How the Industry Has Given Back ...to Me by Steve Stephens, Steve Stephens Consulting
Not too many months after being told I would not walk again and have very limited use of my arms and hands, one of my dearest friends in the world located me online. She had no idea of the trauma I was facing. It had to be devine intervention. Because, if I ever needed a real friend, it was then. Allison Hester and I had been wonderful friends years before when she served as editor of Cleaner Times Magazine. After Allison learned of my situation, she was truly devastated. Allison’s moral support played a big part in giving me the encouragement needed to get my body out of bed in the mornings when the pain was so devastating I just wanted to give up. No one can comprehend the mere act of putting weight on my feet. It is like submerging my feet in ultra hot boiling water every time my feet touch the floor! Even now, the water is still just as hot as it was the first day – actually, even hotter because feeling is returning.
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Allison and I introducing my book, The Pressure Cleaning Marketing Bible, at the 2010 PWNA Convention.
Pressure Cleaning Contractor
However, if you have support from others, and believe God wants you to walk, you can walk in the fire of life. We will save the operations on my spinal cord, the numerous broken neck bones they actually removed, and severe conclusions for another time. The bottom line here is that I was almost completely mentally and financially broken. Although I had been writing for Cleaner Times since 1992, it was never a paid gig. I just considered it incredible advertising for my pressure washing company (HydroTech) and a sure-fire way to earn credibility with customers. Allison, who had gone back to work part-time for CT in 2009, talked to them about hiring me. (No one will ever really know how much I needed that writing money.) Then Allison and Charlene (CT’s publisher) had a garage sale for me that raised a muchneeded $1000. By this time, my savings was gone, CDs gone, money market gone, and I had broken the company up. I attempted to salvage my largest customer, but they were paying less than half of what they had paid seven years ago. I could no longer afford to pay my skilled technicians $25 an hour when our untrained competition was doing work for $12 an hour, if that. If I were a whole person at this time and not always spacey on medications I know I could have conquered the situation. But, not in a wheelchair, half coherent and scared of losing everything, including my mental state. My physical condition appeared to improve drastically over the next year. However, mentally, I would get lost – forgetting where I was, forgetting names, conversations I had been involved in, and tasks that I had said I would do. If I had an important meeting I would have to heavily medicate to deal with the pain. I would appear to be doing fine. As a matter of fact, the medications even helped my walking, but was it really worth the mental disability it was creating? While those meds were working, I really felt I was improving
Fall 2011
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