Ep. 97 - Rob's Career History

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."  -  Jim Rohn  

Emanuel James Rohn professionally known as Jim Rohn, was an American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker.Wikipedia  

Who do you spend the most time with?

Historically - I've spent the most time with people I've worked with.

(7) categories I am utilizing to build the life of my dreams:

• financial
• physical
• personal development
• family
• spiritual
• social
• career

Last week, we covered financial and physical...

...Monday we talked personal development (Finding Your Rudder)...

...Tuesday we talked family (Multigenerational Families)...

...Wednesday we talked Spirituality

...Thursday we talked about Social (The Human Social Creature)

Today, we close out the week on Friday with an episode on career / work life.

The quote of the day was seen p.141 in the Self Journal by the Best Self Co.

• Use code "YMF" to save 15% on your first order

Education:

Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute
Associate’s Degree, Landscape Contracting and Construction / Nursery
Management · (1999 - 2001)

Work Experience

Cahoon Nursery
Retail Sales and Landscape Design
1997 - April 2004 (7 years)

Appalachian Creek Nursery and Landscape
Landscape Crew Supervisor
April 2004 - September 2006 (2 years 6 months)

Thatchmore Farm
Organic Farm Apprentice
April 2006 - September 2006 (6 months)

The North Carolina Arboretum
Grounds Maintenance
September 2006 - February 2008 (1 year 6 months)

Davey Resource Group 5 years 4 months  (beginning April 2008)

Contract Utility Forester
April 2008 - July 2009 (1 year 4 months)
Eastern United States

Senior Utility Forester
August 2009 - March 2010 (8 months)
Eastern United States

Project Supervisor
March 2010 - June 2011 (1 year 4 months)
Eastern Contract Services

BURNOUT 1.0

Field Supervisor - Urban Forest Inventory and Analysis
June 2011 - December 2011 (7 months)
Southern California

Contract Utility Forester
December 2011 - July 2013 (1 year 8 months)
SDG&E (San Diego Gas & Electric)

Environmental Resource Solutions, Inc.
Grant Compliance Inspector
September 2012 - November 2012 (3 months)

Davey Resource Group, Inc
Interim Project Coordinator
July 2013 - January 2014 (7 months)

COMA IN DENVER AFTER UTAH TRIP

Inside Sales Representative
January 2014 - March 2020 (6 years 3 months)
Valley City, OH

Inventory Management
March 2016 - Present (5 years)

Digital Content Manager
January 2020 - Present (1 year 2 months)

