This is the third in my triptych about a few dubious decisions I’ve made in an otherwise great life. After “Drunk Diving” and “Drunk Driving”, I offer A Seriously Sober Decision.
My first job after I graduated from college was selling solar water heaters, door-to-door, from my bike, wearing a suit, in Phoenix in June. That’s not really what I had in mind after spending four years chasing a BS degree in Poli Sci. OK, I didn’t graduate Magna cum laude, and I was at Arizona State, not Yale, but I thought I’d at least get a job someplace that had air conditioning. Jesus. But just as I started practicing my “Would you like fries with that?” delivery, something pretty cool happened. My aunt, whom I hadn’t spoken much with during my four years at school, called me to tell me that she had a cousin who worked for an oil company in California. And that he would be visiting Arizona; she wanted to know if I’d like to meet him. No mention of an interview, let alone a job prospect; she just wanted to see if I wanted to meet him. I told her I’d love to, as long as he didn’t want me to come in a suit or drive.
He turned out to be a good guy. He asked me more questions about my family than anything. He was older and had a much better understanding of our family tree. He gave me a brief description of the company he worked for and what it did. How oil companies worked wasn’t a big topic for a guy who rode a bike and sold solar water heaters, but I listened. He is probably the most intelligent person I’ve ever met, so it wasn’t hard. Thankfully, he picked up the check, said he’d be in touch, and wished me luck. I was perplexed, or it might have been the beer.
Looking for Work in a Booming Economy
It was 1980. It was a time when the country moved from a somewhat meandering version of capitalism to capitalism on steroids. The post-World War II baby boom created new jobs, professions, opportunities, growth, and wealth. But when Ronald Reagan got his hands on the controls, he kicked the American economy into hyperdrive. Personally, I don’t believe in trickle-down economics; the only thing it created was one-percenters. Corporations don’t trickle anything, and certainly not down. They don’t have hearts or souls and won’t be beneficent until there’s a place for it on a P&L. If it isn’t profitable, they can’t do it. Wall Street demands it. That’s what I know today and it colors my world, but as a guy entering the workforce in 1980, I was more concerned with my solvency than the nation’s. I needed a paycheck and a career, in that order.
Funny, that dinner with my aunt’s second cousin turned into a job. He called me two weeks later and asked if I’d like to build gas stations. It was something for which I was utterly unqualified, so of course, I said yes. That’s how it worked back then; your degree and job were rarely connected. Two weeks later, with my Poli Sci degree in my back pocket, I was in Fargo, North Dakota, learning how to construct a “forced-egress fueling facility.” I spent the next two years on the road and in more backwater, small towns than you could imagine. But I was a kid, and it was a blast. In October of 1982, I got called into the main office in California.
California Dreaming
As it turned out, that first job would be my best job. Unfortunately, you don’t know that until you quit the job, the job quits you, or you have a career against which to compare it. But it was also a curse because as hard as I looked, I’d never find another one like it.
Oasis Petroleum was a small independent oil company in Culver City. Adnan and Esam Khashoggi owned it but probably didn’t know. They were billionaires – and that was rare in the eighties. They were also consultants to the Saudi royal family (the source of their billions), cohorts in the Iran Contra affair, principal foreign agents of the US, and founding members of a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations around Africa known as the Safari Club. They were also uncles to the Jamal Khashoggi, the reporter MBS had killed. The Khashoggies were famous in the eighties and infamous a couple of decades later. I was oblivious to any of this, but I should have known something was off when their stretch limo pulled up to the office, and the driver jumped out looking like Oddjob in “Goldfinger”– complete with tophat and Fu Manchu.
But none of that mattered when I showed up for work in California. As soon as I stepped off the elevator, I was in another universe. We occupied the top floor of a pyramid-shaped building above Fox Hills Mall. It was brand-new, with a four-story atrium in the middle. Depending on where your office was in the triangle, you had a view of the ocean, downtown, or the Sepulveda Pass.
