Christmas Crunch

This box of cereal reminded me of what the Christmas Crunch mean while I was growing up.

During my formative years, we decorated the house for Christmas. And by that, I mean the entire house. There were lights in the trees, on the roof, lining the sidewalk. There were lights in the hallways, in our bedrooms, in the kitchen. There were thousands of lights on each of the trees around the house. This decorating was not a trivial thing; it took a full weekend and some evenings to complete. (In my memory, I think that it took weeks on end, but I know that would have to be an exaggeration.)

We were so much into Christmas decorating that I even started a small business with two friends to build decorations for other families. I think that we sold product to their parents. Yeah, that was about the extent of our business success. But it was Christmas decorating-related.

These are the Christmas light reflectors that I recall from my youth.

If you can remember all the way back to the ’80s – and I know that is a stretch – then you will remember the reflectors that they used to put around each miniature light in a 50-light strand. Okay, maybe you weren’t as much into Christmas lighting as my family, and you may not remember those little things. To me, however, there is only one type of Christmas light reflector: it is the clear, flower-shaped reflector that Silvestri put around their lights. And there was only one brand of Christmas lights that was worth spending money on: Silvestri. Ahh, the memories…

Anyway, one side effect of so much decorating and lighting around the house was that many of these reflectors fell off their lights. To give you an idea of the value of my labor back then, I would often be assigned to look back through the strands and find the lights that didn’t have reflectors, then reattach them.

Sometimes, despite our fastidious efforts, there would be reflectors that would slip past our detection grids, and fall to the ground. (Pay attention now, because there is an important lesson for kids of all ages coming up.) We quickly learned that Christmas time was not a time to wander bare-footed through the house. If you found one of these reflectors with your bare foot, it hurt like crazy!

Beyond that life lesson, we created a name for the sound of a reflector being crushed underfoot: the Christmas crunch. It was that common. Really. While other families may have considered the Christmas crunch to apply to a lack of time, we considered it to be simply the crunching of a plastic reflector under someone’s (hopefully) covered foot.

I may be alone in having such a strange Christmas memory, but I hope not. In fact I am given hope that others have similarly strange memories every time that I see A Christmas Story played on TV.

 

Post-apocalyptic Thoughts

Well, the end if the world came and went yesterday, but that might be – and I really did hear this once – because we’ve been reading the Mayan calendar wrong by a year and the end is not until winter solstice 2013. I think that one of the great secrets of any apocalyptic prediction is having a good backup date if the main date “fails”, or passes uneventfully. A good story for that backup date is also helpful. The story of the reading of the calendar being off by a year is a perfect backup date and story. It allows the doomsday prediction to continue, and provides a great excuse as to why it didn’t happen already.

Of course, there’s also the argument that sometime around 700 AD an emperor decided that he wanted to reign in the year 1000 AD, and so he just skipped 250 – 300 years to get there. There is actual basis to this theory. It has something to do with all architecture dating from 700 – 1000 AD being nearly identical, with progress happening on either side of that time period. Under this scenario, the Mayan calendar is still good for another, maybe, 300 years. Blasted history, made us all look bad. (In more ways than one.)

While I’ve not actually believed the hype around the end of the world, it has been fun to watch. It has also struck me how many different faces we can put on this impending doom. I’ve personally chosen Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as my approach, but I’ve seen several others.

There is also the argument that this simply begins a new grand epoch, rather than indicating an end. If that’s the case, then we all have a lot of things to work on if we are to welcome in this new era.

Reset the doomsday clocks. There’s another apocalypse around the corner.

I hope that we at least figure out the answer to life, the universe and everything before then.

Shutting Down a Company

I’m deeply involved in shutting down a company right now. More accurately, I’m leading the charge shutting down three companies that we sold on 1 November. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as just signing the closing documents on the sale – or closing the doors – and walking away. There is a lot to do, and a number of lessons to learn, both about preparing and implementing this process.

Before the sale closes there are a number of things that will help with the process of shutting everything down.

1. Set a time frame. Obviously there is the closing date for the sale of the business, or the date you’re done. This is  much more akin to the bride who told her mother on her wedding day, “At last I am at the end of my worries.” To which her mother replied, knowingly, “Yes, dear, but you just don’t know which end.” We set a date of three months after closing to have everything cleaned up and shut down. Fortunately for me, I get to stay full-time during this transition period.

2. Trust, but verify. Ronald Reagan introduced me to this concept. It was the mantra by which he ran his foreign policy. It is wise counsel when gathering information for the buyer as well. Any report that you supply can be used against you if there is any error at all. I made the mistake of trusting people who report to me to prepare accurate reports, and sometimes rushed these out without a full review. This has led to a number of mis-understandings, and to my rebuilding reports using multiple, verifiable sources after the sale. Put another way, if a job is worth doing – and gathering required information for a seller is definitely worth doing – it is worth doing right the first time. Because if you don’t, you’ll have to do it a second time.

