Owner Shift (eBook)

How Getting Selfish Got Me Unstuck

Mike Malatesta (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
232 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
9781544523903 (ISBN)

Infos

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Being a successful one is a long shot. The stress makes you feel like you're fighting everything at once. Regulations. Red tape. Employees, vendors, and customers. Even family and friends, sometimes. But what about yourself? All too often, entrepreneurs become their own worst enemies, designing systems that keep them stuck without even realizing it. When that happens, it's easy to blame the lack of progress on other people. They're not helping you. They're the problem. Owner Shift is the no-holds-barred, breakthrough story of Mike Malatesta's own journey through excitement, pain, grit, and mistakes-showing you how to take back your power, evaluate your business objectively, and claim the future you want. When it feels like the world is against you, Owner Shift reveals the Five Words that can reignite your fire-making you a better leader, attracting new levels of success, and helping you accomplish more than you ever thought possible.

Textauszug

2

Big-Boy
Transmissions

Seventeen years later, I opened the door that said OFFICE and went inside. The room was small and grimy. It obviously hadn’t been cleaned in a while. The block walls were painted white, and a single chair sat in one of the corners facing a single security camera hung in another. A clipboard of employment applications was on a counter in front of a one-way mirror. Typed instructions hung on the wall next to a phone. They told you to pick it up and dial seven when your application was filled out.

The office belonged to Ace Service Company, a trash hauling company on Delaware Avenue in South Philadelphia. Across the street from the river. New Jersey on its other side.

A tall and abandoned brick warehouse was adjacent to the north. Its windows were missing. The word “ROBIDEAU” was painted in block letters near the top of the building—a couple decades ago. More recently, painted graffiti tagged the lower levels of the building in stylish and bright colors. A strip club was next door. Some of the drivers took in the views there after work. And a few before, it was rumored. It’s prime real estate now, but in 1986, it was a section of town no one wanted to be in for long.

I was in Ace’s office because I didn’t want to drive the Folsum Fence Company truck like I did last summer. My best friend, Tim, pulled some strings with his brother who ran the place to get me the job. I spent the summer delivering fence supplies to installers in the tri-state area. Chain-link rolls, galvanized metal poles, custom-fabricated gates, and barbed wire. I loved the driving but hated the deliveries. Everything had sharp edges and I had to unload at most stops by hand. A fresh tetanus shot was a requirement. I lost my share of blood doing that job.

During my junior year, I decided to set my sights higher for next summer’s job. I wanted to drive a bigger truck and lose less blood. Trash trucks had gotten my attention. I passed a ton of them on the New Jersey Turnpike driving to and from my Folsum deliveries. They were bigger and cooler than my single-axle Brigadier flatbed. Over spring break, I stopped by five or six local trash companies to fill out an application. Most said I was too young for their insurance. One looked terrifying, with old trash-truck carcasses littered in the front yard, so I drove away without applying.

Ace was a bit of a hike from my house, but they had an ad for drivers in the Inquirer’s help-wanted section. A woman told me to come fill out an application when I called. Maybe they were more desperate, or their insurance more lenient.

When I finished the application, I dialed seven, as instructed. The one-way mirror window slid open. A woman extended her arm with an open hand.

“Application and driver’s license,” she said, without looking at me.

I handed her both. She told me to take a seat and slid the mirror window closed.

The phone rang a few minutes later. I picked it up like I would at home.

“Hello?”

There was a man on the other end. He told me to go outside and meet a guy named Art for a road test. As I hung up, the woman slid open the mirror window and gave me back my license without a word.

A garbage truck idled in the street. A guy was standing by it waiting for me. He wore a uniform and a bothered look. I was clearly an interruption.

“Art?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He opened the passenger door and climbed up and into the truck. He’d left the driver’s door open. I took that as my cue to get in, too.

He gave me instructions.

“Go up to the corner. Take a left. Go to the dead end. Turn around and drive back here.”

I stared at the truck’s dashboard and gulped. Trying to familiarize myself because I wasn’t expecting a road test. It was way more cluttered with gauges and dials than my Folsum truck. It had eight speeds instead of five. A big-boy transmission.

