We all could use a good laugh now

Even with things as tough in the world of business as they are right now, smart leaders are working hard, thinking positive, and laughing. That’s right: laughing. This month, I want to share with you some of the funny things I’ve witnessed in business in the last 25 years. I hope you’ll get a chuckle or two from these stories too, and maybe you’ll even learn something in the process. So here goes.

My third year in business, we were running two crews. I oversaw one and my brother, Rich, oversaw the other. One summer afternoon he called me on my $1,500(!) cell phone to tell me the trailer had “come off” the truck he was driving and hit a garage in a very wealthy neighborhood. I rushed to the scene to find my brother, his crew, and a startled homeowner staring at the back end of the trailer jutting out from the middle of the guy’s garage door. “We were just driving along when all of a sudden the trailer passed us on our right,” one of the crew members explained. “We stopped the truck and jumped out to try and stop it, but it was too late – it had already plowed into the garage.” I wasn’t laughing then but I sure am now.

I went to high school with another one of the guys on my crew. Doug was known as a very smart guy – I think he graduated third or fourth in our class, while I finished a distant 153. One day early in the season I went to check in on him at a large condominium complex whose grounds we were hired to maintain, and I couldn’t believe what I saw. Doug was supposed to have been mowing the lawn but instead it looked like he had been thatching it. And he had been at it for more than two hours, so you can imagine how big a mess he had made. Doug had mistakenly put the high-lift blade on upside-down! I politely suggested to him that maybe his time would be better spent reading than mowing.

In 1993 I built a brand-new building for my business. The day we moved in, I had $356 left to my name. I knew that if I was going to make payroll that week, I had to get to work. So I stayed late at the new office to try to make some sales. I took a break and went for a walk to admire my new facility, at which point I walked out the back door and locked myself out. I had no keys to get back in, no keys to drive my truck, and no access to my cell phone which was in the locked truck. So I walked two miles in the rain to a gas station and called my mom, who got out of bed, picked me up, and took me home to get another set of keys. But of course I couldn’t get into my house either because the keys to it were back in my office. I finally succeeded in getting a spare office key from an employee, and now you know the reason I always keep a spare key hidden.

It’s important to laugh. It’s also important to take care of the customer. If you remember to do both, you can and will survive these tough times.