Promises — June 3, 2022 - Johnny Boy Marketing

🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
New Job🧑‍💼
Happy Times🤗
Small World ⚾

Buckle up. It’s story time. Today I made a reservation for Ruth’s Chris steakhouse on Sunday for me, Wifey Poo and Boys The Elder and Younger. The Core Four is getting dressed up.

Keep in mind, we are not Ruth’s Chris people. It’s not that we don’t love good steak, but $50 hunks of meat are not a part of the budget Wifey Poo and I creatively stretch every month to pay for things such as our boy’s education, basic clothing and the electric bill. It’s not that we’re poor; we’re not. But we’re certainly not “Let’s hit Ruth’s Chris on a Sunday because we don’t feel like cooking” people.

Rather, the reservation comes because, today, I stopped relying on other people’s promises (a completely different kind of OPP than Naughty By Nature sang about) and created a brighter future for the C4 myself.

The story begins …

I’ve been living on OPP — first from Shriners Children’s, which promised me that if I, indeed, did what I had told them in my interviews I would do, I would be rewarded, and lately by The Best Dang Real Estate Team on Either Side of the Mississippi. The amorphous promises of the former didn’t materialize despite my success, and so I took a position with the latter, whose promises were much more defined.

Here’s where math comes into our story, and I hate math, so take all these numbers with a grain of salt. They’re probably wrong. And Wifey Poo will let me know about it.

For simplicity’s sake and because I don’t feel like talking about my actual salary, let’s just say Shriners paid me $100 a year with vague notions of making $100 + ?. I was fine with the ? for awhile, but then Bossman came calling with from the real estate world and offered $100 + unlimited ? based on the success of the team. The projected first-quarter 2022 ?, when I looked at their forecast, was $100 + $40, a pretty damn good percentage for one quarter (about 40%, if my math is correct).

“Even if their forecasts are off by half, $100 + $20 is still better than $100 + nothing. And that’s just for one quarter! And surely their projections have to be at least half-accurate.”

Then I set about doing my thing. And I did it well. Yet there are many things great marketing can’t do. It can’t change a culture overnight. It can’t bring strength to people who need to hold others accountable if there’s going to be real change and growth. And it can’t change the forces of the free market.

So when the first quarter ended, there was no $100 + $40. There was no $100 + 20. There was no $100 + $1. There was $100. Period. Full stop.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Not “full” stop. Stop, but promises. And I believed them because I believed (and still believe) in the Bossman. He’s a great real estate guy. He knows his stuff.

So I got back to work doing my thing. The mission had been clear from the start, and we’d agreed upon our strategy — build brand awareness and build a lead generating machine. I had done both. Brand awareness isn’t built overnight, and it’s not built in a quarter, yet we were making progress. A lot of progress. Search Engine Optimization is an art and a science, and my work was artistically effective. It was working.

Let’s jump out of the math and rewind to December 2021. Me and Bosslady went to lunch, and there I told her that my 25th anniversary was coming up and I really wanted to take Wifey Poo to Alaska in the summer of 2022 to celebrate. “We’ll make that happen,” she said. It wasn’t quite a promise, but you can give it promise-adjacent authority when it comes from the Bosslady.

When the first quarter ended with $100 + nothing, Bosslady was kind enough to give me and Wifey Poo a gift card for Ruth’s Chris, and said, “I know it’s not Alaska, but we’ll get there.”

Promises.

So I asked: Can I please have a look as the second quarter goes on into the second quarter numbers so I can track what’s happening and make plans for my family?

I can’t stress this enough: $100 wasn’t enough to make the budget work. I have a kid in college. I have a family to support. And I needed to have at least an idea of what was coming.

As all of this was happening, I revived my side business and picked up some marketing work to make ends meet. I love creating. In many ways, this side gig is my hobby, not another job.

I waited to see the numbers.

