Tammi's World

Back At It

Well today is the first day back after being sick, stuck in Atlanta and then the back woods of Georgia and having a house full of people. In other words I can settle in and get back into my routine.

I had some friends over for dinner last night, we spent the afternoon/evening talking, catching up and watching some movies. Oh, and I made a really good dinner! Very nice.

Went to bed early for me, had trouble falling asleep, but still managed to get about 5 1/2 hours in before the alarm went off.

Heard that chirping this morning and immediately hit the snooze. Then I sat up in bed and said (really) "Time to make the donuts" (I know, I'm a dork). Got up, hit the switch on the coffee pot and off we go.

I've got an early morning training class for 20 new hires at one of my larger department store accounts so I printed out all my literature, rechecked my training bag and got dressed. Here I sit, locked and loaded for a fun day of training and apologizing.

And I got lots of apologizing to do. It's been 3 weeks since I've done any major store visits. And when I did it was to put out fires. Well, I've still got fires, but 3 weeks of freaking out over what wasn't being done forced me to look at the way I run MY business. I made some changes.

I got the printer/fax thingy running and I spent time Saturday just printing out all my reference sheets and logs. I reworked my run schedule and set everything up in my calendar so if anyone wants to know what I'm doing when all they gotta do is look. I printed a copy of the schedule out so that I can double check everything before I commit to eliminate any possibility of double booking. I miss my palm pilot, but can't afford to replace it right now, so we're doing things the old fashioned way. It's what ever it takes to get this shit organinzed.

I discovered there was a bit of a problem with my pay since the promotion and move. My checks have been a bit lower than before the change and I thought it was because the months of May and June were pretty bad in this industry. Boy, was I wrong. Seems when the old boss set my budget (my goals that my pay is based off of) he doubled the budget on my biggest account. The new boss noticed it while we were in Atlanta and had a fit. Yelled at me that I should have told him. Hey - I was new to this pay structure, no one had explained it to me and to make matters worse - they haven't started mailing me my weekly numbers so I had no point of reference. Anyway - it's fixed now. Even though sales were slow in July I'll still at least make base pay and should be able to handle things a bit better. The bad news is, no retro pay make up. The budget is the budget is the budget, until someone changes it. Damn, they got a lot of free work out of me, that's for sure.

Anyway, it feels pretty good to be back in gear again. It'll be tough this week, getting out there and running like a mad woman, but at least it will be controlled chaos. I've set my 2 weeks rotation schedule so that I'm home at a decent time every evening but 1 each week. I have a fire day or office day scheduled 1x a week and have scheduled in my day off (Monday) beginning next week. Since I took last Friday off to be with my family I'll make that up today.

The secret is to fit everything in so that you leave time for issues and still hit all your calls. The next couple of calls in each store will be a matter of explaining why I haven't been there without making excuses. Honestly, they don't care that I've been sick. They don't care that I had out of town meetings and my family was here. They care that they haven't seen me and feel like no one gives a damn about their business. And this is one of those situations where actions speak much louder than words.

The only thing I haven't really figured out is how to catch up on all the administrative stuff. I've got tons of paperwork to catch up on and that will take the evenings. I'm hoping that all will be caught up and corrected by Friday night. Then I should be able to maintain with just an hour after runs each day. Not bad - now if I can just get the people in corporate to understand how important it is that they finish what they've started and get it out! Everything hinges on them getting stuff back to me.

So...off I go. Should be interesting, to say the least.

Posted by Tammi at August 9, 2004 06:20 AM