What Just Happened?

Just before I graduated from high school, I got a job sweeping floors at Mercer Industries.  Mercer makes doors and windows.  My job was to sweep broken glass in two very large manufacturing plants and warehouse facilities.  It wasn’t exciting, and there was very little challenge, but I was only 17 and it was a job.  After about a month, I was called into the office and told that they were having some layoffs and I wasn’t needed anymore.  That was my last time in a window factory.

Fast forward about 20 years.  I was working at La Sierra University in Riverside, California.  I was the manager of the campus industries (a retail food store, a dry cleaners, a wholesale food distribution center, and a publishing operation), the commercial properties manager, and the accountant for these operations.  When I stepped into that role, the books were very out of date, there were several un-leased properties, and the retail operations needed some tighter management.  Over the course of the next year, I addressed and successfully met each of these challenges. Read the rest of this entry »