A little rain and back to beautiful weather

 

 

You can see how my day started on Friday of this past week. A little background. I had mentioned to Darla that I'd love an O'Henry bar one night. They still make them, but they are not in heavy distribution and you often see them at dollar stores and aggregators. She put it in the back of her mind and when she ran across a Big Hunk bar she bought me one. Big Hunks, a white nougat candy confection and dental appliances do not play well together and I took one bite of my Big Hunk and my front crown that I've had for 19 years was ripped from the post and left in the bar. I called my dentist on Friday at 8 AM and I have a new younger dentist that took over the practice a couple of months ago and he is trying to pay for his investment so works on Fridays. My prior dentist took every Friday off and played golf. Thankfully they were able to get me in right away and I had my post cleaned and the crown reattached by 10:30 and was able to make my lunch marketing call in El Dorado Hills. I call this picture my NHL shot. I was born in Canada and have no use for hockey, which to me is soccer on ice and just as boring.

 

I've also included pictures from our trip to Marysville last weekend and from Darla's Thursday Silpada party at my office. Most of the ladies you see in the pictures are my staff members, except for Gail's mother-in-law, who was one of the big buyers at the event. It was a $1000 party, so well worth Darla's time.

 

We did have some rain roll in this week, which helped to drop the rest of the leaves from the grove in the park across the street. I did my last leave cleanup of the season yesterday and feel good to be done with that. We had two days of rain and three days of heavy wind that helped to dislodge the remaining leaves. It did leave a mess in the pool that I worked on today. I got most of the leaves up and out, but there are some small leaves and branches left scattered on the bottom of the pool. The sweep should clean that up, but I got a call from our next door neighbor this week and the sweep had got caught on one of the swim outs last week and was shooting water into their yard. I had taken the sweep out as it was getting clogged by the heavy inundation of leaves. I put it back in after cleaning out the pool today and hope that it doesn't cause issues again. The neighbors like to sit out in their backyard and smoke cancer sticks and I actually could have been accused of setting up the water works. I didn't. Really.

 

I set up an away golf trip this weekend to Auburn Valley Country Club up in Auburn. Boyd, Neil and Andy joined me and like clockwork, the winds died overnight and their was but a light breeze blowing as we played. Auburn Valley has pretty hard surfaced greens and pride themselves on the speed of their greens and they were running about 13 on the stimp meter. I had a birdie on number two after almost driving the 295 yard hole, but struggled as we all did on the lightning fast greens and shot 43 on the front nine. I birdied the final hole, a par five for a 42 on the back and an 85 overall. Boyd shot 80 and both Andy and Neil were in the 90's Neil had a nice 43 on the front, but struggled a bit on the back nine. It was a fun day and always good to get together with the guys.

 

We have some work to do in the last three days to keep our streak alive of 10 straight months beating our budget. I am pretty even with last year's numbers. Pete is in Mexico this week with his family and I'm holding his staff responsible for keeping his numbers up. Matt was off for three weeks in October and is paying for it on his numbers this month. It will be close and I'll tell the staff that they can go home on Wednesday as soon as we hit our number. It will provide some incentive.

 

Darla and I went out to an event at the Dream Theater in Roseville on Friday night. It was an evening of skits and music all based on the songs of Lennon and McCartney of the Beatles. The Dream Theater is a music theater for developmentally delayed or handicapped people. There were some really poor performances and three blind men that were incredibly talented and I really enjoyed their performances. All of the staff and many of the students knew Darla from her days at Alta and it was old home week for her. It was a honey-do for me.

 

Next weekend will be our final tournament of the year. It is the Eclectic Final and the last tournament of the year long Eclectic Event. We have 53 players that I have tracked their best scores of the year for each of these players. Our best score is by a 1 handicap player who has a gross score of 57. I have a 64 and still have a bogey on number 18, so I have 9 birdies, eight pars and a bogey. It has been a great year and we will celebrate at our Christmas party on December 7th. December 6th will be our last board meeting of the year, with both the outgoing board members and incoming board members meeting together. They are having a board breakfast at 7:30 followed by golf at Timber Creek afterward. I'm taking the day off work that day to attend.

