There are millions of people who own small businesses—and millions struggle. The Highest Calling is the inspirational story of one of them: Troy Becker. Troy has struggled for twelve years with his remodeling business. Not making much money, working seventy hours per week, his family life suffering, Troy is frustrated and confused.
One day, an old man named Cy mysteriously appears in Troy's life—and keeps appearing. Cy, who is on a desperate journey of his own, comes to understand he has been put there to help Troy—but why? And how will he convince Troy to listen?
The Highest Calling is the story of helping others and of learning how to do the right things to succeed. Cy weaves the most important and powerful business principles of all time into the lessons he delivers to his student, for Troy's sake—and his own. His teachings are beneficial to businesspeople and managers alike.
You will laugh, you will cry, and you will learn. The Highest Calling is more than an inspirational book. For those who seek, it is a powerful entrepreneurial education—one that will improve the lives of millions for a lifetime.
There are millions of people who own small businesses—and millions struggle. The Highest Calling is the inspirational story of one of them: Troy Becker. Troy has struggled for twelve years with his remodeling business. Not making much money, working seventy hours per week, his family life suffering, Troy is frustrated and confused.
One day, an old man named Cy mysteriously appears in Troy's life—and keeps appearing. Cy, who is on a desperate journey of his own, comes to understand he has been put there to help Troy—but why? And how will he convince Troy to listen?
The Highest Calling is the story of helping others and of learning how to do the right things to succeed. Cy weaves the most important and powerful business principles of all time into the lessons he delivers to his student, for Troy's sake—and his own. His teachings are beneficial to businesspeople and managers alike.
You will laugh, you will cry, and you will learn. The Highest Calling is more than an inspirational book. For those who seek, it is a powerful entrepreneurial education—one that will improve the lives of millions for a lifetime.
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Overview
There are millions of people who own small businesses—and millions struggle. The Highest Calling is the inspirational story of one of them: Troy Becker. Troy has struggled for twelve years with his remodeling business. Not making much money, working seventy hours per week, his family life suffering, Troy is frustrated and confused.
One day, an old man named Cy mysteriously appears in Troy's life—and keeps appearing. Cy, who is on a desperate journey of his own, comes to understand he has been put there to help Troy—but why? And how will he convince Troy to listen?
The Highest Calling is the story of helping others and of learning how to do the right things to succeed. Cy weaves the most important and powerful business principles of all time into the lessons he delivers to his student, for Troy's sake—and his own. His teachings are beneficial to businesspeople and managers alike.
You will laugh, you will cry, and you will learn. The Highest Calling is more than an inspirational book. For those who seek, it is a powerful entrepreneurial education—one that will improve the lives of millions for a lifetime.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497653368 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 06/17/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 262 |
| File size: | 532 KB |
About the Author
Janesky began his business adventure with self-employment at age seventeen. In the thirty-two years since, he has discovered what he teaches today—that in order for business owners to grow their companies, they must grow personally.
Janesky is the founder of Basement Systems, Inc., and its sister companies Connecticut Basement Systems, Inc., CleanSpace, Total Basement Finishing, Inc., Dr. Energy Saver, Inc., Dr. Energy Saver Connecticut, LLC, and MoreHouse Finance Company. He is also a cofounder of Foundation Supportworks, Inc. Basement Systems is an award-winning, successful-in-every-way enterprise located primarily in Seymour, Connecticut, with three hundred forty-five dealers in six countries.
Janesky's latest book, The Highest Calling, an inspirational novel about work and life, struggle and "success," won Best Business Book of 2010 from the Indie Book Awards, Small Business Trends.com and at the New England Book Festival. Learn more at TheHighestCallingBook.com.
Read an Excerpt
The Highest Calling
An inspirational novel about business and life; struggle and success.
