First!

Hello!

This is a new blog, for me, to discuss my career at McDonald's and my life in general.

I'm 26 years old, 27 very soon, have a wonderful florist wife who I've been married to for 4 years, and two kids - one in pre-school the other in 4th grade.

In the past, I've been primarily a salesman, most recently selling debt-collection services for B2B transactions (which I did for nearly 2 years), and directly previously to that, I was a stay-at-home father working weekends doing sales. For a couple years before that, I sold speakers out the back of a van, operating offices in multiple states, helping build others' wealth, and (unfortunately) participating in a "party" lifestyle that youth, money and expensive tastes brings about.

So, for the past couple years, I went to an office every day, and sometimes successfully, sometimes not so successfully, plied my salesmanly skills to hundreds of business owners and what I got in return is the traditional office-worker experience: profit margin of my existence, whether I paid the rent on my cubicle or not, indifferent training from an incredibly mediocre sales manager (shout out to Mr. Greg Herron of Tucson, AZ! You are the master of lacking! - abilities, charisma, personality, strengths, leadership, motivation, and more! You lack all these), and I also learned that business owners are irresponsible with their money and who they give it to.

I got sick of spending hours a day surfing the net while bored and eating snacks from the breakroom, while pretending to be passionate about selling a service that few want to discuss, over the phone none-the-less. Further, I heard "No" and "Fuck off!" more times than I could ever count (even though I have a 30" tall stack of CDs of my recorded phone calls over 9 months, I still couldn't count them all). Not that the job was all bad, just mostly. In my past, my favorite positions had always been face-to-face, high intensity jobs, with high expectations, enormous workloads in a short period of time, and many people to delegate to and train. Also, I like to make people smile. What's wrong with delivering happiness, I say?!

While surfing craiglist, I saw an advertisement for someone looking for McDonald's managers. I thought long and hard about it, about the McDonald's corporation, about my 2 years as a teenager working at McDonald's and how rewarding it was, how McDonald's - believe it or not - is a paragon of corporate responsibility, and how much I'd love to be back with people, face-to-face, in a challenging environment. I also thought about standing my 6'2" 340lbs fat-ass for 8 hours a day or more, running around, doing physical work (after 2 years stuck at a desk and 2 years before that stuck to a couch!), and the social challenges I'd face working for McDonald's.

I set up an interview with the owner, was blown off for the first interview, showed up for a second interview the next day which consisted of perhaps 10 minutes of discussion and a follow-up interview with the Director of Operations for this particular franchisee. The owner struck me as a together guy, a career McDonald's guy (20 years or some such), and I went and researched him a bit and he seemed altogether a good business man (based on what the Internets tell me). So, second interview, with the Director of Operations... But first a digression...

I'm a salesman at heart. I've spent probably 200 hours of the past 10 years in training (not counting the 300+ books I've read) on the topics of reading physical and verbal signs people give off, negotiation tactics, sales tactics, conversation direction and more kvetchy salesman-y topics.

So I show up for the 2nd interview (technically the 3rd), at the mall courtyard, where there is a McDonald's. I meet the Director of Operations, a very tall, very skinny gentleman who, in the first 5 minutes of speaking with him, has not given a single "tell" into how to read him. Basically the conversation is "I'd like to hire you, but you're a bit overqualified, and why the hell do you want to work at McDonald's?" In fact, "Why McDonald's?" was asked about 20 different times.

So, why McDonald's?