Chapter 13. Sex for Resources

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

In time we exhausted, and dominated the market in our part of the state, and I decided to enter the market of a major metropolitan area about 170 miles away.  

I spent about six months doing market research on the cheap, which meant asking what local fast food restaurants were paying their help in order to get a frame of reference what the current wage rates were in this new city.  At the time most fast food restaurants were paying $3.45 per hour, so I based my quotations on that wage rate.  What I did not know, was that at the time, there were over ten million square feet of new office space under construction in this city.  When all that office space was completed and was occupied, there was going to be a major surge in the demand for new housekeepers.  With the supply of labor more or less fixed, and the demand for cleaners surging, the result was quite predictable:  a surge in the price of labor.  Which meant that all those new contracts I had just sold in this city were going to lose money, because we were going to be unable to staff the buildings at the wage rates we had quoted, and if we raised the wages, we could not raise the prices, and so were going to take a serious financial hit.

 We tried to hold the line on our wages at the level we had quoted the new business at:  remember we were in the cleaning business, and labor is by far the largest cost of doing business.  As we tried to hold our wages at the levels we had quoted the business at, the competition for labor was intensifying in the city, and our competitors were slowly offering more money.  And so were the fast food restaurants, and every other enterprise that operates with entry-level labor.  I would often pass the same Wendy’s unit on my way to work, and they constantly had Help Wanted signs in the window, and I noticed that the offered rate of pay went up about $.25 per hour every two months or so.  The significance of this had not quite seeped into my consciousness, but I woke up at a trade show in St. Louis later that same year.  I was talking over cocktails with one of my Jewish competitors from back in my home state, and he said about one 22-story office building we cleaned:  “My cousins run that building.  Don’t you think I’d have that contract if I wanted it?  Why do you think I don’t have it?  Because I don’t want it, because I can’t make any money at it.” 

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Chapter 12. When Your Best Just Isn’t Good Enough

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation

One of the hardest things to accept about business, and maybe human behavior in general, is that most behavior doesn’t seem to be rational, but whimsical, irrational, and emotionally driven.  Decisions are based on emotion, and then the intellect is summoned to justify them.  Business could be gained and lost for some very arbitrary reasons.  My response to this was mostly terror.  On any given day I knew the wrath of the gods could descend on my head for reasons far beyond my control.  Since all of my contracts were on a month-to-month basis, I understood that on any given day I was only 30 days from bankruptcy court, if enough of my clients were to cancel my contracts at the same time.  No business was guaranteed, even if you were doing an excellent job, and the specter of economic death hung over your head all the time.  It was imperative to build relationships inside the client’s organization on at least three different levels.  Whenever possible I would build a relationship with the CEO of the corporation, my manager would build a rapport with his peer in the client’s organization, and we would try to match up our cleaners with the personalities of key people on each floor.  Generally speaking, it took all of us as a team to keep a tight grip on business.  Everyone was important, and I always told our people to avoid stepping on hands when climbing up the ladder, because those same hands could expedite the way down (or out the door!)  A disgruntled secretary in a client’s building could make our work life miserable.

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Chapter 11. “How Much Justice Can You Afford Today?”

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation.

Some of my most painful business lessons came from the legal system.  I was unaware that a large group of under-employed attorneys had invented a brand new field of litigation that came to be known as contract employment versus employment-at-will.  The theory apparently went something like this:  if an employer said something to an employee that could even vaguely be construed as an assurance of continued employment, it could be considered a binding verbal contract.  Let’s say, one day during a discussion with an employee that you, as the employer say something intended to show appreciation and encouragement for recent good work on their part such as “Keep up the good work.  You have a real future here”, and then let’s say that a few months later their attitude changes and their work goes south and you end up terminating their employment; they could now sue you for termination without just cause, because implied in your encouraging verbal statement months before was a guarantee of some sort of continued employement.  From that point on, in the eyes of the law, you could only discharge an employee for “just cause”.  Well , how hard can that be?  Who would want to terminate someone for an unjust cause?  The problem is, “for just cause” in the eyes of whom?  Of course it was appropriate in your mind to discharge them; you were probably fed up with their behavior, or taking a lot of grief from them and spending 80% of your time trying to correct them and taking heat from both your boss and the customer to get the situation fixed.  But the problem is, their discharge is never  for “just cause” in their own eyes.  When was the last time you heard someone say, ‘I got fired today, and by God, I deserved it.’  So now, under this concept of implied employment contract, this discharged employee can challenge his discharge in court, and you are obliged to defend your decision to let him go.  To a jury.  What if you get a jury that buys into the Hollywood stereotype that businessmen are greedy and corrupt and out to get the little guy?  You may successfully defend yourself, but it’s going to cost you money, probably a lot of it, and the plaintiff’s attorney knows that.  So he launches a paper battle that runs up the bill for the defense.  At some point the insurance company will capitulate and pay off, just to contain their spiraling legal costs.

