My journey through my first job abroad
It was 1999, I was a young promising manager; just turned 30 and already was a regional controller for a big company, barely two years after being hired by the company and relocated to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.
I vividly remember it was a thursday afternoon, August 28th, I received a call, my boss on the other side of the line just said I need you at McAllen office first thing in the morning on Monday, no matter what, I need you to be there period... no further explanation was given to me, just that instruction and a warning: "bring enough stuff to say for a few days". I used to drive to McAllen for business purposes quite often, nevertheless I almost never stayed for more than a night, considering it's a couple of hours drive to Monterrey, so there was rarely a chance to spend the night there.
This brief moment, may appear meaningless even may escape from the memory, but that one minute call changed my carreer for years to come.
Monday arrived and I drove all the way up to McAllen. I remember starting the day very early in the morning as I needed to take in consideration not only the two hour drive but also the time it was going to take to cross the border; so finally I arrived to McAllen's office, and I met my boss there, he also had an early morning as he flew from Mexico City; his first words to me: "You are going to stay here for 3 weeks"; in that precise moment I realized my controller peer for that location was nowhere to be seen, and there I was taking charge at his position, some people from Houston headquarters met with my boss and after a couple of hours, I held a meeting with him, and in a very gentle way he said: "your 3 weeks just became 6 months as you are going to be in charge of this office plus San Diego and El Paso's". There I was being appointed as Regional Controller for LATAM operations withing the US. Just for kicks, by the end of that very week, I received another call from him (as he flew back on Wednesday of the same week), the purpose of the call: my 6 month appointment just became permanent.
Those two years were full of travel, hard work, negotiations, and so much fun; understanding that even though spanish is spoken all across latinamerica, we don't speak the same language, those idioms... oh those idioms!, so confusing and fun at times; My failed attempt to understand portuguese; up to these days whenever I visit Brazil still I can't understand a word.
You may ask, what those offices stationed within the US had to do with LATAM operations? Well what we did there was to consolidate procurement for all LATAM, as pretty much all vendors we used on the fire & protection industry were stationed in the US, even intercompany vendors, however the market size for individual countries whitin LATAM was not attractive to US companies (except from Mexico which was the largest operation), therefore credit terms, rebates and discounts were not available to LATAM, on top of that we didn't have all the e-banking we have nowadays, so they were asked for credit letters, bonds, and so on and so forth. So in order to improve pricing, volumes, and credit terms we concentrated all purchasing. Between US companies the level of trust is higher, regarding credit terms we got better ones, and including the full volume we even qualify for rebates; the downside? a reconciliation nightmare, therefore I needed to visit them constantly to manage the particulars with each country. Another fun fact at the time? I got deeper within the management matrix; I used to have a couple of bosses while in NE Mexico, when I move to the US, I suddenly was reporting to 5 different people.
Those couple of years matured my professional carreer as they exposed me to a whole different range of cultures, ideologies, people, way of doing business and suddenly I became multicultural, living abroad, doing business and negotiations all accross the continent, I was no longer playing major leagues, as I was doing the previous two years within the same world class corporation, I graduated to the all star game, at least that's how I looked at it at the time, that was the cornerstone where my carreer started to launch; and it all started with a one minute call.
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