Jay County REMC CEO Column for the Electric Consumer

July, 2000

How I'm Spending My Summer Vacation

People are already asking me where I'm going on vacation this year. More specifically, they are asking me what kind of loony motorcycle trip I'll be taking. Usually, I don't write about this until September, but I'm hoping there will be some therapy in getting this off my chest now.

For those of you new to this mini-series, I've been sharing some of my middle-aged-crazies with readers for the past few years, beginning with my childhood dream of living on the back of a motorcycle for several days at a time. The first three years were about time actually spent on a motorcycle, last year the closest I came to a riding adventure was that I saw some bikers in Alaska on an island and wondered how they got there, and why.

While I have tried to avoid life-lessons on these trips, I seem to keep stumbling into them, including some metaphors for the business world. This year the story is a sad one, and perhaps includes the biggest lesson of all.

I've run my vintage 1981 Honda CB-750 pretty hard since I bought it five years ago. I've taken care of it, but every now and then a bike needs some special attention. Things like rings, valves, tubing, tires, wiring (and other parts that I'm just pretending to know anything about) can cost money to keep in running order. So, as the snow went away and the longer days returned, I began tinkering with my motorized friend in anticipation of a great summer. Then something else happened that I should have anticipated as once again I was unsuccessful in preventing my grass from growing. And it grew. And it grew.

Growing grass is not usually a problem, unless your lawn mower blew-up last year and you hired the neighbor to get you through the rest of last season. Now you've got problems!

Once I concluded I needed to face the music and get a new tractor, I searched from Indianapolis to Fort Wayne, and from www.LawnMowers.com to ConsumerReports.org. I could write a book on the things I learned about lawn mowers (way more stuff than I ever wanted to know). My wife would tell you I about drove her crazy as we'd see somebody mowing and I'd blurt out the brand and year of the mower and the relative pros and cons. One day she pointed out that I've changed careers in my life in less time and with far less effort than I was putting in to this. I even helped some other people decide on their new mowers, but I couldn't decide on mine.

I made a lot of new friends at places that sell mowers, but I lost most of them when I finally bought one from John's Small Engine right here in Jay County. John and son will tell you that I also about drove them nuts, but they still took my money!

So what exactly does this have to do with motorcycles, much less business?

As for motorcycles, it means there won't be a biker adventure this year for me because I had to make some hard choices and put my money where I needed it instead of where I wanted it. I did get a quality mower, mostly because my wife insisted I get one that would out-live me so she wouldn't have to put up with the process again. But this thing cost more than THREE TIMES what I paid for my motorcycle five years ago. If I liked mowing better than I liked biking, then I could understand that. I mean, this new toy has twice as many wheels, but can't give me half as much pleasure.

As for business, some of the issues are pretty similar. Figuring out what we NEED to do in serving you, and not just what we WANT to do, is a delicate balance. For example, we're trying to get two to three more years out of our big trucks because we believe that gives you better value, as long as it doesn't interrupt your quality service, and so far it hasn't. Instead of trading our cars and pickups at 60,000 miles the way we used to, we're riding them to 150,000 miles, because the value to you should be worth more than our personal convenience. If the cars start breaking down at 110,000 we'll replace them, but we don't think they will.

So while I'm tooling around my yard dreaming of the open Dakota highways, I'll try to console myself that I did the right thing, and maybe that will get me to next summer's promise of wind in my hair and bugs in my teeth!

Although, I have been communicating with some people on the internet, and we might be able to get a lawnmower ride-in put together in Sturgis this summer, so maybe I'll get that road-trip after all, even if it does take three weeks of round-the-clock mowing to get there and back…