Category Archives: Career

New vocabulary words

Career

Due to COVID we have some new vocabulary words never heard before or words that were rarely ever used. A few examples are Pandemic, COVID-19, green shoots, social distancing, flatline, reopening the economy, recovery, ventilator, N95 face mask and path to profitability. These words are all in response to the COVID crisis that has gripped our nation, lives and economy.

The news outlets refer to such terms as, buzzwords or sound bites. Meaning they are new to the conversations and applicable to this time period. In two or three years you probably will not hear many of these terms again.

It always tickles me when someone comes up with a new term and everyone jumps on the word and uses it repeatedly to show how smart and current they are. I remember back in the 2003-2005 time period when everyone in business started using the term, space, to define their business. It was used in a sentence like, “in our industry space we have traction that is accretive to yield.” Sounds almost stupid doesn’t it? Well that is how new terminology starts. My favorite new term for COVID is “green shoots.” The term was first used in 1991 to describe signals of economy recovery in a downturn. In the last 29 years, I don’t believe the term has been used again until now.

With every historic event, there are new word terms that get created to explain the situation. They are generally short lived and not used again until the next event. I find that the old ways and old terminology still work just fine. If I want to really sound like a goober, I could use the terms, space and green shoots in the same sentence. Ha. KT

Learning about life

Career, Life

Charlie Jones tells this story of his son coming home and telling his dad he wanted to start selling greeting cards, door to door in their neighborhood. His son asked him if he would teach him how to sell.

Sure enough, Charlie sits him down and began to teach him what to say and how to respond to the customer’s questions etc. He tells his son to go outside and come up and knock on the door and do a practice run with his dad. The little boy gets his sales materials together and goes outside ready to do the practice pitch in front of his dad. He was so innocent and sweet as he walked to the front door expecting his dad to kneel and be so supportive while he fumbles through the pitch.

He knocked on the front door and his dad opens it and looks down at his son and says, “what do YOU want?” The little boy is shocked by the abrupt voice of his dad and tries to answer. His dad just slams the door in in his face. Of course, the little boy starts bawling. The dad’s wife comes running to in the room and starts asking him why he was being so mean to their son.

The dad replies “I am just getting him ready for a little living. He needs to know that everyone will not be gentle, accepting and kind. He needs to understand how to handle discouragement and adversity and keep on going”

The little boy stopped crying and knocked on the door again and the dad explained what he trying to teach him. That afternoon the little boy went out and sold five orders of greeting cards and did not get discouraged when some people were rude and said no.

That story tells a lot about real life. Many people get discouraged quickly and quit. History is full of people that if they had quit, they never would have invented some of the greatest inventions of all time. Tenacity is often overlooked as one of the most important attributes of life. You show me a person who doesn’t quit easy and I will show you a person accomplishing things in their life. KT

From Density to Distancing

Career, Life

Ten short weeks ago, business was about packing in as much density with as many people as possible. From hotels, conventions, sports venues, air travel, resorts, retail, and office buildings – down to going to a Costco.

Now, ten weeks later, it is all about staying separate and distancing yourself from other people. How can this be possible? Because COVID-19 (‘CV”) has caused a shift in the paradigm of personal life and commercial life that no one saw coming. Ten weeks in, we now judge every face to face interaction differently than we used to.

Behind closed doors, almost every company is fearfully asking themselves, “will life as we knew it ever go back to the way it was?” The scary answer is maybe not. The most advantageous answer is it will come back but not at the same levels as pre-CV. Every company from a sandwich shop, hotels to sports venues, and entertainment are projecting different economic modeling because of the long-term effects on their industry. I was on a conference call recently discussing the various aspects of reopening the office workplace on June 1. Everything was discussed from ingress-egress, ice machine, copier to directional walking patterns in the office. The mandates and guidelines will change how people feel about in-office work, and that will be reflected in dining, travel, hotels, retail, entertainment, conferences, and so forth.

Working remotely has, for several years, been a discussion topic for many companies, but was mostly regulated to the back burner regarding its immediate need. As of 10 weeks ago, the need to implement and fully understand how to work remotely became the only focus. The results are enough to shake any industry and any company because the world was forced to learn how to make it work, and they did. Now companies are looking at everything from travel, office space, client engagement to liability insurance for potential changes in their financial modeling, possibly long term.

