Last day of our National Sales Meeting. Six hours of presentations and we can call it a wrap and head home tomorrow morning.
That's the view from my hotel window. Not that I've had time to do anything more than glance at it quickly before I run to another meeting, but it surely is pretty.
Happy Monday to you. It's day three of a 10 day work trip, the first part in Philadelphia with 3,000 business professors, the second part in Boca Raton with 1,500 colleagues at our Sales Meeting.
The first part has been wonderful. Retired Guy came with me to visit our daughter. She entertained us in her fabulous new apartment on Saturday night and then she and her dad went to the Tut exhibit on Sunday, while I did booth and author meeting duty (I'm on the bitter bus about working two straight weekends in August, but trying to not kvetch too much about it). Last night we had dinner at Buddakan, an elegantly swanky Asian Fusion restaurant. It's all served family style, so we sampled Lobster egg rolls, ahi tuna pizza (think sushi on a toasted flatbread), corn and crab fritters, and edamami ravioli appetizers. The wine list is excellent and reasonably priced and the food is amazingly good.
I'm off to a day of author meetings, customer schmoozing, and in between, hanging out in the booth, pushing our wares, while trading white lies and inflated statistics with the competitors. We're the talk of the meeting because of the recent sale of the company, so everyone is stopping by to see if we're panicked, off our game, looking to change companies. Since we all seem calm, unfazed and focused, they're not sure what to make of us.
Posting is still lite, as the 'job that pays the mortgage' is taking a HUGE amount of time. In addition to the usual return from vacation bustle, we've got a LOT going on with our recent transition.
The sale of the company was completed on Thursday July 5th (I like to be on vacation during these times--harder to fire me). Our former CEO and Senior VP of Sales are no longer with us. The gentleman who hired me to the company is the new Senior VP of Sales and the new CEO is the CEO who was in place when I joined the company nine years ago (that's all good--and would appear to be good for me).
There's a whole lot of really fun behind the scenes politics that went on with those changes, but in an effort to not get Dooced, I won't talk about that stuff here. For various copyright and trademark reasons, we have no new name. It will take another three weeks to finalize the new company name.
We will be merging two huge divisions into one and there will be redundancies. Worst case scenario, it appears that I'll be employed until at least November. I've told my boss that I will not relocate back to Cincinnati for any reason, and that might cost me a job. We'll just have to see. But I'm ok with the risk, as I'm now a Maine girl. I wake up to views that look like this:
We love our life here and we've decided that job or no job, we're staying.
In the meantime, if anyone wants to hire a middle aged editorial manager living in southern Maine, I'm polishing up the resume: I have managed up to 17 direct reports at a time; I manage budgets of more than $30 million and can create and manage a book P&L that is profitable; I can performance manage personnel with the best of them; I can develop manuscript, plan writing schedules, craft market research and run author planning meetings; I have extensive experience at negotiating contracts and royalty rates and I can terminate book contracts without getting sued.....Readers of this blog know that I'm a horrible proof-reader.
