Delivering Greatness: How I Found Success...and You Can, Too!

By Tom V Quinn and Carl L Zuanelli

Delivering Greatness provides the secret sauce for achieving success in life, business, and everything in between. Tom V. Quinn's proven recipe for getting over the finish line faster is presented in a conversational, direct, and humorous way that is grounded in over thirty years of business and life experiences. Join us today on the jo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Quinn
• Release date: Sep 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781737957195

Tom V Quinn

Tom V. Quinn is a food industry professional with over thirty years of successful business and people management experience. He has spent decades mentoring hundreds of people and sharing key learnings for the betterment of others. Now he is proud to share these hard-earned lessons with you. Tom and his wife, Linda, divide their time between Connecticut and Cape Cod, while their two grown children, Tom and Mary, are successfully building their futures in different parts of the East Coast.

Book preview

Part 1

THE JOURNEY TO GREATNESS

MENTORING, THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

It would be pointless to tell any of this story without giving credit to the mentors and teachers I have had over the last forty-five years. I can honestly say that if you do nothing else noteworthy in your life, take the time to teach and mentor someone. It doesn’t cost much to do, and it may be one of the only things that lives beyond you and gives back to the world after you’re gone. That’s a really important KEY LEARNING (see how I subtly identify these things?):

Be a Mentor.

My first mentor, as is true for most people, was my father. Although he may not have been perfect, I picked up many of the building blocks of what I am today from him. That’s another interesting point for those of you young folks reading this text (or listening to James Earl Jones reading the audio version). Learning from your mentor does not mean copying or emulating everything he or she does. Your job as the student is to take the best traits of your mentor while forgiving the failings and mix them with your own. That’s what makes greatness. Not reading a fix your life or be a better manager in 10,000 easy lessons book and doing exactly what they say. Be your own thinker. Take the best of what you hear, see, and experience and mix them with you: The new sum becomes greater than the original parts.

The Original Mentor

My father, also named Tom Quinn, like his father before him (lots of creativity in my family), taught me many things, not by his words—although he took time to share those—but through his actions. Big Example: I made Eagle Scout when I was eighteen (ten days before time ran out on my eligibility). This was a pretty big deal, as statistically about 1 percent of all the kids who join Boy Scouts achieve the rank of Eagle; I was the only one in my family to achieve this ultimate level. At that time, my father was working for General Foods International (a company later purchased by Kraft if you are Googling) and frequently took three- to four-week trips at a clip across Europe and Asia. When he got the call that I made the rank of Eagle Scout, he was in Germany. The following weekend, midway through his three-week trip, my dad hopped a plane and flew eight and a half hours home on a Friday to take the family out to a celebratory dinner and then hopped another plane Sunday and flew twenty-one hours to Tokyo to pick up his trip where he left off. At eighteen, I certainly understood his travel regimen and would have gratefully accepted dinner when he got back. For him, that wasn’t good enough. The best part of this story (as if that part isn’t pretty great on its own) is what occurred much later. In 1996 he went out to the Cleveland Clinic for triple bypass surgery which was going to be a tricky procedure for him. We spoke before I took him out there for the surgery and shared with him how his actions when I made Eagle Scout had changed my life and formed my perspective on how to treat others. He didn’t remember doing any of that, because to him, it was just the right thing to do and you do what’s right, regardless of the risk or sacrifice.

Do what’s right, no matter the risk or sacrifice. You can always deal with any repercussions with your head held high, but once you start to justify to yourself anything less than what’s right, nothing else will matter very much.

Here’s a practical application. In the late 1990s, the company for which I was vice president of sales merged three divisions into one. The incoming regime—whose arrogance was apparent in their belief that if they wanted you to work on Christmas you’d better be at the office by seven in the morning on Christmas Day—decided to have a make-or-break meeting on my son’s seventh birthday. I politely explained that it was my son’s birthday and that I would come down to Philadelphia the day before, meet all day, have dinner, meet all night if they wished, but at four in the morning I was leaving to be home before my son woke up to open his presents. On my way home that morning, one of my direct reports called me in disbelief that I had taken such an action. I explained that for nine years I preached work hard/play hard, deliver without fail, but that family always came first. If I didn’t live those same ethics when my neck was on the line, I didn’t deserve to be their leader and didn’t deserve their respect and loyalty. My son had a great birthday, and I was fired shortly thereafter. Six weeks after I was fired, I was hired by the company where I have been for more than eighteen years and have had the time of my life doing what I was meant to do.

Do what’s right. Virtue brings its own rewards.

