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March 21, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show
16:15
Never Too Late: One Man’s Journey from Temp Job to CEO
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This is an iHeart Podcast.
If you love what you do and you love where you do it, don't let anything stop you from being successful there.
Put in the hours, put in the time, put in the work, put in the effort.
At 21, Justin Misimore had just graduated college and was taking a year off from his education doing odd jobs to earn money for law school.
Or so he thought.
On this edition of On the Job, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals, we'll learn how Justin Misimore worked himself into an opportunity he never could have imagined.
If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you.
Find more information at expressprose.com.
Now, independent producer Philip Greitzer tells us the story of Justin Misimore's unexpected journey.
In an industrial park on the south side of Hickory, North Carolina is the headquarters of Gracia USA.
Hi, how are you?
How was your drive up?
That's Justin Misimore.
He's wearing jeans, a North Face shirt, and has a tattoo on his right forearm.
He looks more like a college student than the CEO and co-owner of this mid-sized manufacturing company.
Gracia is one of the few companies in the world that makes steel sawblade blanks that are used in the lumber, aircraft, and oil and gas industries.
A sawblade blank is the circular steel part of a sawblade.
Manufacturing blanks is an intricate process.
It involves high-tech lasers and a good deal of manual labor.
We have three lasers that are constantly running, either the sheet or the round.
The factory floor is about half the size of a football field.
And considering that lots of cutting, heating, and hammering is going on, it's incredibly neat.
Employees go about their business driving forklift trucks, loading steel blanks on pallets, operating cutting machines, and hammering the steel blanks.
Since the blanks are used for precision cutting, they have to be perfectly flat.
Using just a straight edge and a light, a man inspects the blanks.
If he finds any irregularities, he puts the blank on an anvil and hammers it out by hand, just like an old-fashioned blacksmith.
The first time he saw this, Misimore was impressed.
I was like, really?
It takes that much to make one of these things that I see on a shelf?
It really blew my mind.
And everyone has that same response whenever we bring them here for the first time.
You would never imagine how much work that it takes to make something so simple as a sawblade.
Back in 2008, when Misimore graduated from Appalachian State University with a degree in business accounting, accounting jobs were hard to find.
So he returned home to Taylorsville, North Carolina, moved in with his parents, and took several part-time jobs.
He was 21 and he was saving money to go to law school.
The goal was to save money, so renting an apartment was out of the question.
Moving somewhere on my own was not even an option.
So I worked with some friends that my parents knew.
I painted some high schools.
A friend of mine talked me into selling insurance and annuities and things like that.
So I did a lot of little things.
A family friend suggested that the Hickory, North Carolina Office of Express Employment Professionals might help him find work.
He completed an application and a few days later he was sent to Gracia for an interview.
Grasha was looking for someone with his background.
The next day, the company called.
He got the job.
Misimore started the following Monday as an assistant to the accounting manager.
The company's general manager, Klaus Jensen, really wanted to hire a financial officer.
But getting an experienced one would be expensive.
And right now, money was tight.
So an accounting assistant would have to do.
I thought, okay, let me see if I can get an assistant in first and see how he does and see if he has any potential.
If not, if I had to go out and hire an experienced accountant, at least I would have somebody who already knew something.
So I called Express that we had worked with for people out in the plant and told them what I needed.
And they sent out, I believe, five or six candidates.
And one of them was Justin.
Jensen planned for his new employee to handle basic accounting tasks.
But the accounting manager had other things in mind.
He had stacks of paper on his desk that were at least six inches to one foot tall.
And he knew where everything was.
They really wanted someone to just come by and help organize his office.
I started out doing that, knocked that out in a relatively quickly manner.
So once that was finished, they asked me to start updating some customer databases.
I'm just calling customers, finding out, you know, who's in charge of AR, AP, what do you have?
New phone numbers, new email addresses, and things like that.
AR and AP are accounts receivable and accounts payable.
