Hello friends. Let me tell you, the end of 2014 was full of surprises and packed with exciting action! Never did I think that’s how I would describe a job working for a plumbing and HVAC wholesale company, but once you read this post I suspect that you might agree!

Remember in my last post I mentioned that I had so much fun in the summer? Well, the fun continued into the autumn and winter! On the first weekend of September, one of my vendors took me to the Penn State vs. Akron football game. In all the years that I’ve lived in PA, I have never been to a PSU Nittany Lions football game. Boy, have I been missing out! To witness and be a part of a hundred thousand screaming students, alumni, and dedicated fans was an incredible experience. From the tailgating in Happy Valley to defeating Akron 21-3, the entire day is something that I will never forget. I would like to thank my vendor, Energy Transfer Solutions Inc., for treating me to such a wonderful time.

Fast forward two weeks… I’m in New Orleans attending Hajoca’s first Mainline University. In case you’re unfamiliar, Mainline is Hajoca’s very own private label brand. The Mainline U was a company-wide event for managers, mgmt trainees, and key sales/purchasing employees to familiarize ourselves with current offerings from Mainline (and Luxart) as well as upcoming future products. As I am always saying, my favorite aspect of these types of conferences is the opportunity to meet and network with people from our company that I normally do not get to meet. Sometimes it’s just a matter of putting a face to a name. The folks from our Mainline/Luxart division did a fantastic job of putting together a very educational and informative seminar. Of course, the delectable Cajun cuisine and the after-hours shenanigans on Bourbon Street were extremely entertaining too!

Anytime that I wasn’t away on a trip, I was frantically trying to increase my sales and hit my quotas. In hindsight, perhaps I was being too “frantic” about the whole thing. My sales techniques were still immature and crude. I also lacked the patience and composure that some of our top veteran salespeople possess. October ended up being a somewhat “slow” month for me, which caused me to panic, lose focus, and haphazardly try to claw for POs and new accounts. When everything was said and done, I did barely manage to hit my 2nd quarter sales and GP goals. Unfortunately, I only opened one new active account. I had a meeting with my regional manager and my mentors. They made it very clear that I fell short of expectations and that they wanted more out of me going forward.

My 3rd quarter of outside sales began on November 1st. I really took my 2nd quarter shortcomings to heart and took off with a new passion. The bar was raised — my goals were to do over $100,000 in sales and open 3 new active accounts by 01/31/2015. I’d like to toot my own horn and proudly announce that both of these goals have been met as of 12/31/2014. Everything else in January is an extra bonus.

Throughout this entire time, I’ve been continuing my education through attending classes and meetings offered by my vendors. I took a class on troubleshooting Bradford White’s commercial and residential water heaters, and I sat in on a training session for Gastite products. I strongly believe that becoming more knowledgeable in every facet of our industry is going to make me a better manager and an overall asset to our company as well as myself personally and professionally.

We finished up the year with our annual Weinstein Supply “End of the Year Party” which was an enjoyable time as always. So this concludes my journal for 2014: another year for the history books. In the grand scheme of things, I have never been happier with life and 2014 will always occupy a special place in my heart. See you next year!

5 MONTH MEGA UPDATE:

As you have probably noticed, I have not updated his blog in several months (I hope you all didn’t miss me too much!). Don’t worry, I still work for Hajoca and I’m loving it — for real!

So why the long hiatus? Simply put, it was a combination of the fact that outside sales has required a significantly larger portion of my time and has also completely captured my attention that I found myself concerned about nothing other than reaching my sales goals! Lee Tracy, our Senior Director of Administration and Training, kindly reminded me that I had forgotten about my blog. Oops, I’m back on it now!

Let’s see… April was spent mostly doing preparations for my outside sales phase, which started on May 1st. During this time, I got with my mentors, Tom and Ed, to discuss what accounts I should call on and what my sales goals were. I also spent some time with other managers and outside salespeople in my region and went on a few sales calls with them (special thanks to George, Ed, Jerry, Mike, and Matt). I was able to observe their sales techniques and styles; it was a very active learning experience.

Once May arrived, I started out firing on all cylinders. I also signed up for the Dale Carnegie Sales Success course, which I attended every Monday evening for 8 weeks. My sales goals were set quarterly. My first quarter was from May 1st though August 31st. This three month span went by like a blur. I was constantly on the road visiting my customers, writing up quotes for them, and also still helping out in the office and counter on occasion. Amidst the chaotic schedule, I attended a three day long division-wide vendor roundtable meeting in June and a three day long pricing and purchasing class in July. Additionally, I managed to squeeze in a 5-day vacation to Las Vegas in June!!

Bottom line: How did I do? My sales goals for the quarter was to open 4 new accounts and make at least $70,000 in sales. Unfortunately, I was only able to establish 2 new accounts, but I made over $88k in sales! For the August-October quarter I will definitely do everything possible to hit all of my goals. So far, August has been a little slow, but I have a few more big sales in the works and I am already negotiating two new accounts. Always forward; never quit!

The third week of August was also my third annual Management Development Program Seminar. It was very similar to last year’s, but we are now up to over 50 trainees in the program! Kate, Haley, and Noe added some fun activities like the visit to our corporate headquarters in Ardmore, PA and renting a suite at Citizen’s Bank Park for the Phillies game! Grant and I presented our project and received praise and acclaim for our work. We identified multiple practices which either correlated to positive or negative performance at the profit centers. Based on our findings, we constructed an action plan for the managers to improve their teams (e.g. more delegation, cross training) and had a good participation rate. The next step is to follow up in October and measure the results.

