During the second week of September, we had our annual Managers’ Seminar. It spanned over three days and took place at the Villanova Conference Center. For me, it was just a 45 minute drive, but managers and trainees from all over the country flew in for the conference. The company chairman, president, vice president, and other key members of upper management were in attendance as well.

The hotel was really nice and there was plenty to eat at the buffet. During the first two days, the invited veteran managers and trainees split into two separate groups. As trainees, we covered various topics such as accounting, credit, and risk-management. For the third day, renowned sales coach Jim Ambrose visited to do a sales seminar in a joint session with the veteran managers and trainees. He went into extensive details on how to succeed in outside sales, and we did several interactive role-plays and activities which were surprisingly fun.

Another highlight of the seminar was the business project segment. Each trainee worked on a project for a year and put together a presentation for their fellow trainees and the senior management. Because I was new, I just gave a brief lecture on leadership skills, but it was good practice to give a speech in front of our senior leaders.

I’m back at Lansdale doing work in the warehouse and working on my ProductPro courses. I’m also brainstorming ideas for my project. Hopefully I can put together something impressive for next year’s seminar.

It’s been a month since I started with Hajoca at the Lansdale, PA location. So far, I’ve been learning a lot of things, and everything is going very well. I’m now certified to operate the forklift, and I’ve pretty much gotten the hang of picking orders, packing shipments for UPS, and receiving freight for purchases that we made.

Our profit center (a.k.a. PC or branch) has 17 employees, and everyone has been very helpful. I am the 18th person working at the Lansdale profit center. I will be working here for a year; after my first year, I will move to a different PC for my second phase of the management development program.

I started out spending three days out doing deliveries with each of our drivers. This was a good experience because I had plenty of time to talk to each one of them and their perspective on the company, our business, and work/life balance. It was also important for me to physically go to our customers’ job sites and actually see who we were selling to.

The main challenge the first few days was to learn the names of products and the warehouse layout. Fortunately, I’m getting pretty familiar with our main commodity items and where they are located.

My mentor, Jeff, is the manager of this PC. The people here respect him and as far as I can tell, he does a good job as a manager and leader. I spend most of the day working in the warehouse, but Jeff gives me about an hour a day to do my MDP office work (e.g. ProductPro coursework and exams, studying SPIs). By and large, I’m happy with my decision to work at Hajoca and looking forward to doing a whole lot more in the future!