 

Well, that's it for this week. only a couple of weeks before we are off to Mexico. I look forward to spending time with dad and Shirley and Neil and Lilly. Looking forward to the food, the golf, the Happy Hours at dad and Shirley's condo and some sun and fun. I hope all are well and ready for thanksgiving. Be well. Ciao.  

Great weather in Nor Cal

We are definitely blessed in California and when I'm out golfing on November 16th in shorts and a golf shirt, I realize that I really wouldn't want to live anywhere else. The weather was close to 68 degrees on Saturday and we haven't seen rain since September. Luckily, that will change this week as a storm system finally moves in on Tuesday and we'll have two days of rain. The system will be out of here by Thursday and the forecast is for 70 degrees and sunshine by Saturday when I have a 7:30 tee time here in Roseville.

 

It has been a good weekend. We got to visit with Samantha and Jennifer last night and we got a few screen grabs of our conversation. One is of Samantha acting like she has a loose tooth (it is a piece of popcorn). Also, she is blowing us a kissing in one of them. Jennifer and Sam had gone to a climbing gym on Saturday. Check out the video right to the end and you'll see Sam drop back to the ground and point at Jennifer and say "Your Turn!" Cute. They are doing great. Jennifer has started her new job and is enjoying it, but misses working as a Construction manager. She hopes to get moved to that position in the near future. I'm not sure what exactly she is doing now, but it is more of a administrative role and she would like to be more in control of the work sites. The money is good and she did get a permanent position in Las Vegas. Samantha is thrilled and was really enjoying having a movie night with her Mommy on Saturday.

David got tickets to the Kings nationally televised game on Friday night against Detroit and invited me to join him. It turns out the seats were the corporate seats for the Managers at his firm and we were four rows from the floor. You can see how close we were with the picture of the opening tap meet and greet by the players. I stopped and picked up a couple of bags of trail mix for us and picked him up and we were off to the game. He even had parking passes and we were able to park up close to the entrance. It was a nice night. I took the picture of us above at arm's length.

Saturday, I played in the last Diamond Tournament of the year. These are the tournaments that are put on by the pro shop at Diamond. They are sponsored by one of their vendors and this one was sponsored by Nike. I got to play with Neil, Andy and Paul. For some reason, I have good rounds when I play with Paul. I had my hole in one two weeks ago with him in the group. He shot a really special 75 and I shot 40+39=79. It could have been better (couldn't it always?) as I was four over after 16 holes before finishing with a bogey/double-bogey on the last two holes. How did I do that? I knocked in a 12 foot putt for double on 18. I took first in my flight with a net 66 and Paul took first in the first flight with a net 65. it was fun to have both of us play well on the same day. Neil shot an 87 for net 70 and Andy struggled a little with an 88, net 75.

Saturday night, David joined Darla and I at church and then we went out to dinner at Cha Chas. We had a nice visit and a great dinner and all of us enjoyed the sermon at church. Coincidentally, we are doing a sermon series on the life of King David.

Today, I slept in and Darla went back to church because she missed about 45 minutes of the service yesterday as she was late coming back from an event in Folsom. She was supposed to meet me back at the house at 10 o'clock, but ran into a first time attender at church and showed her around and introduced her to Pastor Rick. We had a very light breakfast (toast) and met Darla's parents for lunch in Marysville at 1 o'clock. We had a great lunch and a good visit. It was Ear turn to pay so the food might have tasted just a bit better.

Darla returned from Dallas on Wednesday and had a great trip, visiting with Diane and Bill and also having lunch with Randy, Cake and Chris. The party was a humdinger and came in at close to $3,000 in sales, so I guess, all told, the trip was worth it. Darla had a good chance to talk to Diane and commiserate about Jennifer and Samantha.

Work continues to go well and I am in the process of bleeding off all of my agents to the other producers in the office. With my new title as Managing Director, I want to be able to work more closely with my new employees, auditing their files, checking their inspections, going on marketing calls with them and directing our growth and managing our profits. I have an employee in Home Office this past week and for the next week as well. She is in the latest training class and I'll have the first three quarters of 2014 to prepare her to move into production. As my office grows I need to be front and center with my younger and newest employees.

As I mentioned last week, Darla was featured in her company newsletter this month, a publication that goes out to over 35,000 employees and representatives. Here is the link to the article. She is on page 7 & 8: http://silpada.https.internapcdn.net/silpada_vitalstream_com/Arrowhead/US/onov876/Arrowhead_Nov_US/index.html#/1/

Well, that is it for this week. I hope all is well with each of you. Darryl will not join us in Mexico, which is a bummer, but I understand. Now, I have to work on Randy. Ciao.


