ADP and Lessons Learned in Entrepreneurship

As I get closer to the 2 year mark from the time I decided I needed to turn my life around, I’ve been reminiscing about the times before this and what drove me to do what I am doing. My career at ADP is one of them, including the people that I met.

ADP was quite the eperience. I had a referral from a friend of mine who said that ADP was a great entry into higher level sales jobs, he himself was accepting a job making six figures working for a company that sold medical devices. I was interested in the job because of this, and because I was deperate and needed work after a 2 month trip to europe. Because I had no real skills, except for an average ability to make people like me, I went for it.

I got the job and soon realized it would be difficult for me. I already hated cold calling, and it seemed that was the only way I was going to do well at selling there. I tried to work for referrals, but in a high paced sales world, none of the managers were willing to wait for me to do that. Besides, I wasnt willing to put in the time to join networking groups because I was lazy, and had no idea how to sell and market (hindsight is a bitch, aint it).

In addition to that, I really didnt like the people that I worked with. Sure, they were nice on the outside (some of them), but they all had the same personality necessary to succeed in that environment. Think of the wall street type that will do anything for the sale. These guys could cold call all day long and laugh when they got hung up on. Sometimes I thought they had to be sociopaths for not being effected by this.

After working there for a while, I would find out that they would do cocaine before making calls, and at one point I was awkwardly in a position where they were doing the drug on a counter top before going into sales calls, right in front of me. Not exactly my thing. Sadly these people were really good at sales, they would annihilate me on the sales boards. I was just average, and in sales, average gets fired.

After a year of struggling, I started to get pressure from management to improve. The pressure got too stressful and I started drinking a lot, getting ulcers, having all sorts of health conditions… not fun.

I quit a month later and got a job with American Woodmark, which is a story all to itself.

The moral of this story is, my personality did not match the job. And, I was extremely naive back then. The combination of those two things was enough to make me a wreck.

Two things I could have done differently (that fit my personality):

• Networked more, and better – I needed to meet more people and at least let them know what I did
• Avoided being around the negativity of the employees that worked there
• Not worked there in the first place, and gotten a job that would teach me skills that could last me a lifetime.

Many of those employees that I worked with went on to medical device sales, which invokes a bit of jealousy because the high pay rates and flexible hours, but I try and remind myself that what I am doing is recession proof, it is “medicare cut” proof, it is something I can rely on the rest of my life. That is what keeps me going. Entrepreneurship and lifestyle design is something I strive for, I want the best of both worlds.