I had settled into a routine as the store director for one of Circuit City's new concept stores and was really enjoying their dramatically new approach of doing business. That's when I received a phone call telling me  they were closing 150 stores, including the brand new store I had just opened 3 months earlier. Now I really felt like someone "up there" was trying to tell me something... "laid off twice in 16 months". I guess lightning really can strike twice! Looking back it's perplexing how such a screwed up company could give birth to two cutting edge business models such as Carmax and the new concept electronic stores "The City".

This sixty year old organization went from having a Billion dollars cash in the bank to being bankrupt in 18 months. The whole time opening brand new stores like there was no tomorrow. Didn't they have an accountant that knew how to perform cash flow projections? There were stores that grand opened and went into liquidation in the same week! They spent almost a million dollars on a managers retreat to roll out the holiday promotion strategy and three days later announced they were closing 150 of those very same stores a month before the holiday season even got started, huh? They had 4 different point of sale systems and none of them were compatible. We were on the newest system and it took 36 steps to sell a pack of batteries. This is one company where the left hand had no idea what the right hand was doing.

It is so difficult to manage big organizations because the systems and procedures take on a life of their own and everything is done by committee. Maybe that’s why I enjoy being an inventor so much, it’s a one man show. Not because I like working alone, I don't, but I do enjoy being involved in all aspects of a  product's development. In my case, I built my prototype, wrote my business plan, raised the capital, found a manufacturer, designed my brochures, conducted market research, promoted my product, shot my own photography and most importantly created the go to market strategy. I felt like I had finally found my "calling" and was really enjoying it.

Although this job only lasted 6 months it came at a critical financial time, filling the gap between the licensing deal that fell through and finishing pre-production testing of the new larger unit. Unlike the last job I had this time I was able to get some work done on my days off. The larger unit was ready for production, the shipping packaging was good to go and some minor changes in the handle design meant it was able to work with a wider range of pot styles. Now I was ready for QVC and I started contacting the QVC agents I had met back at the International Housewares Show in Chicago almost a year earlier.