 

Bachelor Again

Some pictures from Jennifer. She had promised me some pictures and I texted her today and she came through for me. I think Samantha is absolutely loving having her Mommy back home in Las Vegas.

 

It is Veteran's Day today and I tip my cap to Jennifer and all of the other soldiers current and past who have given their all for this country. Jennifer finished her career in the military pretty disillusioned with our mission in Iraq and Afghanistan but her experience also prepared her for the great job that she has now. Her prior company had agreed to let her live in Las Vegas, but her work sites were all in Northern California. It wasn't going to be a long term answer for her and she has since found a new job that she started on Monday with a Las Vegas based company that does business with Lucent. I can't drive around anywhere without noticing the rash of microwave antenna sites that are literally everywhere. You don't really notice them generally, but after Jennifer pointed them out to me, it is like a new car, you see them everywhere. I am very happy for her.

 

Darla is in Dallas as I write this visiting my ex wife and her husband. Diane is having a Silpada party for Darla tomorrow night and Diane's parties are pretty legendary. I think she has a lot of trophy wife friends, who are able to buy the jewelry indiscriminately. Darla is also visiting with Randy and Cake tomorrow. Randy and Cake are both driving into the city from their rural home and will have lunch with Darla tomorrow. I think Cake and Darla will spend most of the day together tomorrow and have a nice visit while Randy is working. Cake was nice enough to get a substitute in order to visit with Darla. I appreciate the kindness to my wife from my family. Thanks, guys.

 

I have been busy transitioning out of production in my office and taking the underwriters out to visit my agents and meet and interact with them. I have been loathe to give up production, because it is the lifeblood of my office. The problem is that I am so busy with employee issues and administration duties that I have been doing my agents a disservice in continuing to work with them. I am committed to working with the many twenty-somethings in my office that are moving into production. So many of them are really young and have never seen anything but tremendous success and profits in my office. I want to go out on marketing calls with them and also be very involved in quality control of their policies and quotes. We have been growing so fast that I need to take this step to make sure that we continue to grow profitably. My office has grown from $13,000,000 in written premium in 2010 to a budget of $26,000,000 in 2014. I've also grown from 16 employees in 2010 to 26 now. I have plans to continue to add to staff in 2014, but we have to get our build out and lease addendum completed soon in order for that to happen. I am completely out of space and have three employees that now principally work out of their homes because of the space crunch that we are in. Even with the record growth, we have been able to stay on top of our filings and typing. I had an issue with typing because I kept hiring recent  college graduates to do the job. Each of them were happy to get an entry level position with me, but were ready to move up within three months of hiring in. I changed my focus late last year and hired in two ladies who had raised families and were ready to re-enter the work force. I brought them both in as policy typists and they have taken my typing unit from being 60 days behind and over 900 policies to current and only 59 policies in queue. It is a great story.

 

I played golf in the Turkey shoot on Saturday and had a great start to my round. I parred the first 6 holes and felt like it was last week all over again. Well, no. I bogeyed the final three holes for a 39 and then imploded on the back nine for a 45 and 84 on the day. That was good enough for a $20 Raley's gift card that Darla quickly scooped up and used on toilet paper and cat food. My driver left me on the back nine and I ended up getting stuck behind a treeon number 10 and trying a miracle shot that glanced off the tree and went out of bounds. That led to triple bogey and a forgettable back nine. I talked to Neil afterward and he had a similar day shooting a 39+47=86. Brothers in arms.

 

It will be  busy week for me at work with marketing calls both tomorrow and Thursday. Thursday is a follow-up call from the visit we had with a Roseville agency when my CEO was here. Matt and I will take in some personalized marketing materials and make our case to the decision makers in the office.

 

Well, I have some scores to get entered from the tournament on Saturday that Neil sent over to me tonight. I will call it a night and wrap this up for another week. I hope you are all well and living a Godly life. Be well. Ciao.