And then I was told those numbers were visible only to “leadership,” which, based on what I had been asked to contribute far and above my role as marketing dude, I had pretty much considered I was. In fact, the Director of Operations had told me I was. Yet when I asked for transparency, I wasn’t.

Do you see what I saw?

So I let Bossman know: Yes, I wanted to be with the team for the rest of my career. But I had a family to think about. And I was told about what was coming, what was going to happen, what was just over the horizon.

Promises.

Yet I had reached a point where I couldn’t just accept the promises of someone who wouldn’t give me visibility into the foundation for those promises. So I polished up my resume, and I let the LinkedIn algorithm know I was available should anyone want to talk to me about what I have done and what I can do.

Enter Samantha.

Sam is a former first-round draft pick in this here country’s women’s professional soccer league. She had a good career doing that, then coached collegiate women’s soccer — and now she works as a recruiter. She sent me a message about a new opportunity — one that paid, going back into the math world, $100 + $50 or $60 as a base, with bonus and profit sharing opportunities. $100 + $50 or $60 is a gamechanger for my family, so I listened.

Over the past week, I’ve had three interviews with the company, and today they offered me a position for $100 + $60. Five more vacation days than what I’m getting. Three more holidays.

Five minutes after saying “I do” to them, I turned in my resignation, effective in two weeks, giving Bossman the first shot at securing my creative services as a side gig at various levels and for various prices. He and his wife/Bosslady are considering their options over the weekend. If they don’t sign on, I have good relationships with other Realtors in the area. I’ll be fine.

And so it came to pass that I made the Ruth’s Chris reservation. We’ll dine on the generosity of Bossman and Bosslady. It’s not Alaska. But it’ll taste good. Irony sometimes does.

And so I texted the C4 to let them know of the reservation. And I told them who’d be paying for the first large chunk of our meal. I told my boys: “Yes, the irony will taste good on Sunday. But I say this as a lesson to you. It’s OK to trust people and believe in people. Be careful whom you trust and believe. And make sure you hold people accountable for their promises. And know this: People can promise you a lot of things. But ultimately YOU make your future. Don’t ever put it heavily in another person’s hands for very long.”

This is the lesson I take from the past 17 months or so. I think it’s a good sign of growth that I can look back at my younger self and think “Damn, he was an idiot.” I was.

But I’m not anymore.

And then I left for the office for the day. I can do what I do from anywhere, so I did what I do from a sculpture park. It was a gorgeous day. I smoked a cigar to celebrate. I took a lunch break and read my book (Stephen King’s Later, which I highly recommend.). It feels good to be me right now, and that hasn’t been a thing until very recently.

It’s a small world. Over the course of my time talking with Samantha The Recruiter, I got to know that her fiance is a member of the Rocket City Trash Pandas. What the hell is that, you ask? It’s the Double-A affiliate of the Anaheim Angels, and that team name is freaking awesome. So I was telling Boy The Elder about this.

“Her fiance is Braxton Martinez,” says I.

“I know Braxton Martinez!” says BTE.

It seems as if, when Braxton was playing independent baseball while trying to catch on with a team affiliated with MLB, he played for the now-defunct River City Rascals, based right here in my section of Missourah. One day when BTE was 16 or so, he, his brother and his cousins went to a Rascals game with his grandparents. That night, Braxton went off and hit some big homers. After the game, my crew went up to the railing to get autographs.

BTE disappeared down to his bedroom and returned a few minutes later with an autographed ball. I texted a pic to Sam. Yup. It was her Braxton’s signature.

Small world.

In Other Writing …

SoS15: So Far Away

Welcome to Songs of Significance, chronicling the songs that have helped shape me and people across generations. So Far Away, Staind, from the 2003 album, 14 Shades of Grey Line of Significance Now that we’re here it’s so far away/And I feel like I can face the day, and I can forgive/And I’m not ashamed…

Promises — June 3, 2022

In Other Writing …

Today’s Reasons to Keep Living

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