Country Coach Marketing Memories

...A Few Employee Memories of a Country Coach Marketeer

MIMI. I remember the time I was hiring a Marketing Assistant and had lined up a day of interviews. I got a call from the front desk that I had a candidate in the customer lounge waiting. When I stepped out to the lobby there were three sales employees lurking, watching me for expression. The woman waiting was a dead ringer for the character, Mimi Bobeck of the Drew Carey Show--Her vibrant heavily applied eye shadow, lipstick, and her physical stature. I have to confess thoughts were racing through my mind: “Did one of the sales guys set this up to pull a prank on me?”  “Is this a joke?”….Thankfully professionalism saw me through. I kept my face deadpan, at least I don't think I let the onlookers see my shock, and I met the candidate with a hearty handshake, took her back to my office, and did my darnedest to concentrate on her answers, not on her hair do, eye shadow and attire…I smile widely to myself every time I recall it…Good Times. (We ended up hiring someone else, someone more qualified for the job description, and I like to think I was not biased in any way regarding the rest…)

BUT NOBODY TOLD ME! Years ago, like ten years before the company closed the door, when Bob Lee was at the helm, there was a potentially robust Bonus available to employees, based on attendance, tardies, and of course, company profitability goals. Attendance really docked you as did Tardies. We had an interior design employee who was on my list of employees whom I managed her time and attendance. She lived 40 minutes or so from Junction City…In the winter, it was important to adjust one’s travel to accommodate road conditions when sporadically we did get some icy mornings. One particular December morning we actually had quite icy roads. She was 10 minutes late. She sent a lengthy email stating her grievance and asking the tardy be removed. “BUT NOBODY TOLD ME IT WAS GOING TO BE ICY!”  I remember thinking, "Note to Sherry, add that to my list. Call all employees on my Time & Attendance list the night before whenever the weather is forecast to potentially be icy, or snowy, or ….”  After all Nobody told her it would be icy...Makes me smile to this day to remember it.

I CAN’T WORK UNDER THIS KIND OF STRESS! I once had a marketing assistant who was learning marketing tasks from the ground up. Her first grown up job after high school. She did some data entry of contacts leads, she collated brochures…busy work, but necessary, just not yet very challenging… The I.T. department contacted me and said “Unnamed employee was cruising the web, in social media and her personal email account for large chunks of time.”  She had a desk tucked away in an area with counters for easy collation of materials etc, and as such was self supervised for hours at a time…Turns out that wasn’t the best idea;)  We spoke to her about being more attentive to her work and saving the other activities for her personal time.  She went to lunch a few days later and never came back. I received an EMAIL letter of resignation that afternoon stating this job was too stressful and the work causing her anxiety. I wondered what in the world could possibly have been LESS stressful work—and wished her well as I walked her paperwork over to Personnel...

IT’S TIME TO SCATTER! I worked very hard in my years at Country Coach. I think I led by example, and anyone who signed on for Marketing knew that they too would work hard. We gave a fair day’s work to Country Coach for a fair day’s wages. We shared a building with the Sales Department. Sometimes a couple of my employees would wander over to the front desk area and chit chat with a couple of sales admin support people. There were days it would grow to four or five Country Coach employees extending a chat to 30 minutes or more. I would get a call from the club manager and it would be: “Sherry, you need to do a walk through the customer lounge and past the front desk. They are playing again…” and I would. I’d come down the back hallway, open the door into the customer lounge and before I even made it through the lounge and to the front desk, bodies would be scrambling toward their work areas like bugs in a dark room when someone flips the lights on….  I don’t think I ever SAID a thing. I just appeared and it was sufficient to get my marketing team back to where they were supposed to be.