Perhaps most importantly, I made sure I had a lot of fun this summer. I think that the summer of 2014 has been the most memorable time of my life. I took a Vegas vacation for the second year in a row, and I also attended a few other music festivals. I feel blessed to have incredible friends and a promising career. Hajoca promotes and encourages a healthy and fulfilling work-life balance, and for that I am extremely grateful. Here’s a special thank you to Keith, Rick F., Rick K., Chris, Lee, Jock, Paul, Tom, Ed, and Jeff for being the best bosses I could ask for. <3

March flew by so fast that everything feels like a convoluted blur. As I mentioned in last month’s post, my goal this month was to knock out the entire interview portion of my project this month. Grant and I spent 3 full days on the road and visited 6 different profit centers to interview over 20 employees. At first, I was unsure how receptive people would be to having two management trainees probing them with questions about their job and work-life balance, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that everyone was extremely open and more than happy to share their thoughts and opinions with us. Between the two of us, we collected over 60 pages of answers and notes. Now we must go through our data and look for trends and correlations. Paul Weinstein (our region manager) is going to provide us with financial figures of each profit center to help us identify trends which lead to financial success. I can already speculate on several abstract issues that lead to concrete success, but I am anxiously waiting to see the real numbers.

I love to be able to spend all day working on my project, but March had many other things in store for me. The week after our “field trip”, we attended our region’s annual Counters Plus meeting. Most of the counter employees of the region gathered at the Hampton Inn at Willow Grove for a day of training and discussion. Paul Weinstein started off by reviewing last year’s results and setting goals for 2014. Then followed a presentation on heating and air conditioning by a manufacturer’s rep from Concord. I had already gained a limited but functional amount of heating knowledge from my time in the industry, but I knew next to nothing about air conditioning, so I found this lesson to be quite valuable. After a nice lunch at the hotel, we spent the afternoon with reps from Kohler who ran a class on sales techniques. Despite the fact that many of the counter people did not sell air conditioning products or that many of them probably already had a solid grasp of sales techniques, I feel that the simple act of gathering in a group and having a forum for discussion and camaraderie is what makes this meeting valuable. I definitely feel that events like this one help boost employee morale and are profitable investments in the long run.

I was scheduled to spend the whole next week in Philly, but Paul threw me an interesting (not necessarily bad!) curveball. Our Weinstein Supply location at Vineland, NJ hired a new employee for inside sales. Because I had become quite familiar and proficient with our Eclipse computer system in the past two years, Joe (Vineland’s manager) asked if I could spend a couple of days with his new employee to teach him how do use our system and perform all the various functions. I said no problem, and spent Monday and Tuesday at Vineland. Again, this was a great opportunity to help develop a new team member of the company, as well as a chance for me to witness how another profit center operates. On top of that, I got free lunch for two days!

Of course March wasn’t going to end in a boring way. On the 25th, one of our vendor reps came in to give us a lesson on hydronic heating systems and products. Again, not to sound like a broken record, but there was some really valuable information presented to us. This type of knowledge is priceless because these are the facts that I will need to become familiar with to have a successful career in this industry! Right now my brain feels fried and I can sure use some rest. However, I suspect that April is going to be an extremely strenuous month. Outside sales is right around the corner, inventory is coming up in May, so I have a lot to squeeze in next month. Let’s see how it goes!

February was a pretty strong month. Coming off of a solid performance review last month, helping George and Grant learn, and continuing with inside sales, I feel like I’ve continued to grow as an Hajoca employee and as a person overall.

On the third week of the month, I spent two days at the Weinstein Showroom in Collingswood. This was my first time being away from the Philadelphia profit center in over a month, and it also concluded my showroom training which I began at West Chester in late October.

My last two days were spent at Wilmington, DE as an inventory observer. I have done several inventory observations now, so this was becoming second nature to me now. It was however my first time at the Wilmington profit center, so it was definitely a worthwhile experience.

Next month looks like it will be really busy. Grant and I will be traveling to various Weinstein locations to interview managers and employees for our business project. We also have our regional Counters Plus meeting on the 12th. I will have plenty of details about my business project to share next month!

First off, I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year!!! I hope all of your dreams and wishes for 2014 come true. And if your plans for 2014 include working at or applying for a job at Hajoca, then you’re certainly in the right place!

I left off last month saying that I was preparing for the 2014 forecast meeting, so let’s begin there. Our annual forecast meeting for the Northeast region was on 1/7 and 1/8 at the Villanova Conference Center. Unfortunately, we had some brutal winter weather and some key people could not make it due to flight cancellations. Two of those who were unable to make it were Keith Colburn (owner) and Rick Fantham (president). Nevertheless, we had the strong leadership of Rick Klau (chairman), Jock Castoldi (division manager), and Paul Weinstein (region manager) to lead our forecast sessions.

We had several support staff from our corporate office in Ardmore present to the entire group of managers about new developments in the company. This included new upcoming products from our private label and new software packages and upgrades coming from the IT department. During our individual branch meeting, we received many words of praise and encouragement from the senior leadership. Our profit center (Weinstein Supply – Philadelphia) had an outstanding year; the financial statements proved that we were at the top of our region and one of the best in the entire company.

We also had a couple of new employees start in Philly. We had George start as a new inside salesman, and Grant started as a new management trainee here as well. I’ve been helping them with some of their training and have taken up a mentoring role. It’s nice to be able to help with a new employee’s development, and I have also learned about my own leadership skills in the process. I expect to be working closely with these guys in the future.

Finally, I had my annual performance review on 1/29. I received high ratings and positive remarks from my mentors (profit center manager and assistant managers) and from Paul (my region manager). Paul noted that I had greatly improved since my previous review, so I was very proud of my progress but also grateful and humbled to hear such words. My spirits are high and my motivation is strong going into February!