Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

Keeping a balance between work and life

It's been ten years since I left corporate life and the memories of my working life were comfortably blank until this Dilbert strip brought it back in vivid detail. I never heard these exact words, but this was the attitude of many in the executive ranks.

There are many who were willing to drink the corporate Kool-Aid and sacrifice personal lives to be part of the greater glory and do important things, make lots of money, and travel to far-off places on an expense account. I was in that group for more than 50 years and my family life suffered because of it.

Corporate careers should come with a warning label: "Not for long term use."

New HP Wireless Printer is a winner

 The HP Officejet Pro 8000 Wireless printer handles one of the biggest problems of our home office. It prints high quality images from any computer in the house or shop and was available on Amazon.com last week for only $127.99. This is something that almost any home office can use.

With our multiple computers and laptops, it has always been a struggle to connect to a printer when we needed one in a hurry. With this new wireless printer we can print from anywhere in the house or workshop or even from the back deck.

This printer is fast (up to 35 pages per minute black and up to 34 pages per minute color) and the four ink cartridges give it a range of colors that our other printers could not achieve.

Installation was a bit unnerving at first because I am not used to peripherals that turn themselves on and perform a 20 minute setup procedure with no human intervention.

When I plugged in the power cord, the OfficeJet Pro 8000 went into a busy self-test cycle that produced lots of chirps and other noises, but no printouts at all.

I looked at the instructions but there was only a cryptic instruction to turn on the unit and wait for the alignment page to print.

After another five minutes of clicking and whirring and no printout, I was ready to turn the printer off and check for a paper jam.

At this exact moment, the printer spat out a brief instruction sheet in nine languages:

Do not turn off the printer; the printer is initializing.
During this process, you might hear some tapping sounds.
While waiting, install the printer software.

(It did not mention the whirring, machine muttering, and chirps)

I am not used to getting scolded by my printers, but I took its advice and installed the software on all computers within reach. By the time the computer software installation was complete, the printer had stopped muttering to itself and was ready for action.

We fired off print commands from one computer after another and the printer smoothly executed them at high speed. The wireless capability makes all the difference in the world. We have used printer sharing systems in the past, but the cabling makes for a time-consuming installation.

The designers at HP got this design right. For more information on this beauty, read on after the jump.

Summertime, and life is sure busy

I will probably look back on these weeks of rain and bright sunshine and wish that I had taken a little more time to smell the roses and take pictures of this beautiful countryside.

A business out in the countryside requires every one of the tasks that fall to a business owner in an industrial area, with the additional challenge that right outside the door birds are singing and deer are happily grazing on our vegetables.

There is all that rustic beauty going to "waste" while we work away at computers while handling phone calls and paperwork.

The upside, of course, is that our place of work is only seventy feet from the dinner table at home and our commute takes less than three minutes even when carrying paperwork and a full cup of coffee.

Inside the workshop, serious craft work is accomplished to the background of classical music and the occasional thunder of a compressor. There is a continuous creative tension between the forces of order and disorder as represented my capable assistant and myself.

I am routinely creating chaos in my development of new processes and techniques, while Luan calmly puts in order while turning out one of a kind custom frames. The end result is that we accomplish a lot of necessary changes and growth while remaining relatively organized.

Our bustling activity is punctuated by the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway as clients arrive for scheduled appointments. Neighbor Tom King has graciously loaned us his dog and she greets every new visitor cheerfully before carefully checking their vehicle for doggy messages.

Our business has been open for almost a year and it continues to grow thanks to word of mouth promotion by friends and customers.

In response to those who have asked me to get with it and develop a logo, I am considering using this for now as it shows our county beauty, our technical expertise and includes our company name. We will be using a version of this on our business cards and will eventually incorporate it into our website.

Give us a call if you are in the neighborhood.

View from a Country Workshop

The contrast between the intense activity inside this workshop and the idyllic beauty immediately outside the workshop doorway is hard to believe.

My picture framing workload has increased to the point where I need computerized equipment and an employee who spends several days a week helping me get Floyd Custom Framing to the next level of efficiency.

Even so, I still spend 12 hours a day doing all of the myriad tasks that need to get done.

So it is a treat to look out the workshop door and down the serpentine gravel drive to see Gretchen chatting with neighbors down by the mailbox.

This is a like a Norman Rockwell illustration. Kids on bikes, dogs nosing about, women chatting and neighbor Tom King taking photographs of the impromptu gathering.

This is one of the moments I envisioned many years ago when corporations began shifting from comfortable offices to vast cubicle mazes and statistics began replacing accomplishments. This one brief shining moment validated all that Gretchen and I did as we transitioned from corporate life to self employment.

