One Man's Journey in The Coffee Industry and Life

Hi everyone, back to the subject at hand. So now my wife and I have two children and it is going ok. My wife is still working, and the kids are being taken care of by family, which was a huge deal and a blessing for us. The only problem is we had only one car and kind of different schedules, but we were pretty happy, busy people, who were trying to work, get ahead, and still try to devote as much time to family as we could. When I think back on it now, I just shake my head. Who am I kidding it was pretty tough, but we we just not selfish people and we devoted ourselves to a common cause. To succeed! So now I am kind of in a panic because we are starting to reach capacity in the manufacturing operation on an 8 hour shift. Hey, don't get me wrong that is a better problem than being at 50% capacity, believe me. You know you quickly learn, that if your business is growing and you apply yourself, and don't go wild increasing overhead, meaning in this case, adding more people, you

One more thing you should know about me. It is truly important. I grew up in a Boston Housing authority project. You know the kind where you have to be just above the poverty level to get in. we were labeled and dreaded. We were labeled loser's by everyone, but that was not the case. most of the people that lived there were your common variety laborers. You know they worked for the local gas company, the Edison, postal worker's and general laborer's. My brother and myself lived in a world where we were labeled and looked down upon. Not for who we were but but where we lived. It was difficult, and left an indelible mark on my life's journey. However, as time went by I realized, everyone puts their pants on the same way and if you have the nerve and the need to succeed you will. I can't tell you all the grizzly details of the shame when our light would get turned off because we didn't have the money to pay the bill. When on Friday, we were told not to answer the d

So, Here I am back again. it is 1992. Although I have to backtrack, just a little bit. We had a beautiful daughter in 1985. She was the world to me and my wife. My wife got pregnant in 1990 and it wasn't right from the get go. She had problems and prematurely delivered a baby boy, on April 6th ,1990 who was 21 weeks old, still born. But still a child and it affected us deeply. I made a promise to her and my family that I would be set, by the time I was forty. I still had 10 years to do that, that proved to be a long time. Although, this was  time a time of complete sadness, I felt it drove me more and more to my purpose. It was as if it put me in another gear. All I wanted was to succeed and no one is going to get in my way. I started going to the gym at 5:30 in the morning, everyday and I would work 12 hour days and do the right thing. I was on a mission, and no one could stop me. Well, my wife got pregnant again and she was immediately listed as high risk. We found that the rig

I just want to give a quick shout out to all those people, who think they can get rich quick. Making money on line is like Dodge City in 1852! You know how people made money in 1852? The same way they are making it now. You know everyone wants you to believe that there is a whole new world out there. WAKE UP people, there isn't! If you have a great idea or an innovative product, then fine. Work on it, bring to market, get some capital, whether it is an angel or a VC fund! Please don't sign up for Click n Profits, or making my next job at home or the many thousands of b.s scams out there! Yeah and that means YOU EMPOWER NETWORK!! Give me a brake!! Oh one more thing EMPOWER NETWORK, call me a pussy to my face. I dare one of you bullshit artists knock on my door and do that. Please do. Oh no wait there just was a knock on my door...... Oh sorry it was just the pizza delivery guy, trying to make an HONEST living. So everyone, please, shake these people off they are no good money hu

Hi Guys, at least I have a few views. Please share this with friends, at least you will probably learn something. So here it is, 1992, I have moved up in the company, but really I am only the one guy they have, that is not 50, let's say. I am a bit worried about this, but I am on the fast track and making, what I thought was good money. I pretty much had my say in every aspect of the business, some of it was probably nonsense, some of it was extremely good. But I just kept thinking, what is the long term plan here? Is there a future or not. Well the future walked through the door in late spring of that year, it was the owner's son, just out of college. I thought, wow, ok at least I know what the plan is. So, the owner, my boss, his father, says to me, "now take him under your wing, I want you to show him the ropes, so let's give him a sales territory and we will go from there". I was totally fine with that, because where I grew up, everyone worked for the same com

So here we are I am 4 years into my life in the coffee industry. Now things are changing rapidly. Our company is not built to be efficient. We lived in a building that had four floors(the ideal plant is one floor), you know the raw materials go in one door and the finished product goes out the other door. This is the time when consumer's were starting to really look at the stuff they were buying also. I started hearing from people, "you know what, I used to drink a pot of coffee a day, but now I am down to one cup, so it better be GOOD". Well that is kind of the start of a revolution. One guy called me up out of the blue and he claimed he had the most revolutionary product, and was determined to change the coffee industry and the way people drank coffee. The first thing I did was chuckle, not because of the premise or his demeanor. It was just I had by then had over 50 people sit in my office and say, "I am going national with this idea, my path is I am going to open

When most people think of manufacturing nowadays, they might think about Pharmaceutical company's, multi-national food company's such as, Procter & Gamble, General Foods, Perdue Farms or Kraft Foods. I think industry in general, is signific behind technology in many cases. I am sure plenty of multi-million or billion dollar company's, have successfully married the two but what about the small to medium size, privately held companies that are the absolute, lifeline to our economy? Well let me share with everyone my life in the coffee industry. I walked into a coffee manufacturer on October 13, 1987. I was 27 years old, coming straight out of the restaurant business, and my head was spinning. I answered an ad in the Boston Globe for a food industry manager, and three days later, after the flu and a detailed personality and psychological test , I was hired. Well holy cow, I loved food, didn't care for the hours being newly married, but now I get the best of both worl

Hello everyone, job seekers, career changers, mid life crisis babies and all the lot of you who are just not in a place you want to be. Well here's the deal. I have never blogged before, and I am not even quite sure what all this business is, but somehow I was drawn to it. I don't know why, maybe a message from above but, surely I was drawn to it. So here we go with my first official blog. It is about being unemployed in Boston, for the first time in umpteen years. So I start to figure out, hey, I better search the job boards on websites. That has to be the way to find a job in 2013, right? So I frantically start signing up to all these websites. Indeed, Career builder, Monster, Headhunter, The Ladders, My Food recruiter, ihobnob and so on and so on, and so on. Let me tell you they are all a joke. I did what I was supposed to do, create an account, post a recent resume, fill out my profile and blah, blah, blah. Well let me tell you something, their software or their job match