MyRetailCareer

Owning your Job

Barbara Farfan, over at About.com’s Retail site wrote a good article called, “Finding and Keeping Employees with Ownership.”  And no, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be owned by any company.

Barbara discusses, from the employer’s side of the coin, employees that actually take, gasp, ownership of their job and she makes a nice analogy of property ownership vs. renting property. 

While the article is aimed at the employer, there is certainly enough to be gleamed from the employee’s perspective. Let me make one thing clear, I know that a lot of companies and a lot of managers just don’t get this concept but I also know a lot of employees treat a job as a paycheck as well.  For now, let’s set both those issues on the sideline and focus on those that do get it.

If you are an owner type, I’d recommend you pay close attention to the section talking about Interviewing for Ownership.  If you don’t get asked those questions, you should ask them yourself.  If you are a renter type and don’t get asked those questions, you’ll fit in just fine.

Keep in mind a simple lesson;  Any job worth doing is worth doing well. Ownership translates into pride and respect in my book.  I’d take a little time today to reflect on jobs you took ownership and jobs you might have slacked on.  Draw some comparisons and take a serious look at your own motivating factors.  You can learn a lot about yourself and what makes you tick if you just take some time to think about it.

Regards,

Helping Yourself and Getting Help

FYI, I’ve departed from what I had planned to write about today.  

Helping Yourself

I get a lot of emails from job seekers.  Everybody wants my help and that’s what I’m here for.  But oftentimes, they don’t want my help, they want me to do it for them.  I’m sure you have all heard the, “give a fish, feed for a day, teach to fish, feed for a lifetime” lesson.  I adhere to that philosophy.

Yesterday, one of my clients emailed me to ask “do you know anyone at ABC company?” Of course I do, probably have 1/2 dozen contacts in my Outlook BCM and twice that many in LinkedIn at 1st level.  How easy would it have been for me to throw them a salmon and just paste 5 or 6 V-Cards into an email? 

I think you see where I’m heading.  Instead, I picked up the phone and called them.  I took about 10 minutes to tell them to take advantage of LinkedIn.  I explained that since we were first contacts, they could do a search for that company and that I would pass along any introductions they were interested in.  I also gave them a lesson on how valuable joining groups could be and how to find more contacts that way.

I felt pretty good, I had taught them to fish and they could use the lesson to find people at every target company.  How valuable is that during a job search?  About 2 hours later I got an email that essentially said this;

“Do you really think looking people up on LinkedIn is going to get me a job?”  I didn’t respond because I realized that the person didn’t want to learn to fish, they wanted to go the the fish monger and point to a Haddock and have the fish guy  gut, scale, filet, wrap and sell it to them.  Job hunting is hard work.  You have to do the heavy lifting and the ditch digging today.  Learn to fish.

Getting Help

Learning to fish is going to get a lot easier and cheaper for a limited time.  I've decided that President Obama and the Federal Government aren’t the only ones that can have an economic recovery program.  Today, I’m proud to announce the MyRetailCareer Economic Recovery Program.  Specifics can be found here in a 3 page Microsoft Word document but let me give you an overview. 

Any retail/wholesale person who has been displaced can get career assistance from MyRetailCareer at a 50% discount plus some valuable bonus services.  Why am I doing this.  You all know I am big on “paying it forward.”  It’s important that we help each other in these turbulent times.

This special is $150, 100% satisfaction guaranteed.   I’m going to teach you to fish so if your looking for a fishmonger, this isn’t for you.  It’s limited, first come, first served and to be honest, I don’t know how many people I can handle at one time.  I’ll keep a waiting list as well.

Download the Word file and if you have questions, email or call me.

 

Technical Thursday

I don't know if any of you have had the misfortune of having a hard drive die but let me tell you, it's not going to be your best day. My Dell Inspiron, the one fortunately still under warranty but still not fully paid for stopped booting about a month ago. After the required hours and hours on the phone with technical support, I was sent a new hard drive.

I installed the new HD but was unable to install the operating system so, after hours and hours on the phone with technical support, I was mailed a box to put my laptop in and send it away. There is something unnerving about sending such an important piece of your business to a drop box in Texas.

Yes, I do back-up's and all that stuff. We have several computers and I have a spare HP with most of what I need on it as well but you are never fully prepared for this. About a week later, the laptop was returned, new hard drive and several other repairs; a new screen cover, new hand-rest, new bottom, new AC adapter. It looks brand new. Plus the old hard drive was returned.