By Lawrence Janesky
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2009 Lawrence JaneskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5336-8
CHAPTER 1
The End
The old man lay still in the casket at the front of the room. Giant flower arrangements crowded in from the left and right. Now, 3½ hours after the wake had begun, the end of the line of mourners, friends and acquaintances was in sight. As the last one approached to pay her final respects, the reverend visited the line of family members in the front row, slowly walked to the front, and turned to the quiet crowd.
"We welcome you all here this evening to say farewell to Cyril Mark James. It is wonderful to see so many people—family, friends, business associates, and members of the extended community here this evening. Cy's family, his loving wife of 42 years, Melissa, his son, Thomas, his daughters, Anne and Shannon, whom I know Cy was so proud of, and his four grandchildren, all thank you for coming."
The reverend went on. "Since Cy's passing of natural causes in his sleep on Tuesday, I have talked with so many people about him. The stories they told me were all consistent. He was a loving family man, and a skilled and successful businessman. Cy was a great husband, a great father, and a great boss. His family will miss him dearly, and his employees will miss him as their leader."
"Would anyone like to speak?" the Reverend asked.
From the second row on the aisle, a man in his 60's arose and came to the front. He began, "It is not so sad to celebrate the life of a man such as Cy. He lived a full and successful life. As you know, I worked with him as the vice president of the company for 23 years. I know that Cy was a man of integrity. He loved his work and his family. People talk of Cy as a success. But we forget it wasn't always that way."
The man really wanted to make sure his audience understood. "Cy grew up in a poor family, as most families were in the 1940's. He had no role models for achievement. But he figured it out along the way. He often told me how much he had to learn to make the company work. How many obstacles he had to overcome to thrive and, sometimes, just to survive."
"If Cy were here, I know he'd tell you that he wasn't a 'natural.' He had a desire to build something great and to win, and he was determined to do what was necessary to accomplish that. He had a zest for life. I know Cy would tell you not to cry for him, for he lived life to the fullest. His only regret in dying would be that he would miss his family until he saw them again in heaven."
The man choked up, and stopped speaking for a minute. When he could, he got more words out. "I can't tell you what Cy has done for me and my family since I met him by chance 27 years ago. And so many other employees would say the same thing."
It seemed the man had more to say, but he cut it short; he could no longer control his voice. "We will all miss him."
Several other people came up to say things about the man who had been their loved one or boss. After listening to the speakers, everyone there knew that Cy had been a good man, even a great man. People from outside of his family and company—even those who had never really known Cy—wished they had. "What did he do to make people say such nice things about him?" some wondered. They'll never know now.
A soft, white mist surrounded Cy as he slowly regained consciousness. He wasn't confused, and he felt calm as he began to awaken and realize where he was. The white mist gave way to rich blues, and wisps of white and golden light. Cy felt a calm, because he knew he was going home.
Suddenly, he felt as if he stopped moving, though there was no landmark to indicate that he had. Before him, a white form appeared. Cy squinted to make out an angelic figure that became clearer as the moments went by. It was beautiful, Cy thought. He realized that that was his first clear thought since he had gone to bed Monday night.
The angel became firm and purposeful. She held up her hand to Cy and said, "You cannot come in." Cy's eyes widened. His mind began to race as he reflected over his life. "Why not?" He began to tremble. "What did I do? Haven't I been good?" The vision of the angel began to fade. "Wait! Wait!" Cy began to panic as he felt a sensation of moving backwards. The angel had nearly disappeared.
"What did I do?" Cy pleaded desperately. "No! No!" He felt the sensation of falling backwards. He heard the angel's voice in a distant whisper. "Your work is not done."
"What? What?" he yelled, trembling in panic. He fell down through space, tumbling, the sound of wind rushing loudly by. "No! Please!" He fell for what seemed like forever, and then he lost consciousness.
CHAPTER 2New Work to be Done
Before he opened his eyes, he could smell it. For a moment he didn't want to open his eyes, for fear of what he'd see. It sure seemed very warm here, but not as hot as he had imagined. That smell, though. He wanted to gag.
Curiosity got him, and he slowly opened his eyes. He saw green. There was a written message. "For a good time call ..."
