Ok, so today is Saturday and it is the second day of my blog. I had everything going really well on Friday. Hit the phones early, talked to one of my larger clients. The SVP
of HR told me that they had 35 open positions in HQ and he wants to meet me for an in person visit to discuss particulars. Pretty good start to the day. Talk with a couple of my guys in the field about peeps that they are running down, things are just moving along as they should and we will have some more folks to present come Monday.
Now I take time out to go through my email, check the website stats for CEC Search, put together a new page or two and add some fresh content. In my email is a story about making your site ready for RSS and how RSS is going to change the way that we use the web. The story makes sense to me. I’ve already got five RSS feeds into my site presenting news from around the globe, so I have some familiarity with what you can do with it. One of the steps to implementing the RSS to good advantage, says the article, is set up a personal blog. Well, I don’t know too much about blogging except that everybody and their brother, especially the technorati are doing it….
So that’s where this blog starts, I do some research, figure out the tech part of hosting it on my site; get some fresh links set up in the template; add the user, password and paths for FTP upload. I get all that set up and tested, I check the template to make sure it looks OK, I’m about ready to make my first post…. and the phone rings.
It’s Chad, one of my buddies whom I worked with at MRI (he moved to Dallas when his wife got transferred) whom I haven’t seen in a year or more. Chad says “Hey, what are you doing at 2:30?” and I say “I don’t know, why?” He says “Well, I’m in Atlanta and we need a fourth, we’re playing at Bear’s Best.” I say “I’ll be there at 1:30.” (Have to warm up, you know.) So everyone else is late, in fact we tee off with three and our fourth gets there and has to tee off with the rest of us lining up our puts on the first green. The weather was beautiful, temp was in the 70’s, greens were a little bumpy from a big tournament that finished just before we got out. But all in all the golfing was lots of fun. Since I hadn’t really been playing all that much (just two rounds since Memorial Day) I didn’t expect to score well, and I didn’t disappoint myself. OK so I lost $16, big deal. Got a couple of free beers in the clubhouse before we left for dinner. Greg (a long time golfing buddy of Chad’s that Chad had known from when they both lived in Kentucky) had a neighbor that was having a 40th birthday party at a Mexican restaurant called Monterey’s so we all headed over there for dinner. Unexpectedly, Greg picked up dinner for our foursome. Nice gesture.
Now Chad is trying to figure out what he is going to do for entertainment for the evening. Guy (the fourth in our group, also a long time golfing buddy of Chad’s) suggests going to the lake. But Chad wants to play cards, and gets Greg to set up a game at Kenny’s house (Kenny is the birthday boy). So we drive back to Greg’s house, Greg gets his kids to bed, we spend a few minutes talking about the projects that Greg has going on at the house, then head over to Kenny’s for some poker. We start off with a six man tournament style no-limit Hold’em game, $50 buy in. Blinds start at $1, $2 and move up on every knock out. Did pretty well, couple of made straights later, I have an extra $250. Then they start playing all kinds of multi-round, bet inducing whacked out games…. You are probably familiar with the concept, teach the knew guy a game that he has never played before and take all your money back. Well, two full houses, a busted straight flush, and several bluffs later…. It was getting near 12:30 and Julie was home by herself so I had let them know that after the next Hold’em tourney, I would be cashing out. I gave them their $50 back in the Hold’em game, but cashed out with $510… not too bad for a rookie.
So why am I telling you all this? Well you see it’s just that you have probably heard that recruiters don’t do anything but drink, play golf, and deposit commission checks twice per week…. and while that isn’t really how it is, all the time…. sometimes it is.
-author: Carl Chapman. Carl is the founder of CEC Search – Executive Restaurant Recruiters. He has 20+ years of restaurant industry experience, spent 5 awarding winning years as an executive recruiter with a top 25 MRI franchise office. Carl graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1980.