Destiny calls: One man’s story about taking advantage of the moment

The path to a promotion can sometimes be long and boring. You’ll need to excel at your work, make the right people happy and ensure in subtle ways that others realize your worth and potential to the organization.

Or you can drive the owner of your company to Milwaukee during a snowstorm and help him craft a killer email along the way.

At least that’s how Bryan Chadwick received his promotion a few years ago, a role that he eventually turned into a consulting job with Accenture and then later as an independent consultant. “My boss came out of his office ranting because his flight had been canceled at O’Hare and he needed to get to Minneapolis,” Chadwick says. “He somehow gets a flight out of the Milwaukee airport but has no way of getting there. He tells me that if I drive him, he’ll give me a couple of days off.”

Chadwick said the proposal seemed “a little weird and unprofessional” but he gladly accepted. “This was pre-wife and pre-kids. I really didn’t have much going on except going to the gym and going out with my friends so I said I’d do it,” says Chadwick, who now lives with his wife and two children in San Diego.

The ride to the airport started out with a bang when Chadwick says his boss got into a shouting match with one of the company’s sales reps over the phone.

“We sold business software and someone had completely over-promised and now there was a company in Connecticut that needed everything they thought we’d deliver immediately, and

I guess we were looking at four weeks before we’d have it finished.”

After watching his boss stew for about 10 or 15 minutes, Chadwick said he asked if there was anything he could do to help. “He said something like ‘yeah, you could get your friends in the office to get a clue about what it is we do, and what we can and can’t do,’” which gave Chadwick an idea.

Bad into good

The then-27-year-old staff accountant suggested going over an outline for an email or meeting that would discuss current company issues. “We were at a strange spot — small but getting bigger, profitable but spending money to keep up — so there were a lot of growing pains,” he says.

Chadwick says he turned on his phone’s voice recorder and listened to his boss rage at his own machine, mentioning the shortcomings of various employees, ineffective company practices and the amount of food that people left in the kitchen refrigerator at the end of each week.

“Oh, it was classic, like an anti-TED Talk,” Chadwick says.

Upon returning home from Milwaukee, Chadwick says he took his boss’s “tantrum” and turned it into 10 bullet points about professionalism in the workplace and expectations with clients.

“I cleaned up a lot of what he said and made it more succinct,” Chadwick says. “I took out names and specific instances and made things general but there was no doubting the validity of his concerns.”

Chadwick sent his boss the email, immediately regretted it and went to sleep.

The next morning, an email from his boss titled “THANKYOU” was waiting for him in his inbox.

“He said I put everything he wanted to say into words he would have never been

able to use,” he says. “I emailed back that I enjoyed doing it and if he needed any help like that again to let me know.”

Two weeks later, after the “list of 10,” as it was referred to, was distributed throughout the company and presented in a mandatory meeting, Chadwick was named senior adviser, a position that didn’t even exist prior to the snowstorm.

“I basically was his sounding board and — I guess you could say ‘translator’ — for three years,” he says.

Chadwick quickly adapted to his new role, learning the ins and outs of helping new companies launch. When his boss decided to sell in 2014, Chadwick revised his resume, secured a few high-level references and began looking for a job.

“Everything that I did stemmed from that particular car ride,” he says. “It was like a little gift to me. And I’m glad I got to take advantage of it.”

– Marco Buscaglia