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My name is Mike J Quinn and I have worked and managed frontline companies for over fifty years, mainly in restaurants, retail, education, and recreation industries. Although these are very different industries, I noticed that when you have a company that invites the public in and does business directly with customers face to face, there are a lot of similarities between businesses as well. These similarities are what make Frontline industries so plentiful and easy to get started in and also gives us the opportunity to try other industries and bring our leadership skills with us.
Aside from doing business directly with customers, most frontline industries :
- Hire inexperienced people from all walks of life.
- Train the workers in a trade they can take with them wherever they go.
- Introduce workers to labor laws
- Offer pathways to promotion
My first management opportunity. I was about 23 years old and working in a self-serv gas station named Terrible Herbst. It was an oil company based out of Nevada. My boss had to quit suddenly, so as his assistant manager, I got a vertical promotion to General Manager overnight. Suddenly my wages almost tripled, as did my responsibilities, and there was no one I could ask questions. The company had only a few locations in California, and they were far apart. I was on my own and I was making stuff up as I went along. One of the things I came up with to reduce shrinkage would even be considered “less than legal” today.
It was 1981 and We sat in a small office in a 24 hr gas station. At that time you had to pay at the window and tell us what pump # and how much, we would input that information into a machine and then you would pump your gas. We also sold cigarettes and cans of our company’s oil.
I had a meeting one day after I noticed a string of shortages at night that were eerily similar to a pack of smokes or two. We (all 4 or 5 of us) thought it was a great idea to kick in $10 each to the cigarette fund (an envelope with your name on it) and I would take the money out of this fund to pay for your shortages each night. This solved our problem, we were just paying it forward instead of after. California might look at it differently today. (It probably did back then, but I was too ignorant to know any better.) This only lasted a few months anyway as most new hires suspiciously didn’t smoke after that. : )
As I look back on my career, working in some of the largest companies in America as well as mom and pop places, I see areas where some better education or insight would have helped me progress a bit faster and earn more money than my career did organically. Reading this book will hopefully take decades off your learning curve.
I could have saved myself a lot of time and energy and legal exposure, IF something like this book were around back then. Unfortunately, all the management books were for manufacturing, corporate offices, board rooms, etc. and had little to do with the kind of leadership I was experiencing day to day. Even the few books some companies would recommend for us to read were either strange and unconvincing, like the Five Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard, Spencer Johnson or The world’s Greatest Salesman, by Og Mandingo. It was brutally proven to me that Frontline management was not being represented in the Self-Help or How-To sections of the library or book store. Even looking around today most management and leadership books on the market today represent the business leaders and former military mostly, but there are a few entrepreneurial leadership trainers out there that have a lot of good things to be used on the frontlines today, after all, we are all just dealing with people, but in different contexts, and I have one to understand that it is the context of the leadership that is often key to success. I will quote from them whenever possible to show you how universal some of these tools I share with you are. You can take a lot of these tools with you wherever you go, so your investment in time will be well worth it.
I was often on my own even back then, but at least there were more good managers I would learn from. Nowadays, there may be one or two well-trained leaders in the entire building. Asking for mentor time is a foregone denial.
If this book had been around earlier I also wouldn’t have had to make just about every mistake known to mankind because I would have known not to do those stupid things before I did them. (read it a few times, it will make sense : )
My first manager’s job was a gas station manager for the Terrible Herbst Oil company. If you ever drove through Nevada during the 70’s and 80’s you would have seen a Terrible Herbst gas station. Although it was based out of Nevada, there were a few stations in California, but they were very spread out. The operation was simple, we only sold gas, oil and cigarettes. I had 2-3 employees besides myself because it was a 24 hour gas station and we were open 7 days a week. I just had to keep it staffed, stocked and clean. Not too much to deal with, but looking back on it, I could have done much better. This station, so far removed from the other locations should have been a red flag, had I even known about flags.
One day, just as quickly and without notice as my boss left, my boss was waiting for me to show up one morning and he paid and fired us all. The business had been sold. So much for the, “Hey Mike, if you get anyone calling and asking for a tour or if the location is for sale, it’s not. . .
Boy was I young.
I soon got a job at Denny’s as a cook. It was there that I learned that if you are trained as a cook, you can very easily do a horizontal promotion and go just about anywhere you want and you will get a job. Everyone needs good cooks. I cooked at Denny’s, but because the horizontal promotion from the Gas station manager to a cook saw a reduction to my income. It was there that I learned that Vertical promotions are usually way more profitable than horizontal ones.
Anyway, I needed more money, so I began cooking at the Peppermill, too. Now I had to cook 8 hours, commute by bus for 2 hours, and then cook for another 8 hours. I know what it’s like to try to provide for a family on an hourly wage. I really wanted to get a nice paying manager job again. Vertical promotions often yield better dividends, so I was hoping to get promoted at Denny’s. They had a great training program, had good benefits and allowed me to only work one job again, so when they offered me the position, I quit cooking at the Peppermill. Now I had to buy a suit and tie, shoes that didn’t have food all over them, a briefcase and I needed a car.
At first I was pretty aimless. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. One day I noticed I had been changing jobs, roommates and girlfriends every six months. I had changed my life completely every six months because I had felt unsatisfied and a new job wouldn’t fix me. A new girlfriend wouldn’t fix me. A new roommate wouldn’t fix me. When I noticed this, it was immediately obvious what the problem was. Everywhere I went, the only consistent variable, was me. I needed to fix me. I needed to IMPROVE me. I needed to quit screwing around and get serious about this thing called life because, frankly, the future was coming at me whether I was ready or not.
