I dropped out of high school, and everyone said, “You gotta get a job.” My girlfriend told me about spinning signs, and I was like, “Please don’t ever say that to me again. I don’t want to stand out there and have people point and laugh at me.” A week later, I still had no job and was still a 17-year-old kid with nothing going on. Long story short, I was in a rut and couldn’t be picky about jobs.
This job takes personality, eye-hand coordination and stamina, so
I was a good spinner from the get-go. The hardest part is not looking at your watch. I’drather get hit in the chin or the face with a sign than look at my watch and realize I’ve only been standing out there for 10 minutes. Thing is, you can never turn it off because your audience changes every two minutes. Someone new pulls up to that intersection, and they’ve got to see the best Ray of the day, not the one who just realized he’s got another five hours to go.
But I’ve not always been an good employee. My boss had to fire me twice to wake me up. He said it was like firing Michael Jordan. Sure, I could throw a sign 15 feet up in the air, do a front handspring and catch the sign between my legs, but could I show up to work on time every day? No. Knucklehead. Knucklehead. Knucklehead. I knew I had to wake up. My boss stuck by me. I moved in with the CEO. Why? Basically, I needed help. I asked for it, and he let me stay in an extra room. That was the best and worst time of my life. You can’t just not show up to work if your boss is right there every morning. His philosophy: Wake up running. Are you going to be the lion or the gazelle? It doesn’t matter, he’d say, just be the one who gets the head start. I hated that lion/gazelle saying by the end of it, but it worked. For the first time, I felt like I was really part of a family — a family of young, alpha males who like to stand on the corner and get attention.
This job made me want to stop acting like some punk kid. I got my GED because of this. I’ve got guys working for me, looking to me for motivation. The Ray of 2007 would have never thought he’d be a leader. I never thought about what I’d be doing next.
One day, I’m standing in the middle of some highway in Southern Maryland, spinning for a new luxury home development. And in five hours, five homes sold. I walked into the leasing office, and the woman just looks at me and says, “I love you.” I don’t have the vocabulary for how I felt.
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