Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

–“Dad What’s Your Job?”–

Daughters. 😉
During most of her life, and still now I’d assume as she creeps toward 40, my daughter repeatedly said “I don’t understand what you do for a living?”

I try:
I’m a CEO. I build companies. And then I sell them.

(Puzzled).

Ok. So, your mom works for a very big insurance company. She has a boss. That person has a boss. That person has a boss, and so on until there is no one left but the top boss, the CEO – and that CEO’s only sorta-boss is a board of directors: sort of like a jury, and shareholders, like an even bigger jury. (Me thinking, except in my case I have pretty much all the votes on the jury.) 😉

(She’s still puzzled though I can’t comprehend why)

But what do I do? I buy companies. I put them together. I make a bigger company. I figure out how make them work together better. How to get sales for them. And I train management to run them. And so we can get bigger better customers with bigger budgets, and more interesting and harder problems, and this lets us hire even better and more expensive talented people and salespeople and marketers so now we’re big and secure and much more stable than smaller companies. (And Dad makes makes money by appreciation of stock that he exchanges for money when he sells the company – but I won’t even try to explain that part.)

(Eyes beginning to glaze over)

What kind of companies? I’ve built different kinds of companies. Commercial Art Supplies. Legal Research firms and Consulting Companies. But during your lifetime, I’ve mostly built technology companies. And the big ones were people that design and write software mostly, build, launch, and manage websites, run marketing campaigns, place advertisements things like that. Companies and governments hire us to listen, advise, write, maintain, software, marketing, advertising, and customer relationships for them. But because most of them are very big companies we only do it for parts of the business – mostly. Because we are very good at one thing: selling complicated stuff to consumers and businesses by making it easy to work with the companies and governments. (I’m thinking: and manage wars, or assist in the transport of secret documents, and help spies – but we won’t discuss that right now as you’re a girl, and this would really bother you, and make you think dad is even stranger than you do already.)

“OK, but I still don’t understand.”

I wish it was simple like being a fireman, policeman, doctor, teacher, or even an accountant – but it’s not. Think of it more like there are people who fix the refrigerator, the electricity, and the plumbing in the house. Or people who the stable calls to take care of your horse, like the farrier or the veterinarian, when it’s ill. I build companies that put teams of people together to solve problems with technology instead. (Realistically it’s a lot l like plumbing, but with information instead of water, and it can leak money or information if not done properly creating a heck of a mess, and often includes a lot of the equivalent of eliminating wastewater so to speak.)

“Ok, thanks Dad”.

Meaning she doesn’t grasp it, and doesn’t want to, and it’s time to move on. But her mother raised her properly and she will show good manners and grace at all times. 😉

I’ve built about a dozen companies depending upon how you count them, and bought more than a hundred I think. And, to be honest I’m not sure what I did for a living either other negotiate with people in ways that made money. 😉

Thanks for listening to my catharsis. 😉