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Always be someone who doesn't just talk about doing something.... simply do it!!
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<div class="paragraph" style="text-align:center;"><br />In my work life, I've been incredibly blessed. Below are some highlights from a few of the positions, industries & companies..........<br /><br />In 1982, I started my 1st real "adult" job straight out of college as a Sales Engineer for AMP Incorporated, which was based out of Harrisburg, PA. I actually won the job over a 42 year old experienced Industrial Sales Engineer due to being "less expensive to hire." I also remember reminding the entire interviewing panel that I didn't have any "BAD HABITS" to break so I assured them I would ramp up faster, cheaper and BETTER.. They bought it and I delivered everything I promised. I went through 16 weeks of engineering, electrical, electronic, interconnection packaging training & graduated with a 99 average out of the AMP INSTITUTE which was founded by Uncas Whitaker - a graduate of MIT.. That training was broken down into (4) 4 week semesters with testing everyday. If you graded below an "A" for ANY of the semester's you were terminated. I took the serious training & I <font color="#f41c1c">WOW'ed</font> my customers as a seller in the beginning and then through MANY leadership positions that grew into a global scale over a 20 year history. That training was the best I ever experienced and when I hit the field, I was on top of my game .... with everything I needed to succeed & win! We need more training like that these days. That solid foundation of training create opportunities for me to advance through 10+ promotions during my tenure there. Several of my positions were: Sales Engineer, Sr. Sales Engineer, Account Manager, National Account Manager, Global Account Manager, Manager of Industry Marketing, Director of Industry Marketing, New Product Development Manager, Director of New Product Development, Director; Global Appliance Industry Marketing.<br /><br />One of my earliest work accomplishments was the connectorization of the backsplash electrical / electronic components in the domestic home appliance industry during my tenure covering GE Appliance in Louisville, KY. That success, which saved GE over $27 million labor dollars exploded into other GE products, which ultimately led to other manufacturers, then other industries then from domestic to GLOBAL. I led the advanced development team at AMP into the Appliance industry at the same time the Pentium chip was making it's climb so the engineers enjoyed a break from just the computer industry during that time. I made lifelong friends with some of the most intelligent engineering and development thinkers during that time and was extremely happy that my thought leadership at that time was dead ON SPOT. I ended up with PLANET EARTH being my territory.. and unless you work for NASA.... that's a lot of ground (and Air) to cover. MILLIONS of Frequent Flyer Miles were amassed quickly..... but looking back on it now, it sure was a lot of time away from family and kids. <br />Another major focus for me was the Japanese multinational manufacturing movement into the US electronic industry at the time & getting to be a part of the leadership team that embraced that opportunity and turned it into hundreds of millions of dollars of business. I was incredibly fortunate to get first hand <strong><em>executive mentoring</em></strong> from some of the Japanese executives that moved to the United States to birth their businesses here. One in particular asked me to be in and witness his wedding in Hawaii so I was honored. This movement created a lot of change management in AMP - a Pennsylvania Dutch company to the core- that had operations in many countries including Japan.. but never so intertwined that you had to consider all of the business cultures, expectations, language barriers and games being played. It gave me a great opportunity to build out a multicultural business group and focus called the Multinational Account Group (MAG) that was the pilot study that exploded into THE blueprint we used to train and build out international, multicultural and multi-talented leaders and sellers to tackle this expanding electronics world moving to the United States with engineering, manufacturing, marketing and production facilities all over the world. We had to get really good..... very quickly... but we did!<br /><br />I did finally leave AMP, after getting a call for help from a former AMP colleague of mine leading Siemens, within 6 months. Shortly thereafter, <span style="color:rgb(238, 3, 3)">TYCO Electronics acquired AMP. </span><span> I relocated to Peachtree City, GA and began work as Manager; Relay Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. We built a brand new building, relocated about 75 families from Princeton, IN to Peachtree City and started up operations to handle what was happening in the relay world. Nine months into my Siemens tenure, we were alerted by Siemens they were divesting the relay business, which included the Potter & Brumfield, Schrack, and several other major brands. Ten months later... </span><font color="#ee0505">TYCO Electronics acquired the Siemens EC business</font><span> and I was invited <strong><u>back</u></strong> into the old AMP family that was now TYCO. I was offered incredible incentives to come back, was given my old original AMP employee number and seniority back and had my bonus programs gapped. They told me I had ALWAYS done an incredible job, left without burning any bridges.. and hated to see me leave AMP in the first place. I was chosen to LEAD the integration of Siemens EC into the TYCO Electronics organization and relocated over 90 families into North Carolina and Pennsylvania. About 90% of those folks are still there. </span><br /><br /><br />While living in Winston-Salem, NC and having completed the integration of the Siemens EC group into TYCO, I settled into a Director position with our newly created Relay Division and led