Written by: Wayne on 05 May 2011
I’m 57 years old, and not a single minute I spent at the helm of Pubco in the past 7 years has given me some kind of regret or another. Not that I am very prone to regret – I’m more of an onward-and-upward guy – but then again it would have been quite natural to do just that at times, considering the risk I took at the inception of Pubco. When I think of it… I do not play poker or bet on horses, but I have to say I felt a bit like some gentleman at the Kentucky Derby putting money on Wildcard Buster at 30:1.
Prior to Pubco, I spent an inordinate amount of time travelling the US mostly, from hub to hub and on every red eye there is. I spent most of my adult life representing industrial chemical corporations. It’s in hotel lobbies and restaurants as well as at symposiums and trade shows that I have honed that particular skill called by some «selling». What is «selling» really, but the «art» of knowing your counterpart well enough that his/her needs become transparent to you: meeting and getting to know people is what I really like in life.
There was a point in my professional life when the strain of being everywhere but where I was began to take its toll, ever so slightly. I enjoyed the relative freedom of the road (musicians, circus roadies and business reps share that in some ways), but when Boston starts to look like LA which seems to be a suburb of Secaucus, New Jersey… In the mean time, my company was acquired and restructured in a way that did not leave much space for creative minds: the corporate structure started to be more and more of a constraint than a support structure for its people, as it should be I believe.
I left at 50. This was the best decision I ever made. More on that later.
