Surprise Me God - The B Side of My Surprise (Don Heide)

Been thinking about your 'B Side' conversation all day and as Jan and I were walking this afternoon I decided I would tell you my 'B Side story.

In July 1999 my personal mentor and business partner died. He had struggled with heart issues for a long time after having had bypass surgery in 1978. I had moved into various positions he vacated as he moved up in management, ultimately retiring because of his heart condition. Much of what I learned about business, finance, sales and management I learned from him. He described himself as a good Lutheran - I don't think he was a believer.

In 1988 - I replaced my mentor as the President of a $25 million company but the owner was an alcoholic and his company was going bankrupt. This mentor became the money person and we together did an LBO. From 1988 to 1999 I was the president of this new company - I named it Applied Power Products - and with the good employees we had - took this LBO from a 6 Million company to over 25 million in 1999 employing approx 70 people. However, my partner and mentor died in July of 1998 and 10 months later the son of my partner asked me to leave the company and since the family owned more than 51% of the company, I decided to go quietly. Talk about a 'B Side' experience - I had worked in only one place, with one group of people for more than 30 years and now found myself - unemployed. I had never written a resume or really interviewed for a job and now found myself asking 'what next'?

This was a difficult experience on two fronts. First of all, I was accustomed to interviewing people for various roles in business, not interviewing to find work. I had become used to being the one with the final say in what we were or weren't going to do. Losing that had me asking a lot of questions about who I was now going to be. Secondly, Jan and I were going to have to get used to living on a lot less income. The year after the termination and my severance was completed, my income was just a bit less than the fed withholding had been the previous year. A lot of things needed to change and all of those changes carried with them a lot of emotion. We put our house up for sale and began looking for a new place to call home. We moved into our current home in August 2001.

I have omitted a lot of the details in the story - many of them I have forgotten by now - but I really want to talk about how much the God piece really meant to Jan and me through all of this. From the very beginning of my sales career I knew what I needed to do to be successful but also knew that if God wasn't going to bless the activity, it wasn't going to work so I prayed regularly that God would bless and promised that we would faithfully give back and bless others with our time and money. In this economy, I am so grateful that I don't have the responsibility of keeping the business healthy and God has provided for us in ways that are surprising us and we are grateful. The home we have is a wonderful place and we feel so blessed to be able to live here - neither of us miss the 'old house'. The timing of all of this also was totally a God thing - selling our 'old house' couldn't have happened at a better time - it sold quickly and for a lot more than we ever expected.

We are sooooo Blessed - but there is a 'B Side ' to the story!