Who Moved My Cheese

I grew up in an immigrant family, my parents were married in the Netherlands April 17th 1952, and within a week they boarded a ship and were headed to a new life, in a new country.  They ended up in Port Williams for their first year in Nova Scotia, just up the road from where my business partner Brad now lives with his family, and  across the road from where we will be installing a new In Ground Swimming Pool this summer.  They had to endure life in a new country, learn a new language, deal with our harsh winters, and be separated from family and friends.  Luckily there were other Dutch immigrants in the area, and before long they developed new friendships, and within a couple of years had siblings join them in this new life.  For having endured such great change, they held tradition very dear to their hearts.  They did not go out of their way to seek change, and while I had made changes in our business over the first 20 years or so, I continued to hold onto many of the ways I had always done things.

So while on a cruise with a number of my industry peers from  across the country in January 2000 I was encouraged to read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" by Spencer Johnson.  This was one of the first of many books that I started to collect and encourage my staff members to read, but this book more than all the others changed the way I looked at how to run our business.  "Who Moved My Cheese" became my motto for the 2000's.  The next 10 years saw us moving the cheese constantly, we changed the way our company was structured, I hired a business coach who helped us set up new structures and systems within the company, in 2005 we took in a business partner,  we identified staff members strengths and with them developed a middle management team. Most of all I learned how to delegate, and realized that others could not only do some of the jobs I thought I could only do before, they could also do it better.   We expanded and opened a retail store in New Minas, and 6 years later built our new store here in New Minas.  We have expanded our product lines and constantly look for new products that will help our customers and friends enjoy their backyard vacations.

Staff members started to cringe when they saw me come out of my office with that look of "what can we change today" or "I think I have a great idea on how we can do this".   I keep a yellow block of foam cheese on my desk and whenever we hired new staff members had them read "Who Moved My Cheese" ... but then I lost my block of cheese, I claimed for years that it was a staff member who took it and hid it from me, probably because they were tired of always having their cheesed moved, but the other day, I was looking in one of my cabinets at home and guess what I found, my block of cheese, it seems like I must have hid it myself ... maybe I was getting tired of having my cheese moved!!  So now that I have found it again I wonder where we should move it to next??

-Mike vandenHof