Compass Communications
One of the shortest jobs in my career still managed to change its direction.
The product was good. That made the culture problem more frustrating.
I had moved to Auckland and taken a telecommunications sales role at Compass. The underlying offer was competitive and I could sell the real savings without much theatre.
I also discovered very quickly that I did not want to build a career around sales language I could not comfortably defend to the customer after the call. I was intensely commercial, but I wanted the pitch to survive contact with reality. If the product was good enough, the job was to make the value clearer, not manufacture a story around it.
So I did not stay long.
I met Jack.
During that brief stint I met Jack, a presenter at ALT TV. That one connection lasted longer than the job did. He asked me to get involved with the station’s late Friday- and Saturday-night shows, which became ALT After Dark.
That is one of the recurring absurdities in my career: a job can be wrong for me and still put exactly the right person in front of me.
Then came HRV.
Leaving Compass pushed me to look for the next role. I found HRV and nearly rejected it because home ventilation sounded unbelievably boring.
That was a spectacularly bad first impression.