Over the years I have studied many different aspects of leadership and have had varying degrees of both successes and failures. Whenever I would feel my progress was slowing, I would pick up a book and bathe myself in a new way of thinking. These books didn’t even need to be management books, which for the most part, were meant for leaders of companies. So most of the time, I read anything that could help me with relationships, because that was the one thing that seems to elude all managers.
One example of this is when I bought the book the Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman. After reading that book I understood WHY some people are motivated or appreciated differently than others, but better still, I knew how to look for someone’s love language, and speak it back to them so they KNOW I am grateful for their efforts that they put out every day. This was not a management book, but If a tool works much more often than it doesn’t, I don’t care where it’s from; it’s going into the toolbox.
Now you don’t have to start from scratch and try to learn all this stuff on your own and take 50 years to do it. Imagine, if you begin with my 50 years of experience, who knows where you’ll end up.
I can imagine a version of this book, written long after I’m gone, filled with frontline management tools that I never even knew existed, because works like these must keep up with the times, for with the internet, social media, youtube. . . we are a changin.
Anyway, I spent about 20 years in the outdoor recreation/education industries. I managed and taught at a sailing school, as well as helped manage two separate marinas. I initially got this job because I was working at fresh Choice and I had established a local community outreach program called “Company Of Week” as well as taken an anemic fundraising tool and turned it into a way to boost sales on days that normally would not be that profitable, if at all and turned them into big draw community functions full of happy parents and kids raising money for their teams or churches or bands, choirs. . . This got so big we went from one or two per month, if any, to Mondays and tuesdays, and selling out for weeks in advance. On top of that I came up with a cute advertising slogan for Fresh Choice. At the time, there were two popular commercials on the air. They were Ford’s “Have you driven a Ford lately” and “Got Milk?” from the Milk advisory board. I combined them both For for Fresh Choice and came up with, “Got Fresh Lately?” insert photo
After all these things, and the fact that we had the best sales numbers as well as the best profitability numbers in the company, out GM got fired, and I still don’t know why, for certain, then I had to witness a parade of industry outsiders with NO restaurant experience tear all the efforts of my programs and throw them into the garbage, and then leave to be replaced by someone else who did the same. Each manager lasted less than a month, and I was overlooked after all my efforts of going above and beyond were for nothing.
I saw an ad in the paper for an office manager for a sailing school. I would LOVE to learn how to sail. Will my management training transfer into this position? Apparently so, and I liked it so much I worked there for 20 years.
I left that job to move closer to home. At the time I was working on the San Francisco Bay and staying on a houseboat 4 nights per week, and then commuting home to stay 3 nights per week. It was fun for several years, and having a houseboat as a vacation home as well as access to sailing instruction and boats whenever I wanted, it made up for in benefits that it lacked in other areas.
I joined Applebee’s after returning home and had a great time. I fixed an ugly and unruly night shift and then transferred closer to where I live and life was great! This was the best crew I had ever worked with and I was loving life, had it not been for a jerk of a GM who didn’t like the fact that I was popular with the crew. This guy punished me for his insecurities and I really didn’t have to take it, and I knew it. So, unfortunately, I had to say goodbye to that crew and go see what all this crazy talk about the “Great Resignation” is.
The last 5 years I worked in the field I worked as n employee. I wanted to see what all the fuss was that I was reading about in the news. Various terms were bandied about: “The Great American resignation.” Ghosting, and others I can’t even remember. It sounded like a horror movie and it wasn’t really happening in the units I was working at. Sure we had a few people who we hired that never showed up and we had our share of lazy people who we always had to clean up after, but other than that, it sounded like Rome was burning and I wanted to see what was going on, so I quit my last management job in 2019 and spent the next 5 years working as an employee at three of the larges corporations in America- Amazon, Walmart, and Costco.
Surely they were doing okay. . .
Well, Amazon, for the most part, was just a warehouse. None of us had to deal with customers during the course of our jobs, so I didn’t last long there. This wasn’t relevant to me, as it wasn’t even a frontline business- the employees don’t interact with customers, but I was pretty curious to see what happens to my order after I hit “Purchase.” About all I saw there were some pretty crazy recruitment policies and i got a 10 hour workout with a half-hour break, four days a week. The benefits were very nice and they started immediately. I got a heck of a workout as a “picker” and I did get to see what happens after you hit “submit order.”
Then I went to work for Walmart. I worked there for over a year and I saw a lot of things that I was reading about in the news like “quiet quitting” and “ghosting” and all the crazy things people were doing because they were not happy with their jobs. Now all the noise was starting to make sense.
Then I worked for Costco. I stayed there for about 3 years and I Made chickens and worked in the Deli for over a year and a half, I worked in the food court, The front end Cashier, cashier assistant, stocker, produce, and yes, I pushed carts for months.
I saw all that I needed to see. While no company is going to be perfect, I have worked for companies that had a good team already in place and I know what that looks and feels like. To be honest, I saw the same dysfunction at Costco that I saw at Walmart. There were a few policy and cultural differences, but basically they were the same.
The good news is they both can be fixed. All it takes are these tools I have picked up over the years, and YOU to use them. Since I know what it’s like to carve out a career from a job that seems like it has no future. I didn’t have any money, I couldn’t go back to school because I had a family and I needed a more stable income to support my family. I had to come up with something. So I decided to go vertical with my career. Most of my life before this I had been doing the horizontal job movement, going from one company to another, doing the same job for the same pay, but for someone different.
Are you serious about doing this “Life” thing? You are at the right place. Welcome.