the sales team to the highest level of sales we had seen in that product line. IT was AWESOME. I had the benefit of experiential wisdom from my prior AMP days as well as the product understanding of Siemens. With my entrepreneurial spirit, a healthy dose of confidence, great customer relationship building skills and good team coaching skills, we set the world on fire and a LOT of money was made. <br /><br />On a cold winter day in North Carolina, I got a call from an executive recruiter I had used to fill about 150 sales, management and marketing positions. He asked me if I was ready to move back closer to home. He knew I had parents getting older, a ton of family back in the Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana area...but even more important, he had a very nice Vice President level job at GROEN- A division of DOVER, that needed a solid leader, with an entrepreneurial spirit that would drive the change management needed to wake up a sleepy brand in the industrial food manufacturing business. I was going to be working under a "<em>renowned</em>" interim turn-around CEO, hired by DOVER to get things turned around quickly. With a nice bump in total compensation, much closer to family and back to the city where all of my kids were born.. It seemed like a no-brainer. <span>My family and I REALLY looked forward to moving back home so we built the house of our dreams including a unique pool that was actually two pools put together in the shape of a large "L." The kids loved it, I loved it and it was great getting into the home with a custom kitchen, custom pool and a Harley Davidson in the garage. The job was extremely fun at first but turned into a very taxing, <em>"close to impossible to deliver</em>" nightmare under the turn-around CEO. I clearly had the skillset to take this job and win with it.. AND DID during my tenure there. Needless to say, I didn't do enough due diligence on the " renowned" turn-around guy, his reputation, the carnage he left behind. I endured through my year and left several great people behind. It's sad, a few weeks after my departure, there was a mass exodus of many people fed up with the interim CEO so DOVER fired him. By that time, too much damage had been done including a very sad break in my family. I never wanted that to happen and didn't feel it HAD to happen...but I was given absolutely no choice and was routed down a road run by attorneys. I've got some very strong feelings about divorce.. with the main one being that the ones hurt the most.. are the ones that don't deserve it........ the KIDS. Needless to say, this was a major life event for me I couldn't control.. so I gained a LOT of experiential wisdom from this and it's made me a better man and leader in many ways.</span><br /><br />The next few years were transitional for me. I had been under more than my fair share of stress with the change management associated with a very large merger & acquisition of Siemens EC into TYCO, the "cleansing" of Groen - as the interim turn-around CEO called it and the loss of my marriage. The last one alone was enough to devastate most guys wire like me. I wanted and needed a break from large corporate life for a while so I could regroup, make the adjustments needed and then get back underway in a positive way. I decided to move forward in a leaner manner, with no direct reports for a while & to just rely back on one of my core strengths which has always been selling and building things. I got my contractors license, my real estate license and starting doing something very well known in the HARDEN family.... construction. <br /><br />Having been born into a commercial / industrial construction family, I grew up being a right hand helper to my dad who built his own company from the ground up. By anyone's standards, he was an incredibly talented, "natural" contractor that had not only the knowledge of construction.. but a very good knack for seeing the much bigger picture of construction and how his part fit into the larger landscape of the total project. I'm talking about a man that based a company out of the small town we grew up in and had crews driving to jobs all over the state of Mississippi 5 days a week. A man that the State of Mississippi honored with more educational contracts that any other single contractor. A man that air-conditioned most of the schools in the state of Mississippi when air-conditioning became the NORM in education. From Mississippi State, to Ole Miss, to the University of Southern Mississippi, Delta State University, Holmes Jr College, Mississippi College, Northwest Mississippi Jr College........ the list goes on & one. I'm talking about a man that had such a CAN-DO / WILL - Do Attitude they should have named him " Let's GO Harden." HaHa. Seriously though.. I'm talking about the most influential earthly man in my life.. My Dad.. As far as I am concerned... It doesn't get any more serious or thankful than that. What a mentor !!! <br /><br />Knowing that I didn't want to go into construction for a living at that point in my life and seeing my parents getting older, with more and more grandchildren, we started talking about them taking time to get to know the grandkids and traveling back and forth between the kids to see soccer games, baseball, football, dancing etc. We were getting to the point of High School for some of the grandkids then college etc. I worked with my mom and dad on the financial aspects of selling the construction business and retiring to enjoy life and helped them through that process.. which I know was bittersweet. My dad's reputation and company history would have made an incredible life for me just as it had done for them and my siblings...but it wasn't in my heart at the time to continue that tradition. I always told my dad they should have had a 4th child (another boy) to take the business on.. but he would laugh and say "no... 3 was plenty to say grace over and raise." I'm sure that somewhere deep down he would have loved for me to take that business on to grow it bigger and better than he had been able to do. I could also see that his health had reached it's peak and he was going through changes that any 70+ year old hard working guys go through. We all knew that he had to be tired even though he would never admit it. You see, he had built this incredible company with a 9th grade education and had more trade knowledge than I could ever learn or hire out.. I didn't have the same heart strings attached and decided that I would let the opportunity go and remember it for the great training ground it was as I grew up.