Money flowed through the halls like chocolate in Wonka’s factory. The offices looked like a golden OZ, and the employees were like movie stars. Our attorneys were named Clay, Tariq, and Nevada; I came from a place filled with Bobs, Karens, and Jims. I was 24, traveling around the country with my corporate American Express card and making $820 a month. Yep, eight twenty. But the perks were invaluable, and it didn’t matter that they were unbankable.
It should have because President Jimmy Carter had begun deregulating the petroleum industry just before I took the job. Carter opened up the market after the OPEC embargoes and US price controls tripled gas prices in 1979. Suddenly, with the price supports lifted, our little independent oil company had to compete with Exxon, Shell, Mobil, and Arco. That sent revenues into a freefall, and our emerald city went dark quickly. The execs with families, mortgages, and legit skills bailed out early. I stuck around because I could and because they gave me a swanky new title and a few dollars more each month. But the writing was on the wall, and we were bankrupt by 1984; my first and best job was toast. And I never found another one like it.
Reality Checks
I didn’t have to go far to find my next job; a law book publishing company right down the street was looking for a marketing director. I interviewed, got the job, got drunk, got a DUI, and quit drinking all on a Thursday. The following Monday, the first of my new gig, I discovered my primary responsibility was to put lipstick on the Sus scrota domesticus (pig) and sell it to an International publishing conglomerate. I was hired to put myself out of a job.
Since a bunch of attorneys ran the place, the makeover took some work and more time than it should have. Go figure. But I plugged away, hoping I’d be compensated by the current owner and hired by the bigger and better International buyer. We sold the company less than a year later, and I was terminated three days after the deal closed by some guy I’d never even met. He must not have liked the smell of my cologne or how I tied my tie, so he fired me. Only the threat of unlawful termination got me a portion of my promised pay. I was oh-for-two.
The second half of the 1980s in California represented the bust part of the boom-bust cycle, and it was a shitshow. The economy went south, and so did the jobs. My resume began to look like a playlist of the one-hit wonders from the 1970s – each song was worse than the previous; I offer Chevy Van 1973 and Afternoon Delight 1976 as evidence. I went from an international oil company to a global publishing consortium, a local ad agency, and then a defunct golf tourney.
My next job was at a small ad and PR agency in Orange County owned by a guy named George. He was a nice guy who had made a name for himself in the athletic shoe industry a decade before I showed up. I can’t recall which shoe company it was (not Nike), but it was big. Unfortunately, the big client had moved on well before I arrived, and we were purely local. My most memorable account was a local car dealer that we spent weeks putting together a Halloween tent sale at Angel’s Stadium. We pitched him the package; he looked at the graphics, pulled out the insert from his last Orange County Register, handed it to us, and said, “Just put some fucking pumpkins on this and call it good.” That job evaporated after about a year: oh-for-three and counting.
The last stop on my full-time employment train was B PJ Enterprises in 1987. If I can give you a tip, never work for an organization that bills itself as an “Enterprise.” I still don’t know what that word means, but I think you’ll find the word included under the definition of sketchy.
Four Strikes and I’m Out
Despite the name, the gig was great – at the beginning. BPJ were the initials for the brothers that had somehow secured the rights to the Los Angeles Sr. PGA event. The Senior PGA wasn’t big back then but was on its way. Arnold Palmer was playing, Chi Chi Rodriguez played, and Lee Trevino would join the following year. And it didn’t really matter because it was a job where you got to work with national sponsors, celebrities, and the PGA to put on a one-week party. And play golf. It was a great gig. Until I discovered that the BPJ brothers had spent every dime of that year’s sponsorship money on paying off last year’s event. My job was to pull off the tourney without anyone catching on. We were broke, and while the fact wasn’t public when I took the job, it was two days after I arrived. Except it wasn’t a secret, so as the new marketing and PR person, I had a target on my back. I felt like one of those ducks in the County Fair, and everyone had a full clip.
