That was the final question I got on my last job interview ages before I started working for myself.
If you could have dinner with any three people who would they be? A question I’d ask each of you this Friday morning.
Now story time, because as I often say here I like to tell stories.
I had already taken the Myers Briggs. An IQ test. Interviewed with four other people for about 10 + hours. Now the owner of the ad agency is asking me this. I say my grandfather. Thomas Edison. Tom Robbins. There is a long pause.
She says there is a III at the end of your name. I assume your grandfather was named Thomas. I am like nope, Tommy. Another long silence.
Then tells me that is one of the more interesting responses she has gotten. Before I could ask why, she said didn’t I realize I just asked you who you’d like to have dinner with. You named three people with basically the same first name as yourself.
You are a little full of yourself aren't you?
Before I could stutter out a response she said I was hired before I walked into her office. A lot of large egos in the place. We are very good at what we do and proud of it. You need that confidence and ego otherwise people will run all over you.
Best seven years of my life. Best job ever. A ton of big personalities and all liberal. I read something today in the Harvard Business Review about new business practices and I was like we were doing that 20+ years ago.
It is with a heavy heart I write this last part, I bankrupted the company. Well I didn’t really and Karen, that was the owner I mentioned above, and I have had long conversations about it. We were a high-tech ad agency in Northern Virginia. Our clients were HP, AT&T, Oracle, EDS.
We laughed at the dot coms.
Well all but one, my client. A client that defaulted on $2.7M in ads that ran in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Now of course I did billing, but it wasn’t my job to collect said bills. In the I can’t make this up category, our CFO was lead out of the office in handcuffs as our office shut down.
See Karen paid that bill and our company was no more. And somehow our CFO, I guess didn’t go through the interview process I did, because when she looked into him and why he had fudged the books and put us in this hole, we found out he was a wanted felon from NC.
Years later I might still want to have dinner with my grandfather, Thomas Edison, and Tom Robbins.