Me --- From then to now
I was born to the son of a sharecropper in a tiny little town in an rural county in North Carolina. There are few better recipes for invisibility than the one that I just described. The only think one might do to make the situation worse, is to be non-descript, non-athletic, freckle-faced little boy. If invisibility could be attained by mortal man, I had all the markers for success.
BUT NOBODY REALLY WANTS TO BE INVISIBLE
So, how do you find the spotlight — even if it’s only just a bright flashlight? My path was academics. I was a good student and I loved learning. I excelled in school; from grade school to high school, I did everything I could to keep my name on the leaderboard. I finished in the top 7% of my high school class, and earned scholarship offers and acceptance letters from every college to which I had applied.
Ultimately, the financial requirements of higher education were greater than my family and I could muster. I returned home — dejected. It was however, in that moment that I truly began to understand teamwork. I had played team sports as a youngster — but working to contribute to the household bills and groceries is VASTLY different than trap blocking a blitzing linebacker.
Working in the restaurant taught me all about managing inventories, profit margins, labor costs, personnel management and customer satisfaction. There is no business degree on the wall, but there’s 15 years of hands on training.
The transition to the automobile dealership might read as a bit strange and bordering on extreme, but it came at a time when I was learning how to be a team player at home also. My daughter had just turned 6 years old, blossoming into precociousness and began to ask the hard questions: “Daddy can you come watch me dance?” The restaurant is an amazing and greedy mistress, she demands every minute of your attention and leaves no room for another — not even the 6 year old in her shiny new tap shoes and clogging outfit. So I left. Now 16 years into the dealership world, I have learned about processes, protocols, and more customer service — especially dealing with those who are less than happy. Let’s face it, nobody is happy when their vehicle is down. There is no degree in Public Relations on the wall either, but there is 16 years of hands on involvement.
My greatest success has been the 12+ years that I have spent on the softball field. My daughter left dance and picked up the yellow ball when she was 7 — my dad died in December of that same year. Softball is where I went to escape the heartache. I have seen some of the best, brightest, toughest, strongest young ladies come through my dugout; each one with a new lesson to teach and a new outlook to share. Out of those years, I have seen over a dozen young ladies receive scholarship offers to continue playing in college. I am most proud that several of those have turned down those offers to pursue their education. There are no state championship banners on my wall, but there are countless texts and letters of thank-you and appreciation, for which I am most honored and most proud.
Tomorrow, when I wake up and go to work, I will be taking each of these lessons and all this experience with me to bring to bear and whatever task comes my way.
The key to being a great teammate is to first be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses. Deliver your strength to the group with all the energy you can muster and do all you can to make your weaknesses stronger.