Before I get into the job and what I learned from my first go round with the agency I want to back track to the dealership again. And it actually sort of ties in more with this new job than the old one.
One of the things I got to do at the dealership was voice over work. I know, it's kind of unexpected and not at all related to the office work at all, but it was pretty close to my favorite part of the job. The used car sales manager was given a budget and allowed to advertise outside of the national advertising that the dealership usually relied on. Part of what he decided to do was radio advertising and he wanted a "voice" that would be the same through out his commercials. I was offered the job and I jumped at the chance to do it, it was something new and different and how cool would it be? It was very cool.
The best part of recording the commercials? Well honestly it was being referred to as "the talent". I loved that. It made me laugh so much. At the studio there was an area with snacks and drinks that was labeled just for "the talent" and when they were ready for me to record my parts they would send someone to go get "the talent". Now after working for the agency I realized that the labeling was just to keep the techs from eating everything and calling all of the actors and voice work people "the talent" was easier to do than learn names, but at the time, it made me laugh. Also, seeing Christopher's face as he made the realization that the voice on the radio was Mom's voice was great. He wanted to know how I could talk so fast during the disclaimer portion. I will let you all in on a recording secret...I can't. I would record those portions at a normal clip and digitally they would go in and remove the pauses that we all take while speaking. Not speeding up the track, taking out the space. It was very cool to watch them do and very cool to hear the end result.
The worst part? Being teased mercilessly by the girls in the office for my bubbly rendition of the scripts! But that's the way the director wanted them done, so that's the way I did them. I was greeted with Imagine!! (one of the lines from the commercial) for weeks every time I walked in the door. I got to do three commercials for the dealership before we moved. It was great and I thought for awhile that working for an agency I would get an opportunity to do more. That didn't happen. Lesson learned from this foray? When your boss says do you want to try "fill in the blank" and it sounds interesting to you, don't hesitate to say yes!
Okay, so back to the agency. I spent the first six months there digging out of the mess that the past year or so had caused. Remember my work at the dealership learning how to do forensic style accounting? Well, it came in handy here for sure. The job was basic bookkeeping. Agency bookkeeping isn't much different than car dealership bookkeeping or wholesale pottery bookkeeping. It's just numbers. Billing was a little more complicated than the billing for the pottery company, but not much. The only difference was in the volume of paper work and money I was handling. At the dealership it was not unheard of for me to be responsible for literally millions of dollars in money in and money out of the door in a week. At the agency the amounts were smaller but no less critical to the running of the business.
I am going to share a couple of stories from the agency during those years and the things I learned from them, but there were so many things I learned working for this company and so many things that tied into when I came back so there will be some overlap there I am sure. But I will start with just a couple of things.
I had been at the agency for a few months and was working very hard at getting all of the old mess cleaned up. Each month there were a series of spreadsheets and reports that Jack wanted to look at. At the end of this particular month I made a mistake on one of them. It was a silly error, I pulled a number from an old report instead of from the corrected version I had been working on and it was something I should have caught before giving the reports to Jack. But I didn't and he did. And then he proceeded to give me a really hard time about it for weeks afterward. Every time I would bring him reports he would question my work. I finally had enough of it. I closed his office door, walked over to his desk and said, "I made a mistake. One. I have been taking the grief over it but now I am done. Either you trust me to do the job or you don't. If you don't then fire me so we can both move on. If you do then let it go." and then I walked out of his office back down the hall to my office, closed the door and fell into my chair shaking so bad I couldn't hold my weight up anymore!
Now, at the time I was 29 years old, and Jack was my boss and just a "few" years older than that. So not only was I standing up to my boss, I was standing up to an elder. That was just not something I was overly comfortable with, but I had had enough and had to do it. And it was the right thing to do. We never had an issue again and ended up with a very close and honest working relationship. I believe he needed to see how far he could push me before I pushed back. How long I would take my work being criticized before I stood up for myself. And I believe he respected me for it. Either that or he decided that interviewing another bookkeeper would be too big a pain in the ass so he let it go!
One of the other lessons I learned about being a boss from Jack turned into one of the main ways I compared every boss to follow. As you can see if you messed up he was going to let you know about it. But never ever in front of a client. Jack would stand in a meeting with a client and take the full brunt of a barrage of abuse that you knew was someone else in the office's fault. But he never threw anyone under the bus, never took the easy way out in front of client, always shouldered the blame and would never ever let someone outside of the agency berate his people. Now if you were the reason there would be hell to pay when you got back to the office, but it was done behind closed doors in private and you were not embarrassed in public in front of the clients. Your reputation was held pristine while he took the hit.
One day while walking past my office he heard the voice of a screaming client on the other end of the line. Now this particular client was just a crank. Everyone who ever worked with him knew he was, and you just dealt with it. When he called with billing questions I would listen to him rage for the first five to ten minutes of the call then once he got it out of his system we could talk rationally and deal with his questions. It's just the way he was and it really didn't bother me. But this particular day, Jack over heard it and it bothered him. He knew who it was and once I was off the phone with the client he called him up. Told the gentleman that he was never ever to speak to a member of his staff like that again. If he wanted to yell at someone he was more than welcome to call Jack but never to call and yell at his staff again. This was impressive on a few levels. One, I hadn't complained, it was just something Jack saw that he didn't like and took care of. Two, this was a new client in a precarious position and we could end up losing them for any number of reasons let alone the head of of their co-op being chastised by the head of our agency. But Jack didn't hesitate for a second to take care of what he saw as an unforgivable offense.
Sometimes being the boss is great. Sometimes it isn't. But you are always the boss. Always the face of your company and Jack never forgot that it was his name on the door. He got the bigger rewards for that privilege and he also took the greater hits for it as well. He had worked his ass off for years to get into the position he was and he could have slacked off and let the rest of us be the cannon fodder for him, as we all witnessed other agency principals doing, but he never did. I measure all of my bosses and other people's bosses against that yard stick. And let me tell you most of them don't measure up. It's much easier to side step and let someone else shoulder the blame, especially if it is truly their fault than it is to stand there and take the abuse. But you don't get to be a success by doing to the easy thing. You get to be a success by working hard and doing the right thing. At least that's what I felt I learned from working for Jack.
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