As a sales trainer I use to tell new salespeople that, "customers buy from salespeople they like". As a regional manager I told my sales managers that, "salespeople sell better for sales managers they like". Most employees would gladly take a 10% pay cut or more to work for a boss they really liked versus working for someone that's really difficult or had a bad reputation, but what about the company's reputation. Here was my dilemma, one of my favorite bosses was offering me a job to work for company with a terrible reputation. This is where a good business relationship can be helpful, I was able to directly expressed my concerns about going to work for a company with such a bad reputation, to my surprise my former boss felt the same way. He explained that the company was aware of their problems and was trying to change their image and was creating a new concept division to facilitate the change. This new division was his baby and I would be helping him bring it to life.  The job sounded interesting and challenging, combined with the fact that I really trusted this guy I decided to accept his offer and let my dream simmer on the back burner for a while, after all I had a family to support and really needed the income while I was getting my product ready for the next step.

In 30 years of being in the consumer electronics business I rarely heard a customer or an employee speak favorably about their experience with Circuit City. Changing the reputation of a 60 year old, 13 billion dollar company wasn't going to be easy, that’s why I was so pleasantly surprised after learning about the core philosophies that were being incorporated into the new concept division called "The City". To this day I'll never understand how such a screwed up company could give birth to such an incredibly well thought out organization with a world class culture like "The City" stores. The problem was that "The City" stores never made up more than 10% of the total company and there was always internal conflict between the upbeat positive karma coming out of the City division and the negative back stabbing cancerous culture of the core stores. Even with all that said, I wouldn't trade a minute of my time working in a City store, it was quite possibly the best 6 months I ever spent in a consumer electronics store, but only God could save something that was already 90% consumed by cancer. 

Nevertheless I spent my days off developing a larger version of the Hotdog Ez Bun Steamer, creating several brochures, about a dozen cooking video demonstrations and getting a website up and running. As soon as I was able to sell a few larger units I started getting reports from my customer that it was great for steaming all kinds of foods from tortillas to lobster. This feedback exactly mirrored the expert advice I received at the International Housewares Show in Chicago, hmmm… maybe the experts actually knew what they were talking about!

Make a note of that, sometimes we inventors get so wrapped up in our product that we're not always open to advice from others, keep in mind that they're usually are looking your product from the very same perspective your customers will view your product. Remember the old adage "you can't see the forest through the trees", most inventors struggle to see their product from the same point of view of their customers but its something we have to overcome.