Lobster and the Last Day of the Quarter

Today was a super eventful day, both for me at work, and for Lily, Georgia and the kids at home.

For me it was the end of my sales quarter. All of our forecasts dropped dramatically due to the number of deals that stalled because of the market uncertainty created by Covid-19. Many businesses do not want to sign a new contract without knowing better how their business will fair over the next four months. Still though, my team had three important deals on the table, and I was involved with all of them. Two reps were inches away from promoting and they were the two reps that still had deals in play. My day was nuts because aside from plenty of other stuff hitting me, I was on the phone with my reps, my manager and customers until the deals were in. It was an amazing day because all three deals came in. Ryan earned his promotion and so did Max. I couldn’t be happier for them. Max’s promotion was an amazing journey. He missed his promotion by $7,000 in bookings (very small amount) last quarter, and this quarter he was at risk of narrowly missing it again. If he didn’t promote this quarter, is big Q4 would fall off, and he would basically need to start from scratch to try to promote. He’s been with the company two and a half years and has worked very hard, but has had some setbacks and had not promoted as fast as he had hoped. This felt like a must win situation for him. He had a deal that he needed to go through and today, in the morning, he talked to the President of the company who flat out told him, “no” that he wasn’t going to move forward because of how crazy things were with the Covid situation. He thought that all of his leaders were too constrained dealing with Covid to try to implement something new. Max kept talking to him and by the end of the call, he said his Phoenix office has not really been too affected by Covid and maybe they could implement. He said he would think about it. We sent him a targeted e-mail in the middle of the day to sweeten the deal for him, just to make it that much easier for him to sign. By 4:00 he was telling us he would move forward and we were beside ourselves with happiness. Then we sent over the paperwork, and we got an immediate response that we didn’t understand. It seemed like he was irritated or passive aggressively accusing us of misleading him. We replied to the e-mail, inviting him to talk. We called him. We texted him. For nearly two hours there was no response. Max and I were freaking out thinking the deal was lost. Then we finally got him on the phone and learned that he simply missed the last page of the docusign by mistake. He said he’d sign it right away and everything was good. Max and I were freaking out with joy. We couldn’t believe he got the deal and earned his long awaited promotion. Times like that, I LOVE BEING A MANAGER. I had additional work and calls after Max’s deal wrapped up a little before 8:00, and one of my reps had an issue processing his deal that lasted until 9:00 or so. I don’t remember when I finished my day, but it may have been around 9:30. It was a crazy crazy intense and fun day.

Little did I know that Lily and the family were having an equally eventful day around the house. Before I get into that, here is a display of all of the vitamins that Lily has been using for me and her and the kids to try to help us to all be healthy. Thanks for helping our health sweetie!!

OK, so back to the eventfulness of everyone else’s day while I was working. It all started when our friend Sarah, out of the goodness of her heart decided to come and deliver to us a fresh lobster. Notice the social distancing. Yup, we are still in the heart of Covid-19. It was so nice of her. Thank you Sarah!!

I wasn’t there, but Lily reported that the kids were absolutely enthralled. They took turns holding it.

They fed it some apple.

And ultimately, they cooked it.

Here are some videos of the events:

Ammon and the lobster

The lobster is eating apple

Lily cooking the lobster