WILL WE RETURN TO GUAYAQUIL?

My family and I had a very good time in Salt Lake City in the winter of 1984. Skiing was good as the mountains got very good snow storms that left an average of 65 inches of snow on the ground in most skiing resorts. Past the year end holidays, we concentrated in enjoying the winter every weekend I was home; however, the travelling overseas did not slow down, and instead it intensified with the purchase, in November 1983, of a new scuba diving resort in the Caribbean Island of Bonaire, one of the three islands of the Dutch Antilles. Evidently, McMillian, the chairman of NWP Corp was not about to quit diving the magnificent waters of the Caribbean. As a result, I had one more offshore location to visit, just the opposite of what I had been expecting. But the Angels came to my rescue: In mid March 1984, on a Monday afternoon while I was doing some financial analysis concerning the Argentine operations, I got a totally unexpected phone call from Bogota, Colombia.
It was Bill Messett, the recruiter who had placed me in COFIEC, Quito, in 1978. Bill, a professional head hunter with his Latin American headquarters in Bogota, Colombia, had been requested by Seaboard Corporation ("Seaboard"), a large Kansas city based corporation, to find a Comptroller for one of their offshore operations, and he wanted to talk to me about it, despite the fact that my profile was somewhat different than the one looked for by Seaboard, he could arrange for an interview for me with the top executives of the company. Seaboard was basically looking for a high ranking financial officer, preferably American, in his late thirties or early forties, with a minimum of 10 years of experience overseas, preferably in Latin-America, who would be fluent in Spanish and be willing to transfer to one of their operations in that area of the world.
Bill had thought that I might make a good candidate for the position because I was a Latin-American, speaking fluent English and Spanish; I was 41, had a solid accounting and financial background and had over 15 years of experience, five of them in the United States. The idea made sense.
I was glad to hear from Bill, whom I had heard nothing from since I left Ecuador in 1980. A great salesman as he is, he painted to me a wonderful picture of my future, going back to Latin America as an American expatriate with all the privileges assigned to this type of executives: housing allowance; two fifteen day vacations a year with air travel and car rental expenses included; schooling allowance for our children in the best English speaking school in town; club expenses in two different sports or social clubs, two cars with all related expenses paid; etc., etc. It sounded like a dream come true and I was extremely excited about the possibility until Bill mentioned the place to which the searched executive would be assigned. It was Guayaquil, Ecuador. It may sound contradictory or even absurd that I was cooled off when Guayaquil was mentioned, unless we remember what happened with our vacations the previous summer, when El Niño made Guayaquil a great place to stay away from. Bill was surprised at my reaction and he tried to use his highly convincing arguments to change my attitude, all in vain. I just told him I was sorry to say no, but I was not going back to Guayaquil. Such was the impact of the 1983 El Niño weather on my family and me.
After about two hours of discussion, Bill seemed to have given up trying to convince me about the change, but that was just my impression. A good salesman like him never gives up and keeps trying to get his sale through. That same day, when I got home, Fanny, my wife was as sweet as she can be; she had fixed the most delicious dinner in months and waited on me like she hadn’t done in years. I was amazed to see and feel so much care and wondered what happened, or better, what was about to happen. I didn’t have to wait long before I began to discover what was behind that entire mom’s like behavior. As we were dining Fanny’s cooked delicious meal, she started to talk about how homesick she feels sometimes, how nice it would be to be back in Ecuador, near the family; near the whole “tribe” she said she missed so much. It was then and only then, that I decided to talk to her about my conversation with Bill Messett.
I looked at her eyes and I could see that she kind of knew about it, so I asked her directly how’s that she knew about my two hour conversation with Bill. She admitted immediately that Bill had called her that same afternoon, that he discussed with her about his search and the fact he thought I was very much qualified for the position he was trying to fill. Fanny then admitted also that Bill had convinced her that it would be a good idea to go back to our home town, Guayaquil. Fanny and I talked about this for hours and hours, in fact we talked about it for several days until she got me convinced it would be good for the kids, therefore, she concluded, it would be good for us as a family. Ever since I got married I have never taken an important decision without consensus with my wife, my partner, my companion, my confident, and the mother of my kids. Bill didn’t call again for the following week, he was apparently convinced that Fanny would do the job for him, and she did, she did it in the most effective possible way, just like intelligent women know how to do it.
When Bill called the following week, I pretended to be offended; I told him he was an SOB, that he was not playing in a leveled field, that he ganged up with my wife to get what he wanted, and so and so. He really thought I was mad at him until I laughed my heart out and told him he was a heck of a salesman, that he new the tricks of his business to the point I was impressed. We had a deal: he would call Kansas City and set up interviews with the top notch guys at Seaboard.

On April 2, 1984, I went to Kansas City, I took a late afternoon flight and arrived around seven PM. Rick Hoffman, the Company´s comptroller was waiting for me at the KC airport and took me to the hotel; it was the Sheraton Plaza, a nice hotel near the famous Plaza in the Missouri side of Kansas City. The man waited for me to check in and invited me for dinner, he wanted me to tell him what I would prefer to dine and I said “I’d love to have one of the famous Kansas City stakes I had seen advertized so many times in the airline magazines”. This was my first time in KC. He took me to a restaurant called The Old Mill (which it really was), a restaurant where I could get the meat I wanted to have. Dinner went from about 8:00PM to 10:00 PM. I ordered my favorite steak, a Prime Rib medium well with lot of meat juice, which I got, and was superb. During dinner, Rick and I talked about many things, including my background, my education, and, of course my professional formation at Arthur Andersen (“AA”), which was the second largest and most prestigious Accounting firm in America and the world in those days.

In my next posting: INTERVIEWING FOR A NEW JOB