. 

We need to be aware of all of the things that exist right in our own backyard.  We need to recognize and appreciate all of them.