‘Stop by my office when you are free’, the note from Mudit read. I was working for a large technology contract manufacturer when a leading vacuum cleaner brand submitted an RFI (Request for Information) for manufacturing services.
Dyson prides themselves on innovation, design, and quality and were looking for a trusty partner to manufacture their products. Since I was involved in all sorts of production and supply chain processes, my boss asked me to write a few paragraphs to include in our response.
I was in St Pete, Florida, right on the Gulf of Mexico. My daily ritual was head down working in my work cube mornings and afternoons and getting out the office for lunch. I’d walk across the road to Publix to bring something back, or if it was too hot and humid, I’d drive to the nearby mangrove beach, park my car there and catch a breath. Life was good.
Before we moved to Florida, one summer, after a cruise around the Bahamas, we drove fourteen hours from Miami back to our house in Huntsville, Alabama. We stopped five times along the way, one-year-old twin boys in tow. At each rest stop my wife and I would watch the boys run around and play in the thick centipede grass. They were having a blast.
“Let’s move to Florida”, I announced. And just like that I was obsessed with finding a way to move my family from Alabama to Florida, something that surprisingly only took six months to achieve.
We were living in a vacation destination and every weekend felt like I was a million miles from work. Often after work I’d catch the sunset while floating in the warmth of the Gulf waters, while others took it in from the beach…apparently because sunset is feeding time for bull sharks, something I only later realized.
Not a week passed when we received a response from Dyson with explicit instructions on the next steps. And so, that evening, after a short hop to Newark, I was sitting on the longest nonstop flight in the world to Singapore, with 19 hours to create a pitch.
