In blog 75 I talked about how to be the change driver. In this blog I wanted to talk about how hard work pays off.

So I didn’t call Rob. I decided to finish the year and have the best year possible. We were on a roll, Jack was already past his Pacesetter goal and others were close to it. The department was having one of its best years ever and that made me happy. I still missed Women’s shoes and the team downstairs but there wasn’t any openings anyways.

 One month later…

Out of the blue Rob calls me. “Mikey boy, I’m going to save you”, “I have a Brass Plum Buyer job open downstairs, you interested?”. Without hesitation I said “Yes!”. Brass Plum Shoes was the Junior Shoe Dept. for Nordstrom that was right next to Women’s shoes. Do you need to think about it all? Nope, I’m ready. “Good, I’ll be in tomorrow we can go over the details”, “Out”…he always ends phone conversations like that lol. 

Rob rolls in bright and early and walks me over to Jean Claudes office. “Congratulations young man, you deserve it”, Jean Claude said to me. “Let’s go down to your new department” Rob said with a grin.

As we were going down the escalator Rob said “ I’m not going to lie, you are going to have your work cut out down here”. After Kathleen left, who was the first buyer for the opening it’s been on a downward slide. When we got down there,  Jim congratulated me as did a bunch of the people I used to work with. I was going to be in BP shoes though which was the juniors area. I still knew a few people there.

Stock walk

Rob tosses a legal pad at me, c’mon let’s do a stock walk, you take notes then the next time I’m in we’ll check the progress. We got to the back room, it was a disaster. Sizes depleted, messy. Rob was right, I had my work cut out for me. We spent the whole day going over the inventory and the PO book. He made some great suggestions and I think I was three pages deep on the legal pad.

This should get you started, congrats again, you’ll be great!

Before I left for the new position I wanted to say good bye to my team upstairs. At Nordstrom there wasn’t a waiting period. We had some good chats and I felt good about leaving the team.

There was a sign downstairs when you left the stockroom that said  “Are you ready?”

I think I was…

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” — Henry David Thoreau