Chapter 1: The Interview - May 11, 2020

Amy Johnson was 24 years old and a graduate of Duke University. Even though she finished her bachelor’s degree in advertising, with a minor in website analytics, in three and a half years, she had only been a graduate for eighteen months. It was because her mom decided to hold her back a year just days before she was due to start kindergarten. Every time Amy thinks about it she gets angry. She was going to join three of her neighborhood friends in the same kindergarten class, but with what she considered an irrational decision by her mom, Amy was forced to grow up a year behind her first best-friends.

The chip on her shoulder that was set so early in life ultimately did Amy a tremendous benefit. She used it as motivation for everything – perfect attendance through grade school, middle school, and also high school, straight-A student at every school she attended, lettered athlete in soccer, tennis, and basketball, a Thespian by her sophomore year of high school, and of course, the valedictorian that was voted, “most likely to succeed.”

Even with her sterling background, Amy was sitting nervously in the waiting room of Precious Medals. She had been contacted the week before for a phone interview. It went well and the recruiter, a pleasant-sounding woman by the name of Annette Simpson, set up a time for Amy to come into the office and interview with some senior management in advertising and sales. Annette told Amy that she was going to email her a package of materials and she would be well served to read through all of the material carefully.

As Amy waited she used the same techniques to calm and prep herself that she successfully used throughout her academic career. She started by thinking back to the phone interview, and the subsequent email that Annette sent with a zip file containing several documents about Precious Medals.

The first PDF that she read addressed her biggest question head-on: Why would anyone want to work for a gimmicky-titled company called Precious Medals? The answer was simple, really. Precious Medals was the world’s largest provider of trophies, plaques, and medals. High school and college sports programs bought their products by the thousands. Schools also bought their products for the honor roll, end-of-year “best of” awards, and even plaques for perfect attendance. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were huge yearly customers that bought awards for their pack achievements, pine wood derby trophies, and top cookie sellers. The potential customer list was practically limitless: little league sports, adult softball leagues, awards for daily cruise ship contests, and even trophies for the bridge leagues in so many cities.

The next few PDFs were biographies of the CEO and the three VPs at Precious Medals. Before seeing the resumes Amy did not know the names of any of the top-level management at Precious Medals. After reading the documents, she knew that they all boasted good, solid careers, but none of them really appeared to be a real dynamo.

Peter Drudge founded the company almost twenty years ago. He started with small investment from his parents and has never needed to pursue any other outside funding. He tends to only promote within the ranks and not pull management from other companies which seemed a bit unusual to Amy.

Erin Smitters was the vice president of sales and marketing. She was employee number seven and throughout the years held almost every role possible. Her real asset was the tremendous library of knowledge she held of their customer base and the ability to make the perfect match between product and organization.