"What! This is some version of hell!" Cy did a double-take to the left and right. "I'm in a Porta-Potty!" Now, taking control of all the faculties he had when he was alive, he instinctively kicked the door open. He was surprised to find he wasn't held captive, when it flung all the way open. The door came back on its spring so fast he had to stop it before it knocked him in the face. He stepped out to the side yard of an old home under renovation.
"What? Where am I?" Cy said bewildered. He stood in front of the Porta-Potty trying to make sense of it all. "Am I alive again?"
About 20 feet in front of him, a man came around the corner murmuring, "This job sucks." The man sat down on an overturned bucket near the bushes next to the house, and pulled out a small bottle in a brown bag to take a sip. Cy waited for the man to take notice of him, but he never did.
Cy thought, "If I'm alive again, then I want to go see my wife and tell her I'm here." He walked toward the street. "But where am I?" As he approached, he saw a sign on a truck. "Troy Builders." Cy recognized the area code as the same as his own. He grew excited and began to hurry. But when he got to the curb, he was stopped, as though by an invisible wall. He tried again, but he couldn't push across it. "What the..?"
A voice whispered to him. "Stay."
"Stay?" he repeated back. "Why?" Cy nearly asked, "Who are you?" But he stopped himself. He recognized the voice as the angel's. "What did I do? Why won't you take me? What did I do?" He stood still and silent, waiting for an answer. Nothing. He tried to cross the curb again, but still he couldn't.
"Stay," the voice whispered.
Cy thought, "If I'm alive, I'm sure not in control." As he pondered all this, confused, a rumbling noise began behind him. It got louder and faster, and a voice began to yell from the roof. Cy whirled around as the voice became a scream. "Heads up! Heads up! Heads up! Watch out!" Suddenly, a 90-pound bundle of roof shingles slid off the side of the roof. As it hit, it crushed a patio chair with authority, and was deflected enough to hit a glass patio door as it broke open, shattering the glass.
A woman screamed from inside and marched out of her front door seconds later, yelling. She was partly angry, but mostly scared. The worker who was shingling the roof raced down the ladder. The man who was sitting on the bucket was up now and acting defensive, saying he had nothing to do with it. Another man, a young man, appeared and looked at the broken glass, not knowing what to say.
The roofer started to apologize just as the woman let him have it. "My dog lies in front of the door! You nearly killed her!" The woman held a small dog in her arms, and she began to cry, still yelling.
Cy found himself closer to the scene, but nobody seemed to notice him. Just then, in the middle of all the drama, a loud truck approached. It was a concrete mixer. As intense as the scene was, the giant, loud truck helped to break things up. The woman turned, still upset, and went back in her house. The man on the bucket walked around the house and disappeared, and the roofer went back up on the roof.
The young man was left, looking at the truck. He looked at his watch, then looked up, not knowing what to do. The concrete truck driver waved him over. The young man walked to the street. Cy noticed that the young man wasn't affected by the invisible fence as he crossed the curb.
The driver spoke to the young man as if daring him to argue. "C'mon, I gotta' get this stuff outta' here quick," he said, motioning to the back of the truck. "Where do you want it?" The young man looked nervously at his watch again. He looked towards the driveway, towards the truck, and then back at the driveway.
"Well?" the driver barked impatiently. "There's footings we got formed in the backyard," the young man finally said, tentatively.
The driver quickly produced a paper and hung his arm out the cab window with a pen. "Sign your life away," he said, both sarcastically and routinely. The young man didn't know what the paper said, but he'd seen other men sign these papers before from a distance. He started to read the paper, but as he did so the driver slapped the side of the door with his palm and then turned it up, obviously annoyed. The driver certainly was not going to give the young man time to read it, so he just scribbled his name and handed it back to the driver. "Print your name, too," the driver said. The young man complied.
The driver said, "You got help, right?" The young man hesitated. "You got help, right?"
