Here's some background. This company had been acquired by a well know conglomerate in 2006. They had been in business for a few years before that. Just this year, they purchased themselves back. So there was a ready made customer base of all the customers who were using the conglomerate. And, they were using us. For the customers, it was simply a matter of changing from 1 vendor to another The conglomerate was simply referring their former customers over to us, the prices were the same, and from what I heard on a daily basis from purchasers was that the customer service they were getting was much better, and orders were being filled quickly. Most of the customers where large companies themselves. It wasn't a product that you would traditionally find advertised, or that the general public would buy. The sales person was visiting all the larger customers around the country, and it was more a role of education that we were the new owners. I think it might be that my boss (the general manager, not the owner) was either jumping the gun with hiring someone like me to be the office manager type person, or was not aware that someone like me could streamline so many tasks he was doing the long way around. At the stage he was at I could make myself obsolete if I could just have the chance to create a few tools for him. Over the 2 weeks I was there, I realized something, or I think I did, it's hard to tell. While he was very "techno" savy, I don't think that's the same thing as him being "computer" savy. Does that make sense? For instance, the last day I was there was Saturday. During that week he'd been getting our new office space ready, all the inventory moved over, buying office furniture, etc. We all came in for about 4 hours to get everything ready for business on Monday. He proudly showed off how he had labled all these shelves in a large area with parameters for the parts and products would be going on each one. He had several people loading up the shelves, and recording long serial #'s on paper, and I was to be collecting the sheets and creating a data base. He gave me a few pages to start with. Basic data entry. I looked at his info for a few seconds, and in my mind decided how would be an efficient way to catagorize everything. I knew it would be a work in progress, but I could see out 95% of it should be right away. Each product started with 2 letters, then a series of maybe a dozen numbers. As I started to work, he was walking by, looked at what I was doing and said "That's not going to work, there's a lot of items that will go inbetween what you're putting in there." I just sort of, looking at the screen, did this
because, what does it matter what's coming in between when you're going to be sorting it automatically and other stuff, anyway?
He had also made a comment early on that eventually all of us would be doing the data entry, and then it could all be put together in one place. Um, there isn't that much stuff, and I can enter it faster than everyone could put up and write down. After a couple of hours (I was mostly done) I discovered a few more pages of info that he'd previously written down, and asked him "This needs to be entered too, right?" This is when I maybe realized he didn't really know all the things common programs like Excel can do. He said "No! Listen to me!"
I said "I am listening. You need to have these items entered into the inventory as well, don't you?" He replied "Yes, but there's all those other items that need to be entered first."
I said "Tom, it doesn't matter what order you enter all this stuff in. When I'm done it'll take a few clicks of the mouse to sort it automatically by shelf location, then by numerical order for each shelf. That's what excel does. Then on Monday I'll put it all in a pivot table, and it'll be really easy to find something"
He said "oh....just do whatever you want."
I'm really not sure if he thought I was going to be searching through all these 12 digit numbers, preceded by 2 letters, manually trying to figure out what order they should go in.
Toward the end of the day, a coworker had finished, and although I really didn't wish for them to take any of the sheets, I gave her the last few to enter in.
I said "when you get done, email it to me."
She said "do you want me to print them out?"
Me: No, that would mean I'd have to enter it all again. Just save the file, and I'll merge it all into mine. Earlier that week, she readily admitted she didn't use, or want to learn excel, so I wasn't surprised when that didn't make sense to her. In any event, when I walked by her later, she wasn't entering items in the same format I'd shown her, but just thought "Oh well, I can work with that, I'll just have to move it around. No biggie" I mean, she was trying to be helpful.
I mean, as most of you know, all this stuff is REALLY basic. But if it's not something you need to use, how would you know?
Anyway, when he said "oh...just do whatever you want" I thought "yeah, I'll do it the right way, and not reinvent the wheel"
I mean that's what he hired me for. In the interview a big point in my favor was that I liked to take processes and simplify them, create tools in excel expecially that will make it easier to access information, etc.
So, re the money, the sales were coming in, but I think he hadn't anticipated the upfront expenses.
I'd made up a list of all the services we could use, but I wasn't going to even go there for a few weeks.
But, for instance, when I was looking around the kitchen in the office, I noticied no microwave. I said "Are you going to be picking up a microwave, or shall I?" and he said "we don't have the money for that yet."
We don't have the money.....for a microwave....so we can eat lunch? (this wasn't said out loud, just me thinking)
So, maybe he had a meltdown the next day thinking if he couldn't afford a microwave, how could he afford me?