John Spatola

John was one of my bosses in the first years of my business career. I started in the food industry (I was the only one of my siblings to go into the family business) as a food broker, which meant that after receiving my $45,000-plus degree from Fairfield University (1987 dollars), I spent six months on my hands and knees, scrubbing shelves and ruining dress pants. I had other managers at the broker house before John, but he was the most influential, as I worked for him eight of my ten years there. We first met when he pulled my young scrawny neck out of the fire for taking on more than I could handle. That taught me a very important business lesson.

If you can’t handle something, there is no shame in asking for help. There is all sorts of shame (and bloodshed) in failure.

I was John’s first assistant. During my interview, he wasn’t even convinced he needed one. I told him with my best twenty-three-year-old arrogance to give me a chance for two weeks and I would prove he needed an assistant. That led to an eight-year partnership and a debt I will never be able to repay. John epitomized mentoring. In most learning situations, we are forced to watch carefully and draw the best conclusions we can. With John, we could be mid-crisis—phones ringing off the hook, people yelling, a line of angry folks outside his office clamoring to get in—and he would look at me and in a calm voice say, Now when you become in charge one day, and I know you will, and this situation happens, here’s what you do . . . . His ability to remain composed when all seemed to be collapsing around him was an incredible lesson and a skill that has made me much of what I am today.

Always control the pace of the situation, never let it control you. Once you have lost control of timing and action, if you don’t get it back quickly, all will be lost.

This is why good coaches call time out when they don’t like how the momentum has shifted. Coaches who don’t regain control lose. Working with John was also an exercise in patience. I worked for him for most of my twenties and watched many of my contemporaries get promoted around me. He would always tell me, There is more to learn and when it’s time, we will both know. That’s a really hard thing for a driven twentysomething-year-old to hear when he is eager to save the world and be great. Every one of those individuals who had been promoted past me crashed and burned (either was fired or quit) due to his or her lack of skill and experience. When I was eventually promoted, I became the goto guy because I had the skill, experience, presence of mind, and drive to fix broken or failing businesses and consistently deliver greatness. I would not have been that guy without John’s teachings. Everything in its time.

It is always preferable to take over dying or failing projects because the odds of success are ultimately greater. If the business dies, then it was probably dead before you got there, but if you can bring it back from the ashes, people will think you can do miracles.

John, if you ever get a chance to read this, thank you.

Scott Modica

It should be noted that for most of my time with the food broker, I commuted 160 miles round-trip five days a week. You have to understand this, or nothing that follows will make sense (cheap Charles Dickens reference). After the birth of our first child, this two-hour-long commute each way began to take a toll on my life at home. This culminated in a strong suggestion from my wife that I needed to find a new job or find a new family. Although this seemed like a daunting task for a guy with minimal skills and average intelligence, it seemed easier than trying to find another group of people who would put up with me, so the job search began. I found a job as a regional sales manager with a food company that my father was running as a division of a larger corporation. I took the job because I could work from home with minimal travel. All the managers at the broker house were very gracious and told me in no uncertain terms that if the change didn’t work out, I would always have a home there. What no one knew at the time was that shortly thereafter the broker house would go Chapter Seven and five thousand people would lose their jobs nationally with no severance, no medical, and no job. My phone rang off the hook for weeks with people asking, What did you know? I replied I knew my wife was going to leave me if I didn’t find another job. Her suggestion saved our lives. This isn’t worthy of bold type, but it’s a pretty good rule: Life gives you all sorts of signals. Be smart enough to listen to them. Lacking the smarts, make sure you marry someone smarter than yourself. You’ll have a better fighting chance.

The business world, like life, is like the moving sidewalk at Disney World, except in life the sidewalk doesn’t move at the same speed as the ride. It speeds up and slows down, and you need to know when to get on and off. If you get off too soon, you miss precious opportunities, but if you hang on too long, you’ll hit the wall—hard. Lacking that, marry someone smarter than you.

So anyway, Scott Modica (remember this segment started with Scott) was my first direct boss at the new company. On our first business trip, he explained to me that he didn’t want to hire me but my father forced him to (now that’s motivation, folks). Right after that, however, he explained that after seeing me in action, we were going to make a great team. Six to seven months later, Scott was charged with restructuring the organization. He promoted me to Eastern Division manager, national sales manager, and then vice president of sales within about six months over my father’s strong objections. My father felt it was too much, too fast. Scott told my father that he would have to order him not to promote me, because Scott was charged with putting the best possible team of people together and he felt I needed to be part of that if we were to succeed. I worked every day to live up to that