A Pedagogical Shift

An anonymous comment on my last post reads, "From a typical idealist leftist to a capitalist in a matter of months?!? Where is your conviction!!??!! Say it ain't so, Matt!!!!!! ".

Cheers to your keen eye and quick wit! Now, please allow me to explain...
I met John Olquist in 2007 when I began teaching at Saint Kevins. He organized a mentoring program that encouraged high school students involved in a parish in Sudbury to travel into Dorchester to meet students grades K-8. He worked diligently to set up transportation to and from Uphams Corner and accompanied the mentors twice a week. The mentors always came with enthusiasm toward their work and a respect for the children they were helping. The kids at Saint Kevins loved the volunteeres and they looked forward to the days when they'd come to visit. John would spend his time playing basketball or teaching math. Once summer came, I also found out that John took responsibility of  organizing a summer enrichment program that ran for 5 weeks over the vacation. Again it was a partnership with the community of Sudbury, but was a lot more intensive than the mentor program. He organized field trips, donations, lunches, and gifts for all the underprivileged city kids at the end of the summer. He even opened the doors to his summer home on the Rhode Island coastline to the older children for an overnight trip at the end of the summer. He was an astonishingly positive and generous man that I gained a great respect for while I was working in the Catholic Schools. I actually spent the last 3 summers leading a group and absolutely loved the environment that he created. I am no longer involved in the program but it still runs today.

Now, let's go back a few years. John grew up as a humble city kid in Brooklyn. He came from solid roots and was provided a good education. He went on to get a business degree from Bentley College and worked for the corporate machine for a number of years. He made money, started a family, and eventually grew tired of the corporate world. He decided that he wanted out, and tried his hand at teaching. He spent exactly one year teaching in a public school in Framingham. The experience was enough for him to realize teaching was not for him, and that the politics of working for a school were not much different than the office.He grew a tremendous respect for teaching, but didn't want to rely on it as his career. He opted out, went back to the corporate world, and tasted some good fortune with his endeavors in the stock market. A few years later he started his own financial planning LLC in Sudbury, continued to support his family, and had enough spare time to help out in Dorchester. He realized after working as a public servant that in order to help out, you need to approach it a calculated way. What took him 1 year to understand took me 3. I am far too deep into debt not to spend some time playing a capitalist. If I want to really help the community I grew to love, I first need to take care of myself financially. The three years I spent teaching were a fantastic experience I would never take back, but the stress caused by the work was not worth the small return on such a large investment of time and energy.

So, to sum things up. Yes, I may currently employed as a capitalist, but I am certainly proud of what I'm doing.  I have not lost my ideals, I simply took a more calculated approach. It would be irresponsible not to...

Looking Forward to the Next Step

It seems as if in the flurry of carpet, rugs, Quickbooks, search engine optimization, web design, forming a corporation, developing a payroll, and hiring installers, I have lost track of writing. My last post was on May 6th, and in the meanwhile major moves have transpired in stabilizing my father's business. A one man installation company is now The Carpet Workroom & Reclamation Center, INC. We have 4 full time employees, 2 sub-contractors, and a new store that is home to brand new concept of carpet and rug buying. The speed of this process has been mind blowing, but the skills I have learned will stay with me for as long as I am chasing down a dollar, which will probably be a very long while.

The biggest challenge came to me recently in the form of a sales squall. It dawned on me while I was trying to schedule a week of recent wall-to-wall installations; we were completely overwhelmed with work and entirely understaffed. One of the major reasons  I cut my Costa Rican trip short to work alongside my father in his profession was to help him transition from installer into the less strenuous but more lucrative role of workroom manager. However, as I was scheduling these jobs, it occurred to me I was exploiting his talents the same way an agent would exploit an actor or athlete. This was not the reason I was hired. This situation forced me to take a step back and realize we had plateaued, it was time to hire someone to take over the role of installer. Here, I met two challanges. The first is something every business deals with at one point or another; finding employees who share your enthusiasm and whom you can trust as an extension of your business is extremely difficult. The second has to do with habit. My father has installed carpet for the last 32 years of his life, the vast majority of his existence on this planet. Of course in his mind, and every one else's for that matter, he is the best at what he does. In order to shift roles in his business, he would need to break the 32-year-old habits he had developed, and allow someone else to take over his coveted craft. This is the point we are at now. The transition has not been entirely smoothed out, but it has begun. I firmly believe that once we complete this evolution, we will able to make the next step toward our growth.

The most ironic part of this experience is the path in which I took to get to this point. I spent more than 2 semesters in Fordham's College of Business Administration. I transferred back into its liberal arts program becasuse of an accounting class that gave me more anxiety than what it was worth. I felt then that there would never be a time in my life where the skill of accounting would be needed. I was terribly wrong. I have spent the last month receiving lessons on Quickbooks, a basic accounting software that everyone seems to need help with. In keeping track of credits and debits and following our financial situation, I can finally see the value in such a skill. I only minored in business at Fordham, but the 8 months since starting at the Carpet Workroom, I feel as if I completed what I had started in 2004. I don't know if I can say I belive in fate, but I can certainly laugh at the irony present in the events that got me to where I am now.

Now that we took a moment to lubricate the gears and adjust the machine we have developed, it is time to look at the future. Our website, http://www.thecarpetworkroom.net/ has been launched, and now it is time to optimize its exposure on the Internet. We have barely paid for advertising, opting instead to capitalize on the free press we received from Channel 5, The Boston Globe Magazine, and most recently the Canton Citizen. I think our best bet is to first build our online presence. From there we need to continue building the infrastructure to allow our machine to continue running smoothly; another vehicle, a more pronounced recycling system, and more accounts to add to our inventory and potential order selection are at the top of the list. One thing is for certain, we are on the cusp of something big, and a new set of opportunities is sure to present itself if we continue on this path.