There are days during which I see the future of my client relationships. They do not look pleasant. I can't keep my interest up...and my clients notice. I want to trick them into believing I care, but I can't. I want to trick myself into thinking I care, but I can't. I do think some days that an ice cream cart or a game room or a poetry bar would be more lucrative and more fulfilling. I'm serious. Help me convince my wife, please, that we need to cash in and drop out. Not that there would be much cash. But there would be much more time for one another...and time to reacquaint myself with the business end of a shovel and rake.
This weekend, while we were at the office, working, we encountered a couple who appeared to be in their sixties, in the parking lot of of our office building. He was teaching his wife how to ride a motorized bicycle. They've become distributors of this motorized bike, that according to him gets 125 miles per gallon. He will open up his website in a month or two and his retail shop shortly thereafter. I envy him. I envy them.
The're an interesting couple. He has long, long hair, mostly gray with a few ribbons of black, and an unruly and utterly cantankerous beard and mustache. She looks older than he is, with gray hair pulled into a pony tail and wrinkles galore, but her smile is contagious! The wrinkles from her smile brightened the gray day, I tell you. They seemed to me to be, as one of my favorite songwriters would say, "a cross between our parent and hippies in a tent."
Maybe I will be successful in convincing my wife that the office is the enemy. We need out. Urge me on. I need some time to retire. I have an uneasy and utterly unreasonable feeling that I may not have much time left, thanks I guess to my past life as a smoker and my lifelong habits that contribute to heart problems. I don't want to go without at least a brief period of reckless retirement. I've missed too much already.
4 comments:
John, the problem isn't the office, it's the customers. They complicate the workplace experience in so many ways and render it unpleasant. It's the old 80-20 rule at work: 20% of your customers cause the bulk of your problems.
Print out a revenue by customer report, sorted top-down. Find the top 20% and tell them to take a hike. Tell the rest that you want to simplify the relationship - from now on, they write you checks and don't call you. Ever.
I'd like to say this is my idea, but I think I got it from Tom Peters.
If the wife is younger than you or close to you in age, I can maybe see her point. Retirement is a lovely idea, but her retirement may be longer than yours, if you know what I mean. And nobody wants to live longer than their money lasts.
So you can't just quit. But you can start planning your exit strategy.
Phil, I'm so ready to dump some of my clients and focus on the ones that are more enjoyable and more lucrative...trouble is, there's an inverse relationship! But, maybe a modified version of your (Tom's) idea!
Kathy, my wife is 7 years older than I, so I don't think she's worried that her retirement will be longer. Yeah, we can't just quit, but I MUST work on that exit strategy!
It's not a bad idea to be planning an exit strategy. Why not? It just provides more options. That's what we're doing at the moment - working out the logistics and figuring out how we want to spend the rest of our days.
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