How things end is an indication of how the next thing begins…how you leave a job can haunt you at your next one.
Unfinished business is a struggle for some people and it can be a destructive force in all areas of our lives.
Excess baggage is caused when we drag a set of circumstances and experience with us into the next phase…only there is precious little room for the baggage…because it clearly doesn’t belong. I had an experience that affected my career for several years.I just couldn’t see it until a mentor pointed it out.
I worked at a small family run business for many years and it began to grow rapidly at a time the city itself doubled in size…in less than 10 years the city doubled and the best and the brightest took the town by storm.
We enjoyed a fair amount of prosperity and got caught up in a wave of optimism wherein we expanded and changed locations 3 times in 5 years. We all assumed the trend would continue and we spent money like we were printing it.
Soon the leadership structure began to shift focus and the identity crisis came…and stayed.
Instead of going to the back room where the founders had their office we rarely saw them. We kind of thought of them as figureheads or symbols of a bygone era instead of valuable daily contributors that had a vision since the day they started.
Everyone in the business knew the name of the company and it was always followed by a sense of shock that the company was still around…reputation is a funny thing..people form an impression and don’t always adjust it along the way.
The founders filled a niche in the market with a product line that consisted of 3 items….a generation of grandchildren took over the daily operation and diversified the catalog to dozens of items.
During the population boom we offered hundreds of items.We were not edgy and popular…we were old fashioned and reliable..our word was our bond and we didn’t have contracts we had a handshake to seal the deal.
That was what the founders stood for and that was fine by me. We hired a lot of new people who had no experience in the industry…they were fresh out of college and wanted to launch us into the new way of thinking….not one of them was in town long enough to learn their way around the city and soon we had a crisis.
The founders stopped showing up because they felt out of place…it was their delight to hold daily meetings to inspire us to carry on their legacy….but then we got too busy to check in with them..they were non essential..that was what they said. My boss was the grandson and eventually he stopped showing up too…his partner would show up late and take a 3 hour lunch at the bar….there was nobody from the old days that was there on a regular basis…I did my best but I had no boss and no guiding light…like I had for many years.
My boss hired a business manager who eventually stopped paying vendors and the company went broke in the process…I left to relocate to another state and spend years afraid to get involved with the next couple of companies.
In summary…I felt like I was betrayed..I was selfish as I worried about my security..as the company was falling apart around me…I gave a half hearted effort to the next couple of companies because I was always worried I would not get paid or it would go out of business…I hopped from one job to another for 5 years after that until I realized what I was doing…
I brought my troubles with me…today, I live in the present… "Companies out of business" written by Ken Bownes
