Being kind to others often pays off
Monday, January 3, 2022
It's certainly been a long time since my last entry here. This kind
of entries tend to be boring: you know, life always finds a way to
get in the way yada yada...
Let me instead tell you a story about Ramon instead. Trust me, it
will come to a full circle in the end.
So let me tell you a bit about Ramon. We've known each other for a
long time now. We've exchanged business roles often and it all has
always worked fine between us.
I met Ramon when I got a job as a network engineer at a big, but
family owned company. They had Cisco Call Manager 4.5 (5+ years
EOLed by then) as their IP PBX platform. Despite never having
touched anything VoIP related before, that PBX became one of my
responsibilities.
At the time Ramon worked for the company providing Call Manager
services to us, a Cisco Partner. A couple weeks into the job, here
comes Ramon, asking for a meeting. He had been directed to me.
As it turns out, there had been an issue with some invoices not being
paid because of some disagreement on which party was guilty of a
certain security issue many months prior.
I listened to his depiction of the situation, told him that it was
news to me, and told him I were going to check the facts myself. I
was crystal clear in that I was new at the company and I had
absolutely zero leverage there.
After some investigation I found that what had actually happened was
that the provider set the PBX correctly, that one of our technicians
had reconfigured one of the gateways upon request by his local branch
manager. Said manager wanted call to his daughter, studying abroad,
form home, all on the company phone bill.
Of course, someone found the open phone relay, connected from some
shady phone booth company, and generated a 60k+ EUR phone bill for
the month.
Manager and technician had been fired in the spot but Ramon's
company had been blamed all the same. After some negotiation, they
were forced to agree to shoulder half of the bill, under threat of
payment blocking for some other long-standing beefy invoices.
Now, more than 6 months after the settlement, said invoices remained
still unpaid.
So I called Ramon back, told him I'd do what I could to solve the
issue. I distinctly remember him being somewhat shocked someone
finally at least tried to act on the issue.
In the end, solving this wasn't difficult at all. Some email request
had gone unanswered along the payment approval workflow. Tracking
who to call, talking to them, and getting the process rolling again
was a matter of half an hour. A week later all payments had gone
through.
A couple years latter my company was acquired by a bigger one and
the department I was in was of course made redundant. I used my new
unified communications skills to start a software company with one
of my co-workers.
While it didn't work all that well (my busyness partner views and
my own were simply too different), we spent 6 years producing some
fine UC software products: advanced call reporting, call center
recording, automatic call distribution based on ERP/CRM defined
policies, etc.
Guess who became our absolute number one customer? Of course it was
Ramon. Who else would have trusted a just incorporated company, by
two just laid off guys, with their own customers' busyness? Well,
Ramon knew he could count on me to deliver on what was agreed. That
turned out to be more important than any huge resource pool, or
liability insurance for that matter.
As said, our software company didn't last and it gave way to quite a
rough patch in my career. There were some highs as when I spent 4
years as an international IT manager, traveling around South and
Central America, Middle East, and East Europe.
But there're lots of what I call inhuman companies out there. You
know: you're a number in some spreadsheet and you're welcomed while
that particular cell remains black. The second it becomes red,
you're screwed off. No matter what, no matter what your actual
influence on that figure might be.
On the other hand, being an engineer by vocation begins to be
somewhat difficult once you're 50k+ years old. One begins to look
back and wonder if rejecting all those opportunities to jump to a
managerial position that used to come time ago was such a good idea.
In short, there's been a lot of job changes and unemployment periods
for me in recent years. In the meantime, Ramon left his job and
started his own company, which is another Cisco Partner itself.
A year and a half ago, Ramon called me and asked why hadn't I
approached him about working with him. He'd seen me going through
it all, never willing to put me in an uncomfortable position by
offering maybe unwanted help. Now he was rephrasing the issue: he
needed me to help jump start his company.
So I've been working hard to launch our security portfolio, our
solutions and our technical team. I must say it's been a success:
revenue more than doubled in this period, and it continues growing
month after month. Our performance has been noticed by Cisco itself,
and we're regularly directed to by them in specially difficult cases
[fn_1].
At any opportunity, Ramon has been the best of employers; not only
to me, but to the whole team. If you've been living on planet Earth
the last couple years, with the pandemic and China acting up, you
now that's a feat in itself.
So here you have it: Ramon has been my provider, I've been his, and
now he's my boss. All that time we've remained friends and never
our respective bussyness roles have had an impact on our frienship.
What's next? Remember our software company? Well, in the next few
weeks I'll be legally free to do as I please with that company's IP
(so will be my former partner). Ramon ann I have been discussing how
to incorporate it in his company, what its valuation as capital is
gonna be. It's been a hones negotiation all the way, how could be
other way with Ramon.
So, remember kids: being kind and honest to others always pais off.
Often it does in strange ways, or after a long time.
And what if it doesn't in every instance? It's not as if you had a
limited supply of kindness and honesty you can't afford to waste!
Foot notes
----------
[fn_1] Remember I promised to come full circle? Well this is why I
haven phlogged anything in such a long time. There was no
time for anything else if I wanted to spend at least some
with my family.
