Chairman's Perspective - August 2022

MUSINGS FROM THE ROAD:

Lessons learned during vacation with extended family

I am writing this from a passenger train heading from San Francisco to Chicago after a lengthy vacation with extended family. To say it has been an adventure would be a bit of an understatement, but I have been struck with a number of lessons during this journey that I thought I would share while they are top of mind.

Below are my top five.

5. Find the silver lining. For those of you that follow my social media, you know that we have experienced significant delays in our train service — seven hours on the way out, and nearly 18 hours on the way home. Those delays led to a number of other issues, e.g., rental car woes, missed social plans and many rescheduled meetings. As I reflect on the experience though, those delays also put me in a position to have an additional 18 hours with my kids in the most captive of situations. In about a month, I will be an empty nester, and I will appreciate every extra moment I had with my kids before they left.

4. Customer service is everything. We traveled from Anaheim to San Francisco and experienced every type of customer service imaginable. I can say, without a doubt, that the customer service from one place to the next makes all the difference in the experience. Case in point … we were evacuated from our rental home just outside of Yosemite due to the wildfires spreading rapidly a few miles outside of our house. Every single person we encountered was fantastic — from the homeowner who notified us to evacuate and let us out of the contract, to the front desk clerk at the cheap hotel we found 30 miles away. These were some very stressful and somewhat scary times, and everyone did their best to help us out. As such, I welcome the opportunity to get back there in the future. We all can probably bring this back to our businesses.

3. Don’t waste energy on what you cannot control. I definitely cannot control the delays on the train, the winds that caused the fire to shift to where we were staying or the speed of the ER a family member had to visit in northern California. Unfortunately, I spent an awful lot of time being upset about those things, and it did me no good. I was in a much better place when I focused on things I could impact. I see this all the time in my business life as well.

2. Be decisive, but know when to compromise. If you have ever traveled with a large group of family members, the smallest of decisions, like what to do for breakfast, can turn into the largest discussions. We were all afraid of speaking our mind, and that lead to delays and frustration. Someone just needed to make a decision. That being said, know what decisions are those you want to “die on the hill” for versus those that you can simply go with the flow. It is probably not worth going to the mat for cereal versus eggs, but there are many things in our business and personal lives that are worth fighting for.

1. Be thankful; it is never as bad as you think. As late as we were boarding our train yesterday, I was pretty grumpy. I was getting madder by the moment waiting for food to be served because we hadn’t eaten in quite a while. As we started to pull out of the station, we passed a gigantic tent city with people living under the harshest of conditions. Suddenly my slight inconveniences didn’t seem very important. I find that I can easily get sidelined at work and at home by what isn’t going right, but I need to remember all of the blessings I have.

Dan Ross is chair of the Rockford Chamber of Commerce and president of the Community Foundation of Northern Illinois.