So I get this bright idea to try to see if any of my data survived, instead of restoring the laptop from the last backup I had done (in Sept. I guess I was lazy during the Holidays). I order an external HD case from a company not to be named (Lions, blank, Bears, oh my!). It arrives and although it is a SATA HD and a SATA drive, my drive doesn't fit. I contact their technical support, more hours wasted, to finally get an email several days later telling me I must have made a mistake, the drive must be IDE. We'll I'm dumb but not stupid and I can plainly see it's a WD Scorpion SATA drive since I can still read. Needless to say, the unnamed company gets no more business from me.

I shoot of an email to Western Digital, 4 hours later James G. emails me back and says that often there is an adapter on the pins of the HD if it has been used for a laptop, just pull that off. Amazing information and it works. So now I have the HD installed in the enclosure. Unfortunately, the data had been wiped by Dell when they tried to restore the original HD.

Now for the good part, there is nothing wrong with the old HD. I reformatted the entire HD, ran diagnostics that WD gave me and it works like a charm. I don't know what exactly kept the laptop from booting but now I have a nifty 2.5 inch external USB drive.

Now if I could only find that Office Professional 2007 disc to start reinstalling software I'd be a happy boy.

Dumbing Down the Service

I try hard to keep my rants to myself and not use this forum to complain about specific retailers but some recent service issues and an announcement today on RetailNet demands my 2 cent view.

“Circuit City Stores said Wednesday it plans to cut costs by laying off about 3,400 store employees and hiring lower-paid employees to replace them.”  I applaud Phillip Schoonover, Circuit City’s chief executive for taking this bold move.  As he said in a statement, “We are taking a number of aggressive actions to improve our cost and expense structure, which will better position us for improved and sustainable returns in today's marketplace,”

Boy, as a customer of Circuit City, that is exactly the direction I want a retail organization to take. What ever you do, don’t try to have anyone in your stores that understands customer service or can explain the myriad of choices in the consumer electronics world.  Follow the lead of Nardelli at Home Depot and get rid of anyone that knows anything about home products.  That’s good for the stock value, just look at how well Home Depot stock did against Lowe’s.  Oh that’s right, it sucked.

I was in Home Depot yesterday.  I’m redoing a floor in a bath, putting marble down and had a question.  I waited for about 5 minutes at the “Customer Service” desk, were they didn’t seem to have any staff and then a cheerful person in an orange vest asked if I needed help.  “No, I’m just standing here wondering why you don’t tear this customer service area out and put lumber here since you don’t seem to have anyone here anyway,” I thought.  “ I need some help with marble tile” is what I said. About 5 minutes later a nice young man appeared.

“Can I help you?”  “Yes, I’m putting down a marble floor and wondered what width spacing between the tiles I should use?”

“I though you needed someone to get something down for you.  Let me find someone who knows tile.”  So far Home Depot is batting zero.  After 15 minutes, we determined that no one in the store knows anything about tile.  So I went to Lowes.  Guess where I bought my $500 of marble tile.

Last week I was in Circuit City.  I needed more memory for my HP laptop.  Now, before I left home, I had a pretty good idea of what I was  looking for. When I got to the store, I went to the computer area and started looking for memory chips.  I wandered for about 5 minutes, noticing young man, in a Circuit City shirt, playing a game on a display laptop.  He kept glancing over at me but didn’t seem to grasp that I needed help.  So I wandered over, interrupting his game of FreeCell and asked, “Where is your computer memory.” 

“Over there,” he pointed.  I went over to the end cap which was about 75% empty and decided to act dumb.  “ I need some memory for an HP Laptop, can you help me?”

“What do you need?”

“I have a HP DV XXXX and need a 1 GB memory chip, which one should I get?”  After pointing out 2 different chips, neither one correct, he gave up.

“I think I’ll get this one, what if I need to return it?” 

“You can only exchange it for a like item”

“What if I need a different item, because this isn’t the right one”?

“You can talk to the manager.”  I went to Best Buy and they got my $100.

Now that I know Schoonover’s plan is to “take aggressive actions to improve Circuit City’s cost and expense structure” and not take any aggressive actions to improve the customer experience in his stores, I hope he won’t miss my business.  Schoonover might benefit from reading this short recap of an article from Knowledge@wharton (free membership required) regarding Nardelli’s exit and mistakes.

There are good people working at both Circuit City and Home Depot.  But when management does not make providing high customer service the overarching mantra within a retail organization, service suffers. Bad customer service leads to upset customers and employee moral suffers. It doesn’t take a genius to see that sales suffer.