Interview Story - Overcame a Challenge

When I was a Business Development Director at FHC, they assigned me an account they had been serving for thirty years but were never able to grow the business. The account hovered at around $30,000 per year for a Fortune 500 company.

They had sold the client the same few items for thirty years at the store level with zero recognition at the corporate level. In fact, this way of doing business was working against them in terms of getting respect and opportunities from corporate.

After two years of meeting with people at all levels of the account, I earned an opportunity to prove myself with corporate. The project involved making displays for various merchandising projects and coordinating the rollout.

To implement the project, we needed information on their store locations and the layouts where we would place these displays. With a company as large as this one is, the data for placement and availability of slots came in multiple spreadsheets, with nearly every spreadsheet organized differently. In addition, some store addresses were missing, data for closed stores were still included, and there were ten different flights to transport these items, with requirements for delivery two days before execution.

It was “not my job” to figure out how to put this in order by any stretch, but if I did not do it the program would take weeks more to execute. I spent a week organizing data, only to get everything sent anew requiring me to start over. With a lot of research and pivot tables to clean and organize data, I was able to execute the program without a hitch.

I then handled the (almost) daily requests for new adds to the store list within hours of the request and produced weekly execution reports to all the stakeholders. While there were people in my firm that might have been able to handle some of the daily tasks I took on, the program was too visible at the client corporate level for me to have them think I was not personally overseeing its success. It was personally and professionally important to people at that corporation, and I needed to be sure they knew that putting their success in my hands was well-placed.

The program was such a success, it resulted in another rollout of displays and an expansion of the program. As a result, the client entrusted my company with several million-dollar projects and there is the growth potential for many years to come.