SHUFFLING THE PENSKE FILE. Back before I was a supervisor of people but instead one of the marketing assistants with my own distinct job description, I remember a coworker who was secretary to the marketing director. She’d go into the boss's office and come out each week with a list of projects, tasks, and things to research. She’d put them in a folder in her desk. She’dthen do the things she felt like doing and she’d leave the rest. I’d see her doing her checkbook balancing, and other personal tasks, and I’d marvel that she sat right outside her supervisor’s door… I asked her how in the world that worked out for her! She said "Oh if she inquires about something, I’ll take it out and work on it. But a lot of these things are just because she’s creative; she has great ideas but she’ll move on to something else and never followup with me on a lot of this. If she does come back and follow up with me, I’ll give her a report and then work on those things"…She said she wasn’t here for the long haul, and you know she retired at 30 to go home and be a full time mom….Probably for the best…but it shocked me that someone would have the bravado to do that!

LIGHT THERAPY. There was the employee who shared an office with me when I was not yet a supervisor, and got "blue" in the rainy season. She brought a light lamp in to our shared space that was as big as a 32" computer monitor, and fired that baby up. Man it was like Hollywood stage lighting in our office. People would stop in the hallway and look in to see what the heck was going on in here! I didn't complain although to say it was distracting is an understatement, and after a few weeks she decided on her own it might be a bit too much. Thankfully.  She also had a stress relief coping method as she was easily stressed out, where by she'd get up from her desk out of the blue and lay out flat on our office floor, close her eyes and meditate. My side had more floor space so there she'd be laid out like a corpse on a slab, meditating right behind my chair. Eventually she'd get up and resume her work. She did it once up in the upper break room that the Management team used. President Jack Courtemanche called Personnel and the safety man appeared with first aid bag to help the passed out employee. Boy did I get an earful when they all realized it was a marketing employee just destressing.... Same person, if things were going well on a design project, she was known to throw back her head and quite literally howl like a coyote at the moon. Loudly. Scared the liver out of me!

But these are the exceptions….by and large the majority were the shining stars any company would be blessed to employ!  Over the course of 18 years, I can not tell you how many outstanding people with unbelievable gifts and work ethics graced the hallways of Country Coach Marketing.  To this day I am amazed I was lucky enough to work alongside them.

Matt Howard is brilliant….he knows a little about everything, and if he didn’t know the answer he came back with it shortly. And employee connected—it was a gift he possessed. He learned your interests, your hobbies, your motivators, and he showed interest in his staff. He showed up at my son’s homecoming as the caravan of returning soldiers from Iraq rolled through Harrisburg. I looked over as I was standing with my family at the curb that Saturday, and there was Matt with little Maddie on his shoulders—showing up, welcoming my son home…It meant the world… Still does. His leadership motto was 'get out of the way and let good employees make him look great.'  So glad to have had him in the Marketing Dept.

Pete Sutton-who wouldn’t let himself off the hook until he surpassed HIS expectations in graphic design…He is the most gifted graphic designer I know.

Julie Otis was the most amazing project manager and people motivator. She got things done! She was also  the biggest cheerleader of me. For some reason she thought I hung the moon and made me look much more gifted than I was!

Opal Hale was the best event planner  and event executor of anyone ever – myself included. I’ve written about Opal before and can’t say enough about her.

Scott McFarland who was tightly wound but a perfectionist as a web guy and marketing guy. When He had something in his mind as being the BEST way to do it, he wouldn’t let go of the idea until it came into fruition. He had a bright soul. He was committed to the best in company branding, consumer events, website development and Point of Purchase tools. But where the rubber met the road, our department did some things the way Sales, Management and the Dealers wanted them done, in spite of our imagined better ideas. If that conflicted with his ideas, Scott would take a brisk walk around the manufacturing buildings. Perhaps to work out how to compromise his design to meld with what Sales wanted. He took a lot of walks. He also left an unforgettable mark in my memory.

I am thankful every day for the gift of working with and supervising the Marketing Team. Those years are among my happiestas we marketed the world's finest company, presented class act customer events, birthed Destinations magazine issues on a quarterly basis, created cutting edge product brochures, user's guides and owner's manuals, managed websites, and more....

Through it all, I will never forget the good and the bad and the 'unique'….

There is NO other company and especially no other department I’d rather have been involved in!