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:42

For me, historically, I've spent the most time with the people that I've worked with and the people that I've lived with. But unfortunately, I gotta say, most of the time was spent consistently at work, and uh because my off time was spent either with family, friends, or by myself doing something somewhere. But either way, we're going to talk about my work history, my career history, and my background in this 97th episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. For those of you who are new to the show, this is a show focused on building the lives of our dreams. My name is Rob Kaiser, and I am your host. Today is Friday, February 12th, 2021. It is a chilly morning. Exactly how chilly, I do not know. I suspect it has been like the remainder or the earlier part of the week. And it's either single digits or in the low teens. So why are we talking about my career history today? That's an interesting topic, I guess. As I've said repeatedly this week, I am actively building the life of my dreams through consistent goal setting, utilizing the seven following categories financial, physical, personal development, family, spiritual, social, and career. Last week we covered financial and physical. Monday we talked personal development with an episode titled Finding Your Rudder. Tuesday we talked family with an episode on multi-generational families. Wednesday we talked spirituality. Thursday we talked about social issues or topics with a show called The Human Social Creature. And today we are closing it out with an episode on career and work. So and we'll get back to this on Monday with another episode on finance. But the quote of the day, again, is you are an average of the five people you spend the most time with. And again, that's a quote by Jim Rohn. And that quote was actually seen in the best self journal today on page 141 of the best self journal. And you can find a link to the best self journal in the show notes. And if you feel so inclined to order one after hearing me talk about it all this time, you can use the promo code YMF. That's uh Yankee Mike Foxtrot. Or also an acronym for York Meadow Farm. You can get 15% off your first order. So check check it out. It's a great journal. They have other great products there too. I own many of them, but more on that later. So that quote today got me thinking about who I spend my time with, and it got me thinking about the day job. And the reality is the day job has just been a part of my life for most of my life. And I'm I've done some little side hustle things here and there, but I would certainly not consider myself an entrepreneur at this point in my life. And as I think about this and as I assemble the show notes about this topic, I realized that I have been with the day job now for seven years. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Glad I spend most of my time working by myself. At any rate, career history. Now, to do this, the easiest thing that I could do was reference my LinkedIn profile. And I'm going to take us all the way back to 1997. And that was the first year I began working at Cahun Nursery. That was the year I after I graduated high school. And maybe I started in 98, I don't know. But it was the late 90s. Ultimately I ended up going to the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute, ATI, in the town of Worcester, Ohio. Not main campus that everybody knows and loves, but it was a little farm school, and I learned quite a bit about horticulture and built my foundation in the industry there. And I went back and continued working at Cahun Nursery full-time, doing retail sales and landscape design for about seven years. I did that until about 2004. But I ended up coming back working in the nursery, and then I moved down to North Carolina and spent about two and a half years working at a place called Appalachian Creek Nursery and Landscape. I was a primarily a crew supervisor there, but I lived in the old farmhouse on site and sort of began toying with the idea of homesteading and things like that. After I left there, I started working at the Arboretum, but I was also working part-time as an apprentice at an organic farm called Thatchmore Farm. And I did that for a season. And again, I was working at the North Carolina Arboretum. I did that for about a year and a half before moving back to Ohio when my parents bought this property in late 2007, early 2008. I was kind of ready for a change, anyways, from the old home state and was ready to give this homesteading idea a shot, especially now that mom and dad had some land and we were all getting older. Keep in mind this was almost 15 years ago, and things just didn't work out. Housing bubble crashed, and parents couldn't get financing on the land and such. So I decided to take a job, you know, and not do the gig at the nursery, expand my horizons. And I decided to chase a career in the corporate world. And I did that through forestry. Forestry at that time was a booming industry when a lot of economic hardship was occurring. And utility forestry was where it was at for me because I could get paid to hike outdoors and look at trees. And I learned a lot about the utility infrastructure of the nation in the grid, because the reason why we were so active at that time in the utility forestry business was because there was a huge outage four years prior in 2004 that basically had the entire Northeast United States blacked out for a few days, and all of it, the root cause of it, was a four-inch maple, four-inch in diameter maple tree that grew into the line, and the line sagged into it and rounded it. Circuits had to be carried by other circuits and they were overloaded and everything cascaded and crashed. So, you know, April 2008, I started working as a contract utility forester doing projects all throughout the eastern United States. By mid-2009, I had moved up to the senior utility forester, you know, kind of running projects in the field. And by early 2010, I was managing projects and traveling a lot on the road and managing the guys in the field. And I had quite a crew underneath me, maybe about 40-50 employees and multiple contracts. Did that for about a year and a half, and that's when I burned out. Burnout 1.0. Good times. So because I worked for a big corporation, the Davy Tree Expert Company, I was able to make a lateral move and life was interesting at that time. I crossed paths with an old friend at a wedding, and we hit it off, and I ended up moving to California, chasing love, chasing dreams. And it was awesome. And I did that for a couple of years. And while I was out there, I was a field supervisor again, doing urban forestry this time, and then went back to utility forestry working with utilities in Southern California. And also at that time, my parents were making progress on the land. I had become hip to some ideas of permaculture and homesteading. Stumbled across the survival podcast at that time and was listening to a lot of that and really getting the gears grinding on, you know, the potential and the possibility to be a self-sufficient homesteader at some point in the future. Or, you know, and help my parents do the same. So I managed to take one final project in Texas at serving as the interim project coordinator where I was going to find, hire, and train the replacement to take that position because I was trying to work my way home, but they wanted me to take that position, so even negotiation was me taking that on for a year with some negotiated pay rates and such, and that allowed me to get out of debt at that time and um, you know, to kind of celebrate the me getting out of debt and you know having one last hurrah before moving back to Ohio. I went to Denver with my friend Rick, and we took a trip out into the Utah backcountry for a few days. And on the last leg home, actually on the drive home of that trip, I I fell into a series of extended seizures. It appeared as though I was sleeping. And when we got home, Rick realized that I wasn't sleeping, and an ambulance was called and I was given a healthy dose of prophethol and put into a medically induced coma to basically reboot my brain, and that accelerated my trip home to Ohio, and the medical expenses incurred after that really um got me back to the feeling of debt and thinking that I could never escape it. And then I began working here at Davis Tree Farm, and I'm on my last leg of the commute here now. And I started off as a sales rep there in January 2014, and I basically did sales in some way, shape, or form for six years, uh, up until last year when I said no more because my priorities had shifted and they wanted me to move into inventory after basically I sucked. Alright, like two years of sales in the front office, and then at the same time chasing other people's dreams and going deep into debt doing so. I experienced burnout 2.0 and I really should have been fired from the job, but I work for nice people, so they shifted gears and recognized that I could probably fill the need for inventory management and inventory control. And I had since been working in inventory for the past five years, and I still do that's the bulk of what I do now, even though I do some digital content creation online. So that pretty much brings us up to the current day, and there's one thing in the show notes that isn't listed, and you know, this and links to all of the other things that I've talked about are in the show notes, so check those out. Um, I did not, however, list my own business, Deliberate Living Systems, which was founded in 2014 in the process of chasing all these other people's dreams. Now, towards the end of my front office sales career, when I went through Burnout 2.0, and I uh let the business go defunct basically in late 2016, early 2017. But I decided that I am in a position now to recover the business and start moving forward and integrating it more wholly into my life. So I recovered the website as of last month and am making a slow recovery into learning how to function as a business and ultimately make money sometime. So there's my career history dating all the way back to 1997 when I first began working at the nursery after high school. And here we are, Friday, February 12th, 2021, closing out episode 97 of the All Around Growth Podcast. So just about after 24 years or so of working in the green industry and realizing that's all I've really ever done is work in different facets of the green industry, here I am. Obsessing about who I am and where I'm going. Alright, but it's become much, much easier. And uh I've gained a lot more clarity on all of this since becoming debt-free. So for me, that was the starting point of it all. And I finally reached the conclusion that all I need to do is follow the baby steps and the rest will figure itself out. So hopefully this show was of value to you. And if it was, and you'd like to, you know, give it a thumbs up or support it in some way, shape, or form, again, go to the show notes and you can go all the way to the bottom. And you'll see a link in all capital letters that says click here to rate and review the podcast. And that will take you to iTunes online where you can leave a five-star review. Apple podcasts, rather. And if you uh feel so inclined, leave a written review. It's a five-star rating, rather. So if you have any questions or feedback for me, I would encourage you to join the telegram group.