Part 69: Climbing To The Top!

Well hello out there in cyber land. Hope all is fine with you. The story is moving right along. In this and the upcoming next few parts you see the challenges that I had to endure, they all helped to shape me in to a better person, both in sales and in sales management. Please enjoy this next part. It was a long drive to Iowa, it seemed like I was going to drive for ever. When I made it to the Mississippi River I was relieved to finally have made to Iowa. Now I just had to find the branch office. I heading to a town called West Branch. I drove for about and hour when I came to the exit off the interstate for West Branch. The branch was located right off of the exit just outside of town. The exit was one of those that looked like so many others I had seen in my travels, a vacant gas station at the top of the exit. There were a couple of other buildings close by. One of them had to be the branch where I was to take over as branch manager. There it was, with a small sign outside. Farm fields were tilled and came right up to the building. The branch was a large pole barn that was converted with an office in the front of the building. Outside of the office was the check in room were the salesman were to do there beginning and end of day. It was the same type of set up as we had in Fort Wayne. There was one difference here though, I had 5 routes that covered almost all of Iowa, part of Minnesota, and half of Illinois. All of the routes had two overnights each week. This was an extremely large territory to cover and I thought a lot of room to grow.

          I wasn’t sure how long it would take me, but I was going to make this a great branch. I thought I would grow the number of customers and the number of routes would grow as well. The branch was the newest that the company had. The company opened it five years before and this was all of the business that it had gotten so far. I was amazed that the company would allow this place to stay open that long. There were a few problems that came along with this branch. The route salesmen were not paid  one hundred percent commission. They were paid a base amount of four hundred dollars each week. If their sales equalled more that that then they would make two hundred dollars plus the commission. I had only one route that did that most of the time. The others were content with the paychecks they were receiving. The one that were content had wives that made more money then they did. The one salesman that made commission every week was a single man and was one of the top routes in the company.

   The next problem that I has and it was a big one. For the five years that the branch had been open, it was losing twenty three thousand dollars each month. This was going to be my main focus for the next year. I had to find out why first. Why so much money going down the drain? It would be different if the money was being spent on getting new customers or even on payroll. This was not the case however.  I had to start at the branch and see what the money was being spent on. Phone and other utilities, rent, property maintenance, up keep of the trucks. 

     I was staying at a motel through the week and I had a month to find a place for me to live. Darlene and the kids were still at the home getting it ready to put back on the market. The company would pay to have movers pack everything and move us to the new location. I was traveling home each weekend it took about seven or eight hours to make the trip. I would leave Friday night and then return Sunday afternoon. It was now winter and some of the trips I made were in the snow. Little did we know that this year was to be a year of record breaking amounts of snowfall.