The actual result of the past ten weeks of CV will not become fully known until later this summer and fall. The potential changes to how businesses operate and the effects on the idea of dense groups of people in the same place will likely affect almost every commercial real estate segment going forward. For those segments where density was the objective 10 weeks ago, there may have been a longer-term shift in the way people think about it and how it affects personal movement. This shift could have lasting effects on almost all commercial real estate segments. KT

30 years

Career

Last week was my 30th year anniversary of selling hotels. It is hard to believe because I feel like I should only be 40 years old but when I look in the mirror, there is some old guy looking back at me.

In 1990 I was in the restaurant business and failing miserably. I was working a hundred hours a week and still couldn’t make the business work. I remember like it was yesterday, one day I was driving back home from Columbus Georgia where the restaurants were, and I passed by a real estate school with a sign that said the next class was starting soon. In my mind, I thought, well maybe I can sell a few restaurants to help make the ends meet. So, I parked and went inside and signed up for the class.

I graduated the class and passed the state exam in May 1990, but in order to use your real estate license you must be assigned to a firm in good standing. I had bought the restaurants from a friend of mine who also sold hotels and thought I would get him to add my license to his company and start selling restaurants. I show up the next day at his office and tell him I want to learn how to sell restaurants and he says to me, “I don’t know how to sell restaurants, but I can teach you how to sell hotels.” I thought, well, how hard can it be. Ha

That was the start of the greatest opportunity God could have given me. I was broke and knew nothing about hotels but only that I needed to make something happen financially for my family. That first week I would drive early in the morning to Columbus to check on the stores and then get to the hotel brokerage office by early afternoon. I did that for the first week or so and had no leads, no phone calls and really didn’t know what I was doing. The next week I decided that if I was ever going to learn the business, I had to get out and go see some hotel owners. I got in my Chevrolet Caprice and went down I-75 until I had stopped at 132 hotels. I found the owners in probably half of them and by the time I got back to the office I had some people I could talk to.

I started in May of that year and by the end of 1990, I had closed seven hotel transactions and won the rookie of the year award for the US. After that I never looked back. I made God a promise in May of 1990 and even now when I think about it, it still makes me choke up even today. I promised him that if he would help me succeed, I would always give him the praise for it. I always have, See, I have no formal education and I stutter when I talk so I knew it would take the hand of God for me to make it.

30 years later I sit writing this blog and I can tell you unequivocally that it has been the hand of God on me that allowed my family to get out of the restaurant business and into the hotel brokerage business. I don’t know how many years I have left in the business, but it is as fresh every day as it was all those years ago and I am still amazed that God allowed me to do this as a career. KT

The Great Realization

Career, Family, Life

I heard a guy yesterday refer to this pandemic as the great realization instead of the great recession. I started thinking about what good (because there is plenty of bad) we may have learned during the COVID situation and I would like to share some of those thoughts with you.

Speaking for myself, before COVID, I was consumed with email, text, calls, advertising, marketing, management of staff and all means of communication. I would come in the office every day and promise myself I would not spend all day answering and responding to email. For me it had become obsessive to keep my inbox cleared out. I made myself a promise a few years ago to only answer emails during certain times of the day and therefore allowing me to focus on things in front of me. Well, that was a great idea but very hard to manage. Many times, I would open my email in the morning and look up two hours later and realize I have not taken time to think, focus, plan, strategize, and lead the company.

Many people (like me) just went to work and did the same things over and over and week to week and took very little time to see the world around us.

Well, COVID changed all that. Now I have more time on my hands than I believe I have ever had. Emails, texts, calls, social media etc. have all slowed down. The first week of social distancing was kind of a novelty but by week three we all knew something had changed, possibly long term. People were settling into being with their children, playing in the yard without a cell phone, taking picnics, planting gardens, going for walks, loving on their dogs, reading, telling their children stories and planning their day around simple old school living.

It is almost like people hit a reset button in their life. They began to enjoy simple pleasures and simple things again. With technology our lives had become consumed with connectivity and instant responses. In the old days people would call your house on a rotary phone and if you didn’t answer they would call back the next day. People would take drives in the country, read a good book, sit on the porch after dinner and talk to each other. Before COVID, it seemed everyone had a cell phone with social media and instant internet and entire families would sit around with their sole attention on a phone.

Many heartbreaking things have happened due to COVID, but just maybe there has been a realization that has emerged where people are doing more simple things and enjoying simple pleasures and being involved with family and seeing the world differently around them. KT