We work as hard as we ever did, but the rewards are immediate and we can stop and chat with the neighbors when the opportunity arises.

We are immersed in projects and deadlines, but we are surrounded by natural beauty and good friends. Who could ask for more?

This is the good life. It was worth all of the effort it took to get here.

Stylin' in Las Vegas

The 2008 West Coast Art & Frame Show was a visual feast. Thousands of framing and art industry professionals met in the Las Vegas Hilton to trade ideas, launch new products, and to develop and strengthen relationships to meet the challenges of 2008.

I will try to cover some of the exciting new products and their implications in a later post, but I wanted to capture my impressions of the fashion statements being made by convention-goers and other Las Vegas visitors.

The image at the top shows statuary in the lobby of the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas which affectionately portrays the high rollers who were the basis of the original Las Vegas economy.

While a few Las Vegas visitors still carry on the grand tradition of wearing glitz and glitter that rivals onstage performers, most of the visitors I saw presented a vastly different appearance.

Gene Eichner, Co-Chairman of Framerica, one of the major exhibitors at WCAF, provided one of the best examples of understated sartorial elegance at the show. Impeccably tailored, his passion for his company and his customers comes through at first meeting.

There were so many stylishly dressed buyers examining art in the Convention Hall that some areas looked like a gala gallery opening. These smartly turned out men and women gave the WCAF convention a distinctively cosmopolitan flavor.

Booth personnel, on the other hand, were dressed in a wide range of attire from business suits to T-shirts.

Essentially, they were dressed for work and their attention was on presenting their service, like Tami Elhart, a marketing manager at Kandu, a non-profit organization in western Michigan which employs the handicapped.

The vast majority of convention attendees were dressed for modern airline travel: jeans and sneakers, with an occasional sports jacket crammed with literature. These were mostly small business owners and they came for information, not to put on a fashion show.

Many of these attendees looked just like me and cousin Martin Picard, seen here dining at the California Pizza Kitchen in the Mirage Hotel. From our attire, we could have just as well been sitting in the Blue Ridge Restaurant in Floyd, Virginia.

Speaking of airline travel, there are few vestiges of the fashions that prevailed when I first started traveling for business in the mid-Sixties. We travel in jeans and sweats now and flight attendants rarely present the visual delights that stewardesses did in the early days of air travel.

Huge jets and demanding schedules have demanded a different skill set for airline personnel and you rarely see someone who looks like this charming AirTrans flight attendant any more.

That's a pity. We need beauty in all aspects of life. We all need to be stylin' in one way or another.

(stylin': 1. (sti-lin) slang. meaning looking good or in fashion.) from the Urban Dictionary. http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Welcome to the 21st Century workplace...

People who are still "employed" in the old-fashioned 20th Century sense have a hard time comprehending what is happening in this small town where many people have multiple jobs. Several visitors have asked me why people in Floyd would have as many as four jobs.

For the most part, these are people employed by corporations who have never had to prospect for business or never had to deal directly with customers. In an all too real sense, they have been insulated from the uncomfortable realities of life.

Some of these people are/were considering moving to a small town like Floyd when they are ready to retire and it is beginning to strike home that there may be some problems finding work at which they can support themselves.

There may be more companies every year that are hiring older employees, but it appears that it may take a few years before this becomes the norm.  Right now, I can think of only a few major companies that actively recruit older employees: Home Depot, WalMart, and Sam's Club are the first that come to mind. There are many more, like Starbucks, who welcome older employees, but do not necessarily focus on hiring them.

According to several articles I read recently, in the past few years, more and more companies are realizing that by the year 2010, almost one in three workers will be at least 50 years old.

As this becomes common knowledge, industry employment may reach a tipping point where older employees may get incentives to stay at work instead of being shoved out the door.

In the meantime, however, those of us who have chosen a non-corporate lifestyle find that there is work available in many different places, but not a lot in any one place. This means that our work patterns are like those of a consultant, where we work for as many clients/employers as we can in order to maximize our income.

It also explains why you see so many of us chatting in coffee shops and other gathering spots at various times during the day. We are busily swapping information on upcoming projects and what work needs to be done. This is our equivalent of a local job exchange. Someone always has information to pass on, or eggs to sell, or needs help of some kind.

This is not a "retirement village" where we while away the hours between mealtimes. Yes, there are traditional retirees here and they are a valued part of the community in that they serve as volunteers in important local organizations and they bring a wealth of outside world experience to the job.

I think that Floyd, and the many smaller communities like it, are models of what the mid-21st Century lifestyle will become. I think it will be primarily a service-based economy in which the primary focus is on sustainable economic development through creation of non-outsourceable jobs.

