World Fence News

58 • JULY 2018 • WORLD FENCE NEWS Steve Saucerman's quintessential corporate office staffing matrix continued from page 56 On one particularly slow night, Andy, the new junior store manager still worried about making an impres- sion, busted Daryl (sporting goods) and me midway through a game we'd invented called "Plunger-Suck." The game involved affixing bath- room plungers (on sale now for $3.99; limit 3 to a customer. Hurry!) onto designated colored floor tiles some 20' away with a strict proviso they flip twice in the air before landing on the sucky-part of the tile (I believe that's the proper technical term). And I have to tell you, it was tru- ly inspiring how accomplished we'd become at our game (there were a lot of slow nights). It was a source of tremendous personal pride for both Daryl and myself. It turned out Andy didn't see it that way. In his best scolding-manager tone (he'd been rehearsing in the mirror; he was getting good), Andy challenged both of us to explain exactly why cus- tomers and co-workers alike were re- porting plungers whirling and spiral- ing wildly up over store displays (in some cases taking out ceiling lights) back toward the home improvement. Incredibly, neither myself nor Daryl could produce a plausible ex- planation. My hours were reduced to 9 per week and they took away my discount card. A blind squirrel But time passed and against all odds and every one of my high school teacher's predictions, I did go on to better myself. I parlayed [def: verb (Latin) – "to extricate from one's nether region"] my vast Home Improvement experi- ence with Montgomery Ward into just enough of a bluff to land a clerk job at a local lumber yard. This eventually melded into full-time building materi- al sales over time. After a handful of years forget- ting to include screens and extension jambs in virtually every window or- der I submitted to the factory, I felt myself compelled (picture an angry mob with pitchforks/torches tracking Frankenstein's monster) to leave ma- terial sales behind and – with the help of a few material sales contacts who also happened to be builders – found an entirely new calling in the new and exhilarating world of residential con- struction. Residential construction consisted of churning out the same 1,150 rect- angular, vinyl-covered ranch homes available in the same gray or beige built on the same identical flat, barren (think Death Valley but without all the cheeriness), subdivided lot with the same 68 feet of curbed frontage … day after day after day. And if this alone didn't suck every last atom of hope from your soul, these subdivisions also often came with "Architectural Control Committees." This was a group of citizens – often unemployed and/or retired patrons living within the subdivision itself – who owned obscene amounts of free- time, snotty little Pekinese dogs and passionate and unalterably steadfast positions on plastic gable-end louvers. Just like Alexander the Great But still I soldiered on. I compro- mised, adapted and assimilated into the industry, but after a while (stop getting ahead of me), there was a problem. Unbeknownst to me in the be- ginning, most mid-size, residential construction contracting offices face fierce local competition (particular- ly after factory layoffs where pretty much anybody with a pickup truck and a cousin becomes [pick any two initials] "X&X Builders"). And this tends to keep profit margins razor thin. This, in turn, meant that there wasn't a whole lot of cash floating around for silly, superfluous things like office staff, expense accounts or oxygen. This environment compelled employees like myself to "wear many hats," so at any given time I could be called upon to perform all manner of duties, including estimating, project management or even sales. It was this last duty that would inevitably see my residential career come crashing down around me. As it happens, owners of residential con- struction companies place a particular emphasis (i.e., threat of future em- ployment) on sales. This makes sense continued on page 62

• Cover