Episode 57 – The Ups and the Downs: From Elevators to Aircraft

MIKE GOSS:  I believe that everything in life in one way or another is a project.  So if that’s true, how do I increase my chances of it being successful, and who can I help with it? NICK WALKER:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  Every two weeks we get together to talk about the ins and outs of project management and what matters to you as a professional in the field.  We’ll talk with some of the leaders in project management to find out what motivates them, what drives them to succeed, and to get some encouragement and inspiration from them. I’m your host, Nick Walker, and with me are the two main motivators around here, Andy Crowe and Bill Yates.  And Bill, today we have with us via Skype someone who has made it a life goal to inspire people. BILL YATES:  Yeah.  And Mike, I’m excited about having you on this ‘cast because you’ve been entertaining our operations team for weeks and weeks and weeks.  I can always tell when they’re on the phone with you, so I’m looking forward to this. NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s meet Mike.  He has held sales and leadership positions with four multinational companies, several small and mid-size businesses, and three of his own businesses.  He’s an accomplished sales trainer, a project management trainer, contract project manager, speaker, and author.  And one of Mike’s lifetime goals is to reach 10 million people with a message of hope and inspiration.  Today he’ll get a little closer to that goal right here in our studio.  Mike, via Skype from Portland, Oregon, it’s great to have you with us here on Manage This. MIKE GOSS:  Well, I’m honored to be here.  I'm glad I was invited because this – Velociteach, Andy Crowe, Bill Yates – this is the big-time.  I got invited to the big-time.  Hallelujah. NICK WALKER:  Well, you know, that goal of reaching 10 million people might seem unusual to a lot of people.  Why did you set that particular goal? MIKE GOSS:  A few years ago I had open heart surgery.  I had chest pains and didn’t tell my wife.  And when she finally found out, things happened, and suddenly I’m having a five-way heart bypass.  When I woke up, I checked around, and I said, “I’m still alive.”  I wiggled my toes.  They're still working.  I tried my fingers.  They're still working.  I couldn’t talk because they had these huge things down my throat.  But I thought, you know, I must be here for a reason.  God must still not be done with me. So I set a goal to see how many people I could enrich.  And if you’re going to make a goal, you might as well make a big one.  I didn’t set out to enrich 10 people.  I set out to enrich 10 million in one way or another.  And when I speak or when I create a course or when I’m teaching boot camps, it’s all about making the other person better off.  I want to be able to say I did something; I made my mark by helping others. NICK WALKER:  Well, let’s go way back.  Way back, I guess, even when the first little seeds of your career began to be planted.  You had the nickname of “Otis” in junior high school and in high school.  Tell us why. MIKE GOSS:  I lived in Pendleton, which had a total of four elevators – Pendleton, Oregon.  But I was always fascinated by the box moving up and down with people or materials in it, the counterweight behind it, all the mechanical and electronic things that had to happen to make it work.  I was fascinated with it, and I always talked about it.  My friends got very tired of listening to it.  I made scale model elevators and entered them in science fair projects.  It just went on and on.  And eventually I got to work for my dream company, Otis Elevator. NICK WALKER:  As a matter of fact, I understand one of your usernames is ElevatorFan.  Would that be true of you? MIKE GOSS:  Well, yes.  When I was setting up my account in Skype it said, “What handle do you want?”  And I, well, thinking Otis, somebody took Otis.  So I said ElevatorFan.  That will work fine. NICK WALKER:  So you got to have your dream job.  Tell us a little bit about kind of how that started and what you were doing initially. MIKE GOSS:  I started out as a helper in the field, Nick.  I was in Otis Elevator’s management training program.  They want you to get your hands dirty in the field and work on elevators.  I did that as I finished up my business degree at Portland State University.  Then I worked for them in San Francisco, and then in Phoenix.  And it was all about either managing the installation of the project, or managing a sales contract to win a sale over at a premium price.  I never won a sale ever by being low bid, but I did win it by being high value.  And it was a project behind that that let me do that. ANDY CROWE:  I would far rather manage a sales process than manage the actual execution.  I’ve done both, and I’ve learned.  Presales engineer can be one of the greatest job titles there are. BILL YATES:   That’s true.  