I should have known something was up when they gave me a new set of Pings on my first day (leftover sponsor swag), then told me that we had a membership at Riviera (a remnant from the ’87 event) and I never played a round of golf. The event was a bust. The course was too hard, so the players got mad. Then, the big, fake cardboard check turned out to be nothing but a big, fake cardboard check, and everyone was apoplectic. The day after the tourney ended, the Sr. PGA showed up to cancel the deal; we were done. It was 1989 in Los Angeles, and I was oh-for-fucking-four on the job front.
After eight years of humping it around LA, I was back where I started in 1980: looking for work. The economy was in tatters; I had a Poli Sci degree in my pocket, my resume was a mess, and my prospects were few. Rent was due on my beach-adjacent apartment, my refrigerator looked like King Tut’s tomb, and I had no idea where my next check was coming from. The funny thing was I loved that town then, and I still do today.
This was why, as I sat at the top of Mulholland in my 1980 tennis ball yellow BMW 320i with 265,00 miles, aimed at the BPJ officers in hopes of getting my final check, I decided never to work for anyone but myself again. I wasn’t the sharpest guy in the basin, but I had to be smarter than most of these knuckleheads (Oasis people not included). And since integrity seemed to be the missing component in most of my failures, at least I wouldn’t screw myself, right?
The Boss of Me
But perched on that hill, looking out over the San Fernando Valley in 1989, I decided to start my own company. I felt energized, excited, and free. I could pursue whatever work, business, and clients I wanted. I was a marketer, which, much like the term producer, meant nothing and everything. With less than $900 in my account, I incorporated myself. Over the next four years, I worked with (not for) some of the most bizarre and misguided individuals you can imagine. I had some pretty cool clients, too. Most of them paid on time and in full because my fees were low and I did good work. Excellent work. So, I never went hungry or homeless. And while I was never a regular at Spago’s, I did spend a Happy Hour at The Ivy.
It’s 2024, 35 years after I decided to work for myself. I’ve paid my way into Medicare and Social Security – whew. It’s been a journey, maybe not a hero’s journey, but the road trip of a generally decent guy. Over the years, I’ve worked for fifteen companies, started and ran another seven, and worked with over 150 clients through those. I opened Brand Canyon Co. in 2001 and have been doing that since. I’ve been flush, broke, on the brink of great wealth, and inches from going off the cliff. It’s been a great ride; I’ve always been busy, and I’ve never been bored.
Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda
If I could, would I do it over? Yes. But, I should have done more preparation, planning, and a personal SWOT Analysis. Except all of that would have paralyzed me and I would have chickened out. I’m a jumper, so I jumped. Woulda, coulda, shouldas? I wish I had given a bit more thought to these four things and made sure I was good with them before heading out on my own:
- Mentors – Totally necessary. You need them and should be comfortable with the trades required to accumulate them.
- Self-promotion and marketing—Only the chosen few can sell themselves well. I’m not a politician or a narcissist. Self-promotion is a unique skill. It takes just the right mix of narcissism and humility. As it turned out, I could sell everything and everyone else but me.
- Networking – I’ve always been more lone wolf than capuchin monkey – they love socializing. Connecting is a critical career skill for the self-employed. You need it more than anything else.
- Value – You need to know what you’re worth. For as long as I’ve worked, I’ve charged a fraction of what I’m worth because I had no idea what my work was worth. In hindsight, my work was worth four to five times what I charged. That’s on me. You need to know your value before you can sell yourself.
I love solving puzzles, and that’s what marking has always been to me. It’s an effort to get people to change behavior, and that’s one of the hardest things anyone can do. Change is hard, and being an agent of change is harder still. Understanding someone well enough to know the buttons to push to inspire change is beyond tricky. But it’s what I’ve spent my entire career doing. And I know that as hard as it has been, it would have been much more difficult with a client and a boss looking over my shoulder.
I would do it again because I loved working for myself. My days were my own. Success wasn’t a given, but independence was. There were days I was a great boss and days that I sucked at it. So, while it might not have been done the “right” way, in a hat tip to Mr. Sinatra, I did it my way.
