Hospitality Monetary Management – Transferring (Half 3)
Anyone who wants to get ahead in the hotel industry is better prepared to move. In this way you can multiply your chances and increase your chance of more personal wealth. This is how it was explained to me many years ago and it is certainly my experience. Moving, on the other hand, is not easy and can put a strain on you and the people in your relationships.
One aspect of moving is the experience you can gain. The work exposure as well as life itself. It is seductive and exhilarating to learn how to survive and excel in different work environments and locations. Once you’ve built this into your system you’ll want more, which means you’ll be moving again.
I’ve moved 11 times in my life and career. When I say moving, I mean packing up everything, selling the flea market and loading the truck. All over North America and I can honestly say that every move has had a silver lining. I can also say that every movement had its challenges and bumps. I’ll take you through each one and try to highlight the good and the less positive. Because I believe that life is about life and at this point we never know what will look like adversity, that may be exactly what drives us on.
For the first part of the story – read here (1981-2000).
For the second part of the story – read here (2000 – 2007).
Working for the EPP meant that I was its numbers man. I gave him everything he needed to analyze, and he and I got along, so to speak. I now had a new goal. I quickly realized that there were many advantages to being your pocket man. People will get back to you if you call from the boss’s office. I was part of his team and we did two budget review tours across North America. These meetings were sometimes tense and action packed. You never knew who was going to be beaten up. I learned so much about our business and human nature. I’ve worked on a lot of interesting projects, including a regularly added feature of the President’s Favorite Projects and even an 11-hour appearance for the CEO to fend off a fatwa. Who says accountants aren’t creative?
The only thing I’m going to say about Corporate or the Puzzle Palace is that I liked it a lot better than I thought. My job at Corporate came to an end and in 2007 I switched back to the world of hotels on our mother ship in Toronto. It was good to be back in a hotel and play a permanent role that wasn’t going to change that much. This was a step in my career that I didn’t have to pack. I just stopped a block down the street to start my new gig. Working as a manager in a hotel has many advantages: the cafeteria, dry cleaning, parking, service and entertainment accounts, to name a few.
My life has settled in quite well in Toronto and we’ve moved from the suburbs to downtown. No more trains to commute to the city – I exchanged the Go-Pass for a new bike and found a new love for cycling. My kids were getting older now, one at university and two more at the door, when one day my phone rang and as the saying goes – one thing led to another – and we moved to San Francisco. Check out the full history of Trading Places here.
If you count, this is nine moves so far. It was, so to speak, the last step I took with the company. San Francisco was a dream come true. I had planned a trip to California almost 30 years earlier that didn’t materialize, now someone or something was paying me. Ain’t life sweet
Leaving family and friends behind in Canada was not easy. I remember asking my daughters what they thought of us moving to San Francisco and they were all very supportive of us. One aspect that made it even more attractive was that Johanne has dual citizenship. After carefully researching her late mother’s birth and school records, she’d received her U.S. passport the year before. It started and for the next three and a half years I was the regional controller for California.
We had so many great adventures there and the work was amazing too. But like many things in life, they come to an end, so to speak. For me that meant the hotel was sold, we had new owners, and let’s say the arranged marriage didn’t go so well for me. One thing led to another and it was time to leave the hotel family after 31 years.
Getting divorced is tough for anyone, but getting divorced after three decades and nine moves is heartbreaking. As devastating as it was, I also knew it was time. It was my time, time for myself, to do a different type of movement. We stayed in the Bay Area for another two and a half years, at our home in Haight Ashbury. Mainly because we had nowhere else to go. I started my coaching business. John’s counseling flourished and my daughter Alyson graduated from college and moved to SF and us. We helped her settle in, she found her first job with this new company called AirBnB. A few months later she moved out alone. Now it was time for Move # 10. SOCAL, we’re coming.
Train number 10 was very different from the last couple of trains, simply because we were alone. No company move this time. We sold our house in SF ($$$$) and found a house to rent in Orange County south of LA in a small town called Corona Del Mar. We wanted to experience Southern California and wanted to stay for a year.
Four years later we loved our SOCAL experience. Our house was a five minute walk from the beach. I lived in shorts all year, rode my mountain bike almost every day, bought a little red British sports car and kept working on my coaching business. I started writing in this house. I also made some good friends. But the one-year experiment had unfortunately turned into four. We’ve been staring at the States for almost 10 years now and we both wanted to retire, but the big question was where we were going …
Come back for the final moving part and the nearly 3,100 mile cross-country adventure.
