Giving very important speech tomorrow. Wish me well...

Tomorrow we're having a store meeting. Before every store meeting we have a department meeting. I have to give a little talk to my crew--I have 14 people now, and some of them have been Home Depot employees for three whole weeks. (One of them has been a HD employee since Wednesday.)

Here is my problem: I basically run three departments--Lumber, Building Materials and Millwork. We have an official department head, but he does mostly admin things and isn't on the floor much, so I'm the straw boss. And for the next five months, I am responsible for convincing people to buy $350,000 worth of merchandise. Every week. Some of these people hadn't sold anything before they came to work for us. (Which in some ways is good--we get to screw them up the way we want them.)

So the old sarge is going to do a bit of team building tomorrow. I'm going to call it Operation Cinder Block...we're going to take one of our major competitors, Lowe's, and we're going to push them so hard, outsell them so effectively, that they're down in a big mudhole just a flailin' and a strugglin'...and then we're going to throw them a cinder block. (And when it works, we're gonna do the same thing to Wal-Mart next year.)

I'm going to emphasize my five major goals: staying in stock (hard to sell things you're out of) as much as humanly possible; keeping the place clean and orderly (a clean lumber department is a safe one; I'm not looking for white-glove-inspection clean, of course, just no product or empty pallets on the floor); selling the whole project--including upselling whenever appropriate; product expertise; and killing the word "cheap."

I'm going to catch some sleep now; wish me well.

If they did, getting loyalty, hard work and dedication will be a lot easier for you.

I gave the talk. They were motivated. This afternoon I saw them using forklifts in two different aisles, pulling down products and filling holes. (We don't exactly have "shelves." More like huge grates that hold some products; others we just sit on the floor.) That hadn't happened before.

When I left the building at 2:45, they'd managed to sell all of the concrete we had. I'm happy. Unfortunately, our Inventory Management Associate (the person who orders stuff) isn't real happy--she thinks she's going to get her ass chewed at Monday's staff meeting for letting us run out of concrete. The store manager says that won't happen--he knows we had what we thought would be plenty on Saturday morning. I had no idea we were going to sell fifty-six skids of concrete (there are 42 bags of concrete on a skid) and a whole truckload of 4x4s in two days.

I will never say selling three hundred thousand dollars worth of lumber, building materials and millwork in one week will be easy, but my guys will make it possible.

I hate giving talks.

You will.