I think we will continue to see an ebb and flow of manufacturing opportunities, but these will probably be more ecologically friendly industries and will be smaller in size than the mills of  the past.  It is a poor choice to embrace industries that rape the land and leave a lasting legacy of poisoned aquifers and waterways. It appears that the era of wasting human, ecological, and economic resources may be coming to an end.

We are rapidly coming to a time where skilled employees and a healthy and green environment will be given the attention they deserve. This is not something the government does for us, it is something that will happen because more and more people recognize that it is economically vital.

Meanwhile, those of us who are already working several jobs need to stay productive and figure out ways to increase the flow of information about part-time, contract and full-time employment opportunities in the county.

We live in a time when our employment landscape is continually changing. We need to share information if at all possible.

How are things in your locality? What kind of job prospects do you expect to see in the next few years?

How many of these prospects are under your control?

If at first you don't succeed, try Starbucks??

Michael Gates Gill, son of privilege and New York society insider, was the very model of what moms want their sons to become until he was eased off the corporate merry-go-round at 53.

Yale graduate, member of Skull & Bones, Executive vice president at J. Walter Thompson on major accounts, children going on to college, all was going well until the new owners of JWT decided that he didn't fit the lean, mean, hard-charging image they wanted to project.

As many others have done, he went into business for himself and even wrote a book about it. But, ten years later, his life as an entrepreneur had collapsed, an ill-advised affair left him at a new low point in his life, and he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

While sitting in Starbucks painfully going through the motions of contacting prospective clients, a chance encounter with Manager Crystal Thompson gave Michael a new start in life.

On the way to his personal and financial redemption, he learns to clean toilets, run a cash register, and become a coffee master. None of this was easy and he made plenty of mistakes along the way as he recounts in his essay in the Sept/Oct 2007 AARP magazine.

He has now written a book, How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else, and it also appears that Tom Hanks will be starring in a movie adaptation of the book.

I haven't read the book and I am writing this only to illustrate that this is an increasingly common career situation and that personal redemption is possible with enough work and persistence.

His story also illustrates that it may take more than one attempt to recover from a massive career dislocation. His earlier book about his entrepreneurial experiences was called "Fired Up!: The Proven Principles of Successful Entrepreneurs". 

It seems that he may not have covered all of the essentials, as his consulting practice eventually dwindled and he had to regroup and start again.

From what I have read in the AARP article, it appears that this time he has made some significant changes in his approach to life and that may make the difference in his latest career(s).

I wish him well.

21st Century Sweatshop

In the 21st century, you can easily put in a grueling 10 hour work day without ever leaving your home. Sometimes the biggest problem is pacing yourself. You can get involved in solving a knotty design problem and work non-stop for hours on end. Interruptions are few and they come mostly from four-footed members of the family who are checking if its time to be fed again.

The availability of fresh air and sunshine does wonders for my peace of mind and my morale. Under these conditions I am able to produce more work for my clients now than I ever could in a cubicle farm or even in my own private corporate office.

At the same time, I can find time to have coffee with friends or clients on a moments notice, if I want to.

I make sure that I spend at least 20% of my time marketing my services or thinking up new services to exchange for income. The absence of forced commuting gives me two to three hours of extra time every day for work, study or relaxation.

As a self-employed entrepreneur, I have no corporate safety net, no corporate insurance, but I don't have layers of inert or timid management to placate either.

When I was employed, even though I considered myself a top performer in my particular area, I worried constantly about corporate changes that would result in loss of income. The biggest discovery on leaving the corporate world was realizing how illusory the corporate safety actually was.

To Be or Not Be a Commodity - that is your choice

Being a commodity can be very rewarding under the right circumstances. If you are a commodity that commands high wages, you show up, do your job and rake in the money.

Some past examples of this type of commodity were design engineers, system analysts, database administrators, and MBAs from recognized universities.

I was a commodity for the first eleven years of my working life and never knew it. As a computer design engineer I was always getting job offers at higher salaries and as a result, I changed jobs every two and a half years. The fact that I was difficult to manage and didn't understand office politics made little difference during those golden years. I was a scarce commodity at the time and benefitted greatly from being in that category.

I didn't realize there was a downside...

Facing Layoffs at 50 -part 2

If you are a hard working and conscientious employee, you are not being laid off because of your performance. Your company has decided to lighten ship and you will be chosen because your manager could not justify keeping you.

You may be able to find another berth in the company if you act fast, but generally all personnel requisitions will have been frozen some time ago.

If you have been networking (hint! hint!) you will probably have some idea what groups in the company are going to be hiring after the layoff is complete and will have a slight chance to interview for the position with the added bonus of being able to come up to speed quickly in the new position.