atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums So what are you going to do?

I'm now in the Security business working as a Sales Rep and it has been a fantastic move.

The company that bought my business was a mess. Initially their vaunted technical staff wouldn't work on my customer base because it was all ESI stuff and "beneath" them and there was no supervisor in that department to oversee things so I ended up servicing my customers. When I made a stink their answer was to hire a manager for that department. Since I was 6 months into it and many of my customers had disappeared or gotten annoyed I put in for and took the manager's job. That was fine until we signed a contract to provide first level phone support for the cutover and ongoing needs of another interconnect that was replacing the systems at every Goodyear store (almost 600 of them) in the country with IP Office systems (we didn't service IP Office systems and had ZERO experience with them). The company we were working for (Integration Partners) subbed out the installations (50 per week) to one company which hired subs as well, we handled the first level of support and they used Granite for telecom and wiring.

Turns out the IP Office is horrible with POTS lines and when they swapped out the Cisco UC540's that were working fine all of a sudden they had issues with static etc and we were overwhelmed with calls. The projected 3 calls per day turned into 25 a day and of course they never added any staff to handle the volume so I sucked it up and handled most of them. After 6 months they called me in and told me I was doing a horrible job as Manager and not leading my team. I walked in the next morning and resigned! .... and they lost the account within a month because no one would take the Goodyear tickets and there was no supervisor again.

We do Door Access Controls and Surveillance Systems and business is booming.