After the sale, my wife thought that I’d be able to just stay at home for a while collecting a paycheck. I think that I’d enjoy that almost as much as she would; but that is not what I’m doing right now. Granted, a few days are slower, but I’m still staying pretty busy. We still operate two companies that we didn’t sell, so my duties continue there. I also find my to-do list has some new and unique issues on it that I get to solve.

1. Bills keep coming. We are now more than 45 days since we closed the sale of our three companies. Somehow we keep receiving bills for all of those locations. (In fact, I’m jumping from writing this to calling a vendor back about a still-outstanding bill.) I made the mistake, at the beginning of this month – one month after the sale closed – of thinking that I could pull money from the bank accounts of the sold businesses into the operating account of the business that we still own. I held back enough money to pay the outstanding bills with the idea that I could close those bank accounts before any additional fees came. The result of that is I have been continually transferring money back into those accounts to pay the bills that keep appearing. Be ready for the bills, some as much as four months old.

2. Banks Statements. (The vendor just called me back; sorry if I just lost my train of thought.) For most of our bank accounts, I am a signer and have full Internet access. There were two accounts, however, that I did not have online access to, and for which the statements were mailed to the location of the closed business, not our office. Getting access to these accounts proved problematic. We had to wait for the statements to be delivered to the sold location, then for them to get them forwarded – via snail mail – to us. The lesson that I learned was to make sure I have access to whatever I need before I start shutting things down.

3. Taxes still have to be paid. For us, taxes are always a very involved process. That is still true, but moved forward by a few months. We got the joy of trying to calculate all of the taxes that we would owe, so that we knew how much money we wouldn’t get from the sale. Definitely have your accountant or tax advisor do this before you start to distribute money to the owners. As little fun as it is to get checks for far less than the total sale price, it is far more painful to have to ask for money back from owners to cover taxes. Don’t go down that road. We didn’t and I am so glad.

4. Enforce the time frame. We are still in the process of wrapping things up, and it seems like every step forward brings another back into the operation of the companies somehow. At this point I’m revisiting the first point of sale preparation: Setting a time frame. It is now approaching the time to close accounts, whether old checks have cleared or not. We’re getting closer to making final distributions of the sales proceeds to the owners after all the final bills and taxes have been deducted.

It is getting closer to the time that I will no longer be needed full-time to close things out. But the results of that will be another story altogether.

Transitions

Ch-ch-changes. Turn and face the strange.

I visited with a couple of friends this weekend who talked about their plans for the future and changes that they saw coming to them. This topic was brought about by the fact that they know about my coming changes as well.

One has been a social worker, who has seen a pattern of burning out on jobs about every five years and is about six months from that point now. She realized, looking at what she’s done, that she wants to be a life coach. Her situation is similar to mine in that her résumé doesn’t support the skills that she knows she has to succeed at this, but she has some friends and contacts who she is talking with to get mentored into this new line of work, or maybe even get an interview through. She would be great at this, and Nicole even asked to be her first client before she even has the job.

Her husband plans to retire after 20 years of working with unsavory elements of society. (He is in policing.) He then wants to do something else productive with his life, as he still has a couple of decades before Social Security will kick in for him. As we talked, he commented that with an MBA I should be able to jump into any sort of management position that I wanted, as opposed to his having limited education and only one career. However, I didn’t feel that different from him in that I’ve also only had one job for the past 15+ years, in a family business. The education may differentiate us, but his work ethic really stands him apart in my mind. Any employer who could see that would be crazy not to hire him for anything.

It struck me that I’m not alone in my insecurities, and that it is often easier for others to see our strengths than it is for us.

We spent a lot of time talking about the hurdles that were in front of us. Whether it was skills that we hadn’t used in previous jobs, but had it spades; or a lack of formal or practical education; or lack of variety on a résumé. Each of these is backed by some kind of fear or self-doubt. It’s easy for us to doubt our abilities in the face of change, but takes some courage to plow through them to get what we want.

I also realized that I could see in each of these friends significant strengths that completely overshadow the weaknesses that they see in themselves. That’s why we’re friends: they have incredible strengths that have attracted me to them. All three of us just need to tap into those strengths as we move forward.

Easier said than done.

 

Looking for a job

After over a year and a half of negotiations, we finally closed the sale of three of the proeprties owned by the family company that I’ve worked for over the past 15+ years. That leaves me underemployed. While we still operate one assisted living community and the apartments that we own, I will not be needed on a full-time basis much after the start of 2013.

As a result of this sale, which was good for all of the owners, I am now in the market for a new employment opportunity. Time to start hunting.

I don’t really expect anything to jump at me from just this post, especially as I’m just starting up this blog; but I figured that I may as well put this out there in case anyone is interested in my services.

You can find my résumé here: Kevin’s Résumé short

I may also be reaching out for help with some aspects of my job search over the coming months, whether it’s input into improving my résumé, getting some interviewing tips, or just getting ideas of what types of jobs are available.