Sneaking away to Lake Tahoe for a quick getaway

 

 

We are off playing hooky in Lake Tahoe. I usually like to get away after the Manager's meeting for at least a day to recharge my batteries. I mentioned to Neil last week that I wanted to get away and that the Lakeside Inn had their Steak and Lobster Lodging special for $89. He said, as Neil always does, "Count us in!" We drove up this afternoon and stopped at the overlook at Emerald Bay and took a couple of pictures and then drove the rest of the way up to Tahoe and our hotel room. We checked in about 4:30 and rested for a couple of hours before meeting for drinks at 6:30. We got seated for dinner a little after 7 PM and spent the next 90 minutes gorging on steak, lobster, clam chowder, French onion soup, salad, baked potatoes and crème brulee for dessert. It was actually better than I expected, the lobster tail was large and succulent and the sirloin was lean and delicious. We spent a bit of time gambling with little luck and were back in the room by 10:00 PM.  We will meet Neil and Lilly for breakfast at the crack of ten AM in the morning, preferring a leisurely morning. We will drive back around the north side of the lake and stop for a late lunch in Truckee at Jack's by the Tracks, a restaurant that Dad and Shirley know.

 

Halloween came and went this week and some of the younger staff members approached me about a costume contest. I did them one better and offered to get gift cards for best dressed cubicle/office and my assistant threw in a gold cup for the perpetual winner of best dish at the potluck. The Queen of Hearts won the best costume and our receptionist won for best cubicle with a Hansel and Gretel setup of candy and treats to lure young children into her lair. Darla won the best dish for a cat litter box cake that was pretty gross. The cake was made with food coloring and melted Tootsie Rolls. It may have won the cup, but not too many people tried it. Pete had a scoop. Also, you can see a picture of Sam's costume for Halloween. Jen was supposed to send me more pictures, but has been hosting her Mom and McKenny this weekend.

 

Also, this weekend I had another hole-in-one at Diamond Oaks. I could get used to this. My first one was in a tournament two years ago and it cost me $145, which wasn't bad as I had $150 paid to me out of our hole-in-one insurance at the club. This time it was just a social round with John, Steve and Paul (Ringo couldn't make it). I bought a pitcher of beer and lunch for the guys after the round and got out of there for less than $35. The last time I was pretty pumped up and shot an 84 which isn't very good when you factor in an eagle and then the birdie I had on the following hole. This year, I was more focused and ended up shooting my best round of the year with a 37+38= 75, net 62. I told Darla that if I'd shot a 72, I would have just quit as I would have shot a hole in one and a par round on the same day. What's left? She wasn't buying it either. I was really happy with the 75 and pleased with the ace. I hit a pitching wedge on the 116 yard fifth hole that hit the front of the green rolled toward the hole and we lost it in the shadows on the green. I knew it was close and when there was no ball on the green when we walked up to the hole, I knew it was in the hole. So now I've had two aces on the 5th hole at Diamond Oaks. Boyd has also had two there and Bob had one.

 

Darla's business is really doing well and she is now the number one recruiter in the company and on track to promote to a Sterling Manager hopefully next month. She is featured in the corporate magazine this month with an interview about her recent success and she gives all the glory to God in her interview. Also, she has been sought out for speaking engagements at the regional meetings and on the conference calls that Silpada does every week. I'm proud of her and looking forward to seeing her success begin to be seen in our checkbook. She is rebuilding her business after her recent health issues and it all takes time. I'm very proud of her.

 

Our office just completed our 10th straight month of beating our budget and as proud as I am, it all gets put into perspective when my CEO tells me that my budget was too low. We are carrying over our lunch winnings for both September and October and hopefully November and we will rent out a party room at the local bowling alley for our Holiday Party. I get $45 per employee for our celebration and I like to buy everyone $50 gift cards. The room has two alleys, five big screen TVs and it's own bar. It costs $150 an hour and we will rent it for two hours in December on  Monday night.

 

We also are off to Mexico in December, the 14th-21st in Nuevo Vallarta. Dad and Shirley will be there from December 7th through the 21st and we will join them for their second week. Hopefully Darryl and Cheryl are able to make it out as well. We are bringing Neil and Lilly to stay in our two bedroom condo.

 

Well, that is it for this week. Darla is fast asleep in bed as she was up early this morning and I need to call it a day. I hope you are all well. Dad and Shirley will be back from their 28 day cruise in another week or so and I look forward to getting caught up with them. Be well. Ciao.