That night the region manager told me that the choose this location five years before because it was located in the area that the company felt would make it more centralized for doing business in Iowa and the surrounding area. However now the region manager felt that it wasn’t going to work out here anymore. Our sales people were traveling a long ways to cover the territory and it was expensive for what business we were getting. We decided that we would make a plan to back out of some of the territory that we were not making enough money at. also we were doing a lot more business in Illinois. In fact were were doing almost sixty percent of the total branches business there.
I was given the task of finding a new location for the branch and at the same time I was to visit the customers that the region manager that we had decided not to service anymore. This was going to be one of the hardest tasks that would required of me, after all in the sales world the idea is to serve and grow customers, to achieve incremental business, not withdraw, concede. I wondered where to start, which customer would be the first one to tell of the news that we appreciated their business, but we were leaving the area because we could not grow enough fast enough to continue servicing their stores.
I pack a suit case for two days. That’s what I figured it would take to talk to all of the customers that were on the list for deletion. I decided to head north to Minnesota. We had several accounts in southern part of the state I would go to the largest accounts a chain of three large super markets. I was very nervous and I thought that my meeting with the management at the buyers office would turn as cold as it was outside.
Amazingly it went well, I explained that our company had been in the area for five years, and that the customers we had in the region were very good to us, we just had not gained enough business to be profitable for the wages and fuel cost. The customers everywhere I went wanted to know if they could do more to keep us in the region. The only thing I could say is that had our company maybe spent more time in their region in the past years maybe I would not have to deliver this news. I thanked them for the business that they had given us and that I hoped that if we were to return to their region that they would still except us back into their stores.
I now had to head to northern Iowa along the state line and do the same, some of the customers were less understanding, some had been with us since the start of the branch. From this point I now pointed the van towards the western edge of our territory toward Des Moines. The snow was starting to fall again. It was a dry snow as the temps were in the single digits. As I was driving along a back road I was thinking and watching the snow blow across the wide open fields and across the road in front of me. The sun started to peek through and the fields were now glistening. I thought how beautiful and how cold looking at the same time. Suddenly I was sliding! I was spinning around, loss of total control, then I hit a dry patch and I thought the van would roll. I brought it to a stop, not another car in sight. I was thankful for that. I sat there shaking wishing I was not there, not there in the middle of nowhere. I got out and walked around the van, the ice cold hit me and that seemed to straighten me out. I got back in and continued on.
