A neighbor down the street is an attorney, a sports lover, and all-around good guy. He’s also, I learned quite some time after meeting him, a wine collector.
He has a cellar in his basement that contains some 3,000 bottles, much of it from European countries, and a considerable amount from vineyards in California whose owners he has come to know personally.
If you guess that my first visit to his cellar included a fairly long dissertation on wines, you’d be right. And my wife and I enjoyed it greatly.
The point is that we often don’t find out how interesting people are until we see what they do on evenings and weekends. Most of us aren’t fortunate enough to have careers we enjoy so much that they feel like recreation. So we own a business or hold a job that we find satisfying and that pays the bills, and we pursue passions when we can.
A new occasional column in Cleaner, titled “After Hours,” looks at how service business owners invest their spare time. Judging from contacts we’ve made and stories we’ve planned so far, cleaners are interesting folks indeed.
Lots of variety
The first “After Hours” story, in this issue, features David Currier, who moved his family and his business from Massachusetts to North Carolina so his son, David Jr., could pursue a promising career in stock car racing.
It’s not just about the racing, of course. It’s about how Currier’s wife, Cindy, and the kids adapted to new surroundings. And how David Sr. went about buying and building a new business in unfamiliar surroundings.
We’re planning other stories on contractors whose pursuits include starting a Bible college, performing in a country band, building custom motorcycles, and putting on a huge Halloween haunted manor. We hope to include features on the spouses and families of contractors, their special interests, and how they deal with the special rewards and complications that go with a family business.
We all know there’s more to life than work. A wise man once observed, “No one on their death bed has ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.’”
It’s easy for a trade magazine to take itself a bit too seriously, to focus on business matters to the exclusion of all else. It’s fitting for a magazine like this one, which serves mostly small family-owned businesses, to pay attention to the personal and family sides of things, and in fact to celebrate them. And so we will.
Finding inspiration
It’s easy to imagine conversations between cleaners at industry venues like the Pumper & Cleaner Expo turning eventually away from topics like fuel prices, hiring practices and camera technologies to hobbies, children, pets, car restoration, fishing, sundowner farming, travel. That’s where friendships get formed.
So think of “After Hours” as a place to learn about new sides of industry colleagues you may or may not know, and how they find a place within business life for their favorite pursuits. You might even get inspired to make your own passions more of a priority in your life — and so be a little richer.
We’d like to run this feature often, and to do it we’ll need to know about cleaners and families who have interesting sidelines and interesting ways of keeping family life vibrant, even though the work days and weeks get hard and long.
So we invite you to let us tell your story. Or to let us know of someone in the business you like and admire who pursues a passion others would enjoy knowing about.
Just follow “After Hours” — without expecting it to appear every month, at least in the beginning. And if the spirit moves you to offer a story, please do. Just drop me a note to editor@cleaner.com and I’ll be sure to respond.