You sell it, and you get out. ANDY CROWE:  Yeah. BILL YATES:  Somebody else has to implement that. MIKE GOSS:   After I came back to Oregon from Otis, I was the salesperson, and then I was ramrodding the installation, working as project expediter, and had a lot of fun doing it. NICK WALKER:  But you’ve had some challenging projects.  And one in particular that I’ve got a little inkling about.  Something having to do with having to make an old elevator fit into a new building? MIKE GOSS:  That was exciting, Nick.  I was working for Otis Elevator’s San Francisco regional offices.  And in the fast-track management program you work a little bit in the sales department, a little bit in the engineering department, and so forth.  When I got to engineering, they said, “Have you ever done drafting?”  “Oh, yeah, I did drafting in high school.  I enjoyed it.”  And they said, “Well, we have a drafting project.  We’re taking an old elevator out of an old building, and your job is to cut it down on the drawings and make it fit into the new building.  And we’re not sure we have accurate measurements of the hoistway.  So take your best shot.” And I took my best shot, and it seemed to work.  I got a letter from the job foreman, and he said, “Thank you.  It finally fit.  It did actually what the drawings would say it did.”  So it worked out well.  I don’t know whether we’ll call that a project or a phase, but it was successful.  Everything fit. BILL YATES:  Mike, I want to ask a question about this.  You had a passion, even when you were a kid you had a passion for elevators.  And then you were able to pursue a career in that.  And I think about – can you speak to the idea of, as a project manager, you’re more effective if you happen to know a lot about the product or the service that you’re working with?  In your case you had a passion for elevators.  How did that help you in the role of project manager? MIKE GOSS:  Bill, it helped me get in the door because I had the passion.  I took a three-ring binder to my interview with letters that went back, well, they went back to the 1950s.  And they said, “You’re insane, but we’re going to hire you because you have all this passion.”  So I translated that to working on either a sales project or an installation project by setting a goal.  And it was very simple.  I had not had any project management training.  I could say “project management,” but I wasn’t sure what went behind it.  So I would say, “What must be done?  What is the deliverable that everyone will measure?  And when is it due?  And what’s the budget allocated to it that I cannot spend more than?  And who’s the accountable person?” Well, I was always the accountable person.  But at least I had a very basic, basic macro structure.  And I used it to get things done, and they always worked out well.  Even when we had surprises, I didn’t have a risk management plan.  I didn’t know there was such a thing as a risk management plan at the time.  But intuitively we said, okay, we’ve hit a roadblock.  What are we going to do about it?  And the answer was, well, we’re going to do this and this and this because this is the root cause of it.  And then later when I was sitting in, taking my own PMP training, I thought, hey, I know about that.  I can talk about that a little bit.  And they said, yes, but we wish you’d talk about it just a little because you can’t tell a short story. NICK WALKER:  Well, at the risk of having you tell a long story, I’d like to hear a little bit more about some of your sales projects.  I understand there was one in Phoenix in particular where your objective was to increase the market share.  What was involved in that? MIKE GOSS:  I built a project plan, without calling it a project plan, for Otis’s position in the Arizona market.  And I did this for a 400-level marketing course that I was attending at Arizona State University.  We made the plan, got the plan executed, and watched the sales rise.  We used some basic fundamentals of project management without calling them that.  One of the things that happened in Phoenix was that one of our customers was the Del Webb Corporation.  They owned half a dozen downtown office buildings.  And I was charged with winning back the maintenance contract that Del Webb had given to our competitor, who was charging 15 percent less.  My boss said, “I don’t care how you do it.  Just go get it.”  I was awfully glad that he said that because then there were, like, zero constraints. ANDY CROWE:  Those are dangerous words. MIKE GOSS:  Well, it was exciting.  I toured the building where our competitor was maintaining the elevator, had been for a year.  The building was filthy.  The machine room was filthy.  There was fuzz growing off switches in the hoistway.  But I went back to the building that Otis was maintaining, it was in immaculate condition.  So I went to my customer and said, “I’ll bet you that I can prove that you’re not getting a deal,