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Chapter 9. Starting Over: From Rags to Regulators.

What follows is a continuation of a series of articles comprising a book entitled “Passion, Power, and Panties–Confessions of a Businessman” wherein the author describes being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, spending almost ten years at their headquarters in Brooklyn, NY and then entering the ”outside”  world at the age of 27.  For purposes of continuity, I encourage you to subscribe in the column to the right so as not to miss a post.  It is free and without obligation. 

During the last few weeks at Watchtower, I began preparations for entering the outside working world.  Since I loved to write, I sought a job as a writer.  It took no time at all to discover that writers with  phD’s were falling out of trees.  My first obstacle was how to explain how I had spent the last nine years of my life.  Life in a monastery?  A waiter, bookbinder, letter writer for Jehovah’s Witnesses??  How to explain why I left?  To have children?  On the outside, people didn’t have to quit their jobs and relocate in order to start a family.  What was I qualified to do?  How much did I have to earn to survive, to support a wife and possible child?  I had no idea about any of the above.  I had never bought a car, established credit, learned a trade, or gone to college.  I was twenty-seven years old.  During the few disastrous  job interviews before we left Brooklyn, I did learn the short answer to why I left my last “position”:  “Career redirection.”   My first lesson in spin control.  Substance and unnecessary detail were not nearly as important as a few words that created a brief image.  I also learned a quick lesson right out of law school:  Never answer a question that hasn’t been asked.  Also,  never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

Suffused with early rejection and a sense of impending disaster, Barbara and I decided to move to Youngstown, Ohio where she grew up.  Her parents encouraged us to stay with them until we got on our feet.  Our timing was impeccable.  Unknown to us, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, a steel company that was a pillar of the economic community was about to announce its closing, the first in a string of dominoes due to fall in quick succession and ultimately to devastate the local economy.  Unbeknownst to us, the biggest business in the Youngstown area appeared to be organized crime, and the economy was so bad even they were leaving town.  With tens of thousands thrown out of work, we came to Youngstown like two immigrants just off the boat and looking for work.  And like first-generation immigrants, because of being sequestered for over nine years in near-monastic existence, we couldn’t speak the language of the new world in which we found ourselves.  I couldn’t even begin to comprehend their thought processes.  It was massive culture shock, and we were too ignorant and innocent to even feel sorry for ourselves.

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Chapter 2. The Politics and Business of Belief and Service

I remember once the organization was trying to unload some old publications.  Instead of throwing these pamphlets out, which is where they belonged, we ran a “sale” and gave bunches of them away for next to nothing.  But at least they weren’t going to waste.  My mother had the temerity to read one of them, something no one was expected to do.  It was entitled Judge Rutherford Uncovers Fifth Column.  As I recall, it was published in the early years of World War II and made some absurd predictions as to the outcome of the war.  We were distributing these pamphlets in the mid-fifties, long after the war was over, and the predictions made in this publication were embarrassing.  My mother wanted my father to explain how we were in good faith expected to distribute this material to the public.  My father told her that no one was expected to read it.

Later when I was at Bethel I found it most interesting how an organization based on faith endeavored to teach the flock not to act on faith in their business dealings, and to adjudicate their differences when they failed to act rationally with each other. It was only much later that I understood that to live at all “by faith” means to suspend rational judgment and accept what rational judgment will not support (or faith, by definition would not be needed), and that in order to live by faith, one has to compartmentalize one’s life.  The exigencies of daily survival often require a higher level of intellectual integrity than does one’s philosophy, and so usually these two parts of your life have to be divorced from one another.  It never occurred to me at that point in time that if living a successful temporal life required you to practice your beliefs hypocritically, this was a condemnation of your philosophy:  your philosophy was not life-supporting or life-enhancing, but quite the opposite.  And if your beliefs condemned you for seeking your own life and happiness as your logical highest achievement, your beliefs in effect put you at war with yourself, with unearned guilt as the result; self-esteem, if not outright impossible, becomes possible only by further compartmentalizing your life.  Our family practiced our beliefs with considerable integrity and consistency; we had little guilt and were very unhappy.

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