Have you ever wondered what would happen if you put just a little bit of the wisdom you have from your day to day job down on paper and shared it with anyone who wanted to know about your niche?What you do every day is a niche and there are others who do what you do too.
I remember when I was a teenager, my parents were doing floors professionally, and I thought that was the worst job in the world. I worked two or three nights a week with them in the summer scrubbing up wax after they used the stripper on it, and then we’d wax the floors before morning came and all the shoppers came back into the store.
One night we’d hired a new guy and he was just learning the trade. He didn’t know that you had to edge your mop every time you wrung it out! As a 16 yer old, I was smarter than this guy who was 20 years my senior (way back then I thought he was pretty old). I mean truly, anybody can do what I was doing. But I had to teach him how to do it.
When I got home the next morning, my mom said something to me about training the new guy. She then suggested I write a manual about how to strip the floor and she’d read over it. So, I wrote a manual and showed it to her. It was about 30 pages of typed work, and it had all the steps necessary to clean, scrub, strip and rewax a floor for a professional looking shine. I photo copied that manual and mom bought 12 of them for training purposes. She took one to her supplier and he bought 30 of them, then he bought 30 more. I had the book bound by a local print ship with spiral binding and printed off 500 copies. Those 500 copies were sold within a few weeks.
Last week, I was visiting with a local professional janitor and he showed me his ‘catalogue of information’ and in his book case was a black spiral bound copy of my book with a rather tattered looking cover. He didn’t know I was the writer of that battered old book. But he thumped on it with a knuckle and said, “That’s my floor cleaning Bible, whenever I hire someone new I run copies of that book and they have to read them. There’s every step you take when you clean and strip a floor in there, and it works. Says right on the first page the writer was 16 and worked with her parents in the business, but she sure knew her stuff.”
I asked if he had an extra copy of that old book and brought it home.
It’s embarrassing the number of mistakes in that book, but I’m telling you, if what I wrote in that book has made that much difference in someone’s life, how much more difference could you make by sharing the steps, tips or ideas you have from doing your job all these years?
That story has had a profound effect on me, Jan. It’s really a tribute to the longevity of the printed word. But you’re right about the possibilities for all of us, to get something “out there”.