The young man steeled himself, and admitted loudly over the noise of the truck, "They aren't here yet, so I'm it right now. But they should be here soon."
"Jesus," the driver said, as if the wheels of industry had just been threatened. "Whatever," he said sarcastically. "So pull in the driveway?"
"Yeah," said the young man. "Pull right in here." He motioned with his hands, and looked like he was trying his best to do something he had never done before.
The young man walked back in the driveway, motioning the truck to come his way. As the truck pulled past the broken glass door, and its noise reverberated through the house, the woman looked out in terror. The driver saw the broken glass, and shook his head as he edged by with his giant truck. When he saw the footing forms in the backyard, he stopped the truck and motioned for the young man to come to the door.
The driver yelled, "You ain't gonna reach those forms from this driveway. You gotta' chute?" The young man didn't really know what a chute was, but he knew he didn't have one. "No," he said, now seemingly at the mercy of the driver.
"Well, we gotta pull up on the grass," said the driver.
"Okay," the young man said.
"It's gonna make ruts," the driver warned, directing the young man's next response with a shrug and lifted eyebrows, as if to say, "We have no choice."
The young man thought for a moment, then said, "Well, that's okay." He envisioned himself flattening the ruts with his feet or a rake that he had on site.
The driver revved the big diesel engine, shifted gears, and lurched the giant truck onto the grass. The young man was in front of the truck, waving the driver towards him. The heavy monster edged forward and downward as it sank deeper and deeper into the lawn. A sprinkler head popped out of the ground like a zit. The driver finally stopped, got out and slammed the door. "Damn!" he yelled.
The homeowner watched the scene from her window.
The young man knew that work would be needed to repair the lawn. He worried, as his mind raced. He looked at his watch again, then barked up and tried to reason with the driver. "Look, the damage is done, we can't change that. But if you pull up four feet more, we can at least fill these forms and unload your truck."
As the drama unfolded, nobody noticed Cy as he moved around the scene. Cy could see that the young man was trying his best—trying to salvage something good out of a bad situation.
The driver climbed back up into his smoking beast, with its giant drum revolving and its perishable load scratching inside to get out. The driver put the truck in gear, revved the engine, and let the clutch out. The truck moved forward two more feet, and then the unexpected happened. They both heard a dull thud as the truck suddenly dropped about 18 inches in the front driver's corner. "Oh frig!" the driver yelled. The young man wanted to just run away, like he had had nothing to do with it, but he realized that wasn't an option.
Just then a pickup truck marked "Troy Builders" pulled up with two men inside. They parked crooked in the street and ran towards the truck, which they could see from the street was listing over in the backyard. The young man watched them approach, half relieved and half scared of what they were going to say. "Holy crap!" the senior man said as he neared the truck.
"Freddie, where were you?" the young man yelled out to him. "You were supposed to be here 15 minutes ago! I tried my best!" He showed great worry.
"I know, Danny. It's okay. We'll figure it out." Now, at least, Cy knew the young man's name. It was Danny, and he appeared to be comforted by Freddie's statement.
Then Freddie added, "Troy will be here any minute." This statement took away Danny's comfort.
"Oh man, I'm dead," Danny said.
Freddie got down on his knees and looked closely at the tire, which was buried up to its axle in the lawn. "It's a septic tank!" The four men all cursed different words at the same time. Cy looked up to see the woman run inside her house. Cy knew she was probably calling her husband. Taking control, Freddie said to the driver, "Call a big ass tow truck to pull you out. By the time he gets here we'll have you unloaded." He said to his co-worker, "Jim, get the chute!"
Just then a shiny, new, extended cab pickup truck pulled up. A medium-built man in his thirties got out and immediately began surveying the situation. As he walked along the driveway, his eyes widened, his body became tense, and his forehead and neck contorted. The homeowner began to yell at him through the broken glass. The man from the bucket emerged, to say he had nothing to do with it. The driver began to reprimand him for not having capable people on site, and "there better not be any damage" to his truck.
