Fred Smith -- Becoming a Verb
Why is it that everybody feels whenever they get laid off, fired, separated, that it’s a bad thing? I was a difference-making officer with the KFC corporation. Great job, great home, new family…Top of the World, right? Then we were acquired by a larger corporation, and they brought their own executives with them when they took over. I was out.
Fired.
I immediately clicked into the defensive, self-pitying, “poor me” mode…sure that a return to New York would save me. But my wife was having none of that. She had just presented me with my first-born child, and was firm for staying put. How’s that for pressure? Poor me.
About six to eight weeks into my primetime pity party, the phone rang. It was a call from a guy I’d never heard of.
“Good Morning, Frank. My name is Fred Smith. I live here in Memphis and I’m thinking about putting together a new corporation. I read about your situation recently in Business Week Magazine and I want to talk to you about coming to work for me. Would you mind coming down here for a chat?”
I summoned my absolute, best whine-free anchorman broadcasting voice and said, “Heck, no.” Let’s face it, when you’ve been unemployed for as long as I had been at that point, you’ll pretty much go anywhere.
So I met with this Fred fella. He explained to me what he wanted to do -- drawing graphs and conceptual diagrams on a flimsy table napkin over lunch. A dot in the middle with lines branching out from a single, central point…illustrating the concept of the “Hub & Spoke” distribution system.
After the overview, I gathered my thoughts and finally said, “OK, Fred. Let me get this straight…You want to pick up small packages…tiny packages of 50 pounds or less and bring them to Memphis in the middle of the night?
“Yup.”
“That’s what I thought you said.
Silence.
“And then you want to sort them and launch them before dawn the next day?
“That’s correct.”
“Um Hmmm. Fred, that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”
He looked at me and he said… “Any dumber than selling chicken in a cardboard box?”
He kinda had me there. I realized that this guy, similar to the guy I used to work for, was not a guy who was going to take “No” for an answer. That being said, we talked about it, some more. Then a little more.
I joined up.
Not to suggest that we had anything even remotely resembling a business at that point. Wasn’t even a corporation…but it didn’t seem to matter a whole hell of a lot. We embarked on a journey together.
The journey brought that company from scribbled dreams on a wet napkin to a global presence… from Federal Who to FedEx
From just another name to a verb.
People at that other outfit…you know, “Big Brown” get noticeably upset when customers call up and say “Send over a driver…we want to FedEx something.”
Understandable.
It’s called vision. Fred Smith had one. First night of operation back in 1973, we had 30 employees. Today there are over 300,000 and they are fiercely loyal, productive, supportive of Fred Smith’s FedEx vision.
True story. But it doesn’t matter unless you ask yourself the question…
What’s your vision?
Think of all the people that have achieved their dream no matter how “out there” it seemed at the time. People like Colonel Harlan Sanders, Sam Walton, Bill Gates. The list is a long one. What did each of these individuals have that made their out-of-the-box ideas become household words? Vision.
No whining, now. We’re not talking about the Hubbell Telescope or ending world hunger or manning the mission to Mars here. We’re talking about that thing inside of you that needs to be pursued, explored, let loose. What is your “thing”?
What do you feel passionate about? If you don’t have passion for what you’re doing right now, today, you need to be doing something else. You’ve heard the phrase, “If you ain’t the lead dog, the view never changes.” What’s your lead play?
Getting fired from or quitting a job that doesn’t fire your passion is not the end…it’s the beginning -- the beginning of your journey to success. Define your vision, then get out there and grow something grand.