<br /><br />The next major opportunity came very quickly with a call from another recruiter that explained a company called Grainger needed someone in the Memphis area and that my credentials were more than perfect for the opportunity and it had great leadership potential for me. I had been spending more time on my personal life during this same time and had met someone who just happened to live in Memphis so I knew this was a great sign of getting back into rapids of corporate sales, large customers, peers, personal leadership and something that had always been a natural for me, building relationships based on value, opportunity, need and drive. I had taken probably 500 trips to W.W. Grainger with my dad growing up so I knew where it was... what they did and decided to jump on board. It was through the employees at the company that really told me to join. MOST of the employees there had been with W.W. Grainger for decades and looking into the financials it was a very quick YES.. I was elated to now be in Memphis with a multi-billion company I had grown up with while at the same time embarking on the journey of building a "blended-family" with my new eHarmony bride. WOW.. time has flown with that marriage and my time with W.W. Grainger. While many things were changing at the company, with our customers, with our family, there were several things remaining very consistent. Life was getting back on track... Work was very rewarding and meaningful and customers were loving everything we were putting into place in their world to make their facilities and people safer and more productive. It was a winning proposition and blessing all around.<br /><br />The common denominator in all of my positions during my entire career has always been "RESULTS !!! As I said above, one of them was sales leadership responsibility for one of the greatest sales team within our $10 Billion world class company. We were incredibly serious about saving our clients time, money and space. There was no smoke & mirrors.. no tricks.. just honest and sincere effort to help companies sustain their operations in a very safe and profitable fashion so they could become their employees and their own customers...... 1st CHOICE. While this might sound corny.. it's certainly not meant to be. We were incredibly serious about what we could do and for years W.W. Grainger has been on <strong><u><font color="#000099">Fortune's TOP 100 Places to Work</font></u></strong>. Our fiscal leadership was tops with <strong><u><em>decades</em></u></strong> of consistent quarterly earnings increases. We had some great things happening that fostered growth as well as importance to our customers. Our competition... while good, didn't get it!! To this day... I'm pretty sure their still eating W.W. Grainger dust.<br /><br />In late 2014, I decided that I wanted to get back into the technology business after having spent approximately 25 years in it earlier. I knew I needed to do some networking to catch back up but found many of my contacts were very willing to help me get back into that loop. What's very interesting is how much things changed in the 10 years I was at W.W. Grainger. I enjoyed researching various companies as I prepared for interviews etc and ended up with several different opportunities that made the search exciting. One of the opportunities was a VP of Sales position with a very well established 95 year old brand. Their focus there was to build up the fact the company was almost 100 years old & needed to establish a next level sales function for years 100+. Another opportunity came as a VP & GM of a European-based company where I would handle all of the United States, Canada & Mexico. I would be reporting into the President. Another great opportunity but it meant I would need to relocate to Boston so I passed on that one as well. <br /><br />The opportunity I decided to take was with a very unique smaller start-up technology company out of Nashville, Tn. I interviewed with the angel investors, Chairman of the Board, CEO & President etc and just had a blast with the interview & getting to meet them. In the end, they chose me from their list of candidates to take company sales to the next level. I LOVED this job, the company, the investors and what we were going to do for the services industry. I had a great CEO/President partner I reported into. Great investors that trusted what we were doing as a leadership team to not only grow their investment dollars but expand the company into additional markets. We've started off in the HVACR (Heating,Ventilation, Air-Conditioning, Refrigeration) marketplace and saw that it had INCREDIBLE opportunity to help all of the service providers out there..... as well as larger companies that "self-perform" their HVACR Maintenance. This largest issue encountered was the change-management needed to bring "technology" to an aging industry very slow to adopt to change. We made some great strides and tripled the number of customers. We were learning however, this was going to take longer than anyone expected. The board decided to split the CEO/Position and bring in a new president under the CEO. Sad to say.. It was very quick seeing this guy talked a great story to the board...but very quickly... he couldn't deliver. His past history was larger than life and I'd seen his type before so I opened myself up to an executive recruiter and very quickly found myself in a new position in Huntsville, Alabama!<br /><br />​Stay tuned for more! <br /><br /><br /><br /></div>
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