This man in his thirties was the owner of the company working on the house. "Troy, it's the septic tank. I got a tow truck coming and we're going to offload the truck right now," Freddie said, without waiting for a break in the yelling from the driver or the homeowner. Then Freddie turned away quickly and went to work.
Troy listened as the driver blamed it all on Danny. He listened to the horrified homeowner tell about the shingles, the door, her dog, the ruts, the septic tank, and who was going to pay for it, and could she use the toilet? And how long would it take to fix? How will the truck get out? And is the asphalt driveway damaged, too? She had called her insurance company and her husband ... it went on and on.
Troy tried to keep his wits, but Cy could tell he was stressed and becoming overwhelmed.
Cy knew enough about running a business to know that the cash register in Troy's head was totaling the damage, and emptying fast. Troy looked like he was going to blow.
Danny stayed silent, waiting, knowing what must be coming.
He hoped the homeowner would not go inside; she was a buffer against Troy's anger toward him. He knew Troy to be pretty fair, and a pretty even-spirited guy in the three months since Danny had taken the job. But he also knew Troy was under a lot of pressure; he had seen Troy lose control once before.
Cy watched Troy endure the verbal wrath of his customer, and then promise he'd make it right. "Yes, Mrs. Kaspian ..." But there was something about taking abuse from a person for someone else's mistake that could make a caring man pop. Self-control under pressure was a learned skill; Troy, while he always tried, did not have this one mastered consistently. Still unsatisfied, the homeowner finally went inside. Troy then turned towards Danny and closed in on him.
"You stupid idiot!" Troy began, "What were you thinking? Do you know how much a loaded concrete truck weighs?" Troy's voice grew louder as the frustration of both the day, and the whole week, swelled up in him and came out in an eruption. "This is going to cost me BIG. In fact, we'll have to work this entire job, and the next one, and the one after that, to give this customer a new septic tank, and then we STILL only break even! But do you care? No!
Because you're stupid, that's why!"
The homeowner was back outside, witnessing the drubbing that Danny was taking in front of the driver, Freddie, Jim and herself. She felt bad for Danny. Freddie did too, but after working with Troy for nine years, he knew not to interrupt now. It wasn't often that Troy blew up. When he did, you didn't try to stop him.
After Troy hit his peak, and began coming down the other side, he turned to Freddie. "And where the hell were you?"
Troy almost retracted his question as soon as he asked it. Troy knew Freddie to be a skilled and loyal employee with good judgment—one he would have a hard time replacing. Freddie looked up from dragging the concrete out of the chute with a shovel and said, without emotion, "I was at the Dingman job this morning, where you wanted me to unload the lumber in the right spot—just like you told me to do before I came over here. The truck was late and Mr. Dingman had a lot of questions. I got here as fast as I could, but I was a few minutes late."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Highest Calling by Lawrence Janesky. Copyright © 2009 Lawrence Janesky. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Chapter 1—The End,Chapter 2—New Work to be Done,
Chapter 3—An Awkward Introduction,
Chapter 4—Man Interrupted,
Chapter 5—The Lumberyard Encounter,
Chapter 6—The Lesson of Self,
Chapter 7—To the Future,
Chapter 8—Designing the Machine,
Chapter 9—Getting Started,
Chapter 10—Lesson in the Library,
Chapter 11—A Long Way to Go,
Chapter 12—A Clear Picture,
Chapter 13—Early Morning Lesson,
Chapter 14—Rallying the Team,
Chapter 15—Disaster,
Chapter 16—Assessing the Damage,
Chapter 17—Grim Reality,
Chapter 18—A Brand New Day,
Chapter 19—Becoming a Leader,
Chapter 20—A Missing Link,
Chapter 21—Moving Forward,
Chapter 22—A Real Company,
Chapter 23—A Long Way to Go,
Chapter 24—Back to the Park,
Chapter 25—Milestones,
Chapter 26—The Last Lesson,
Chapter 27—Going Home,
Chapter 28—Legacy,