There was a diagram on the shifter handle in the shape of an H with two numbers next to each of the vertical lines. I knew that meant there was a low side and a high one. I was trying to figure things out and reminding myself to breathe. I glanced at Art. He gave me a look that said, “Let’s get going.” I bit the bullet, put the truck into first gear and eased out the clutch. It began to move and didn’t stall. Whew!

I drove through the course like Art told me to do. A couple of times the truck bucked like it wasn’t sure whether to go or stop. That happens when you go too slow in the wrong gear. When I finished, I pulled the knob for the parking brake and wondered what Art was thinking. He kept that to himself.

“Someone will call you,” was all I got.

I must have done well enough because I got the job. It paid $7.50 an hour to start. Eight dollars if I made it longer than two weeks. Two dollars more than I was making at the fence company. I felt like a big deal because I was going to be driving a “real” truck, like my dad and like the Rouse guys from when I was a kid.

I delivered and picked up large roll-off and lugger dumpsters to and from construction sites. The trucks were complicated and strong. Hoists and cylinders did the heavy lifting. Jockeying trucks like these took a lot of small back-and-forth maneuvering. You’d be surprised how much you can sweat doing a series of subtle movements in a huge truck during the summer. At least, you’d be surprised by how much I did.

It took most of the summer for me to get comfortable with what I was doing. The streets in downtown Philadelphia were narrow and crowded. They make you nervous in a car. Many streets were one-way, which complicated things further. Driving and dumping in a landfill was tricky, too. You run over a lot of trash. Avoiding mattresses was something they drilled into my head. Their springs wrap around the truck’s axles and can stop the truck in its tracks. Nobody liked lying in a bed of trash underneath the truck to cut them loose.

Truth be told, Ace should have fired me that summer. I cost them a lot of money in mistakes and accidents. My creative destruction made a lot of extra work for Art, who turned out to be the company’s maintenance manager. The twisted frame on the truck I nearly tipped over was a shitload of work to fix. Scary, too, for me, because the truck’s cab was five feet in the air when it was all over. A couple of guys I didn’t know helped me climb back down to earth.

There was the time I couldn’t stop and damaged the front end by running it into a car that was stopped at a red light. It bounced forward like a heavy ball before I rolled into it again. I felt helpless and out of control. Then there was the freshly built block wall that I eased the dumpster into, and then through, due to a miscalculation when I was setting it down. That’s most of it. The other companies that told me I was too young were probably right.

I would have fired me had the shoe been on the other foot. I think I was spared because I was young, polite, and showed up on time. No one at Ace wanted to fire the “kid,” which had become my nickname.

Despite my sometimes-deficient driving, I loved the job and the trash business. At least the little I knew about it as summer help. I felt like a big deal. In control of something powerful. I had a skill that none of my friends had. Plus, it filled my bank account more than most summer jobs. Even when I had to start at 4:00 a.m., I was excited. I was working with adults at a real job. Maybe I wasn’t the greatest driver yet, but then again, maybe there was something more to this experience than just the driving.

Shorty was my dispatcher. He ran the yard and yelled at everyone. He started at the bottom, picking up trash from curbs all over the city. He was a soldier of sorts. The guy we relied on to make everything happen. He maximized profit, kept the customers happy, and the drivers in line.

At the transfer station, we dumped the boxes we picked up from the streets into a compactor. Shorty ran that, too. He packed the loads we dumped into special boxes that we would haul to the landfill as our first load every morning. He was good at that, too.

His goal was to pack these boxes so tightly that the trucks could hardly pick them up. We got charged for dumping by the box size, not by the weight. Arbitrage. Not only were the boxes larger than their stencil said they were, but they were also heavy as hell. The arbitrage, aided by some deception, fell squarely to the company’s bottom line.

My landfill loads were almost always more than 10,000 pounds over what the truck could legally weigh. When you raised the hoist up to dump them, sometimes nothing would come out. Friction fighting gravity and winning. That’s what happened to me the time I tipped the truck over. Top-heavy plus unstable ground and a dash of driver inexperience resulted in physics taking over. Down went the hoist and the box.

Shorty also liked me a lot. Sometimes, he’d invite me into his control room. A twenty-five-square-foot wooden box with a phone, his trash compactor controls, and a window air conditioner. We’d shoot the shit or wait for a new pick-up order to come from the office. Before the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 30.11.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• ISBN-13: 9781544523903 / 9781544523903