Money's owed to and owed by the company.
Although these tasks weren't preparing Misimore to be a lawyer, for now, he didn't mind.
Yeah, I was a college kid who was taking a gap year.
I didn't intend for this to be a career path for me.
It was just a paycheck, it really was.
So anything they asked me to do, as long as the paycheck cashed at the end of the week, I was fine with it.
In my mind, my career hadn't started yet, but in reality, it was my career starting.
Perhaps Jensen realized this too, because he asked Misimore to look a little more closely at the customer accounts.
I was noticing that, you know, they had a lot of customers who were paying within, always paying, you know, 30 days, 30 days, 30 days.
And I was like, I wonder if these guys would be enticed to pay earlier if you would offer them a discount, get that money a little bit earlier.
And the guys who are constantly paying in, say, like 45 to 60 days, I wonder if they would be willing to pay in 30 days if you started charging them a finance charge.
And then the customers who are like really far past dude, is anyone calling these people on a regular basis, finding out, hey, where's our money?
Why are you not paying?
So there was a lot of small things that I noticed whenever I was going through those things that were easily addressed.
Justin had no practical experience working with accounts receivable.
I'm straight out of college, so all I really know is the theory behind accounting.
I've never really seen any real world practice behind any of it.
But in college, you learn theories and theories are supposed to work in real-world practice.
Do I know if they're going to work or not?
Absolutely not.
But what do I have to lose by bringing them up or suggesting them?
But he summoned up the courage and presented his ideas to the company executives.
I really had nothing to lose by mentioning this to anybody.
If they fire me, they fire me.
I just go back to doing what I was doing before I got here.
They implemented Misi Moore's plan, and it worked.
The company's cash flow improved.
Soon, Justin was taking on other tasks.
I just took over stuff.
It was funny.
I took over a lot of the IT stuff.
I mean, they had a person not working here, but they had an outside consultant.
They were paying him somewhere in the neighborhood of $80,000 a year to manage their IT stuff.
And they would call him in.
It's like, don't call him, I'll do it.
So I would go in there, reboot the server, and save them from having to call this guy in.
I looked around.
There was a company here in Hickory, contacted them, and they would manage our day-to-day IT services for $800 a month.
Instead of the security monitoring service calling company managers when the alarm went off, Justin told them he'd take the calls.
There really wasn't anything I wouldn't do, and it's not even things that I was being asked to do.
I just did them.
I mean, that's just the way that I've always been.
If there was something that needed to be done, I would just take the initiative to do it.
Justin was also doing things way outside his job description.
When it would snow, I would make sure that I would come here and open the plant and open the office for everybody.
Well, I've got a four-wheel-drive vehicle.
I've lived in Boone.
Driving in the snow is nothing for me.
I'll just come in and do it.
About the only thing Justin didn't do was sweep the floors.
In the fall of 2008, as his 90-day temporary employment contract was expiring, Misimore was offered a permanent job.
But he still wasn't sure that working at Gracia was going to be part of his career plan.
At that point in time, I still didn't know where this was going to take me.
The goal was still to start saving money.
I mean, I didn't know maybe the gap year turned into two years.
So still having my eye on the law school endgame, stay at home and save as much money as possible.
We're going to take a short break.
When we come back, Philip Greitzer will bring Justin Misimore's story up to date.
You're listening to On the Job from Express Employment Professionals.
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Not to Express Employment Professionals, seeking a skilled labor position or administrative work.
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Go to ExpressPros.com to find a location near you.
Now back to the story of the accounting assistant who thought he was taking time off from his career path, but found an unexpected way forward instead.
As Justin Misimore took on more accounting and administrative duties, Klaus Jensen, the company manager, took note.
He was extremely organized.
He was time efficient.
We always thought we needed at least a person and a half.
He found ways to do it with just him.
Soon, Justin had an office all to himself.
The two other people in the shared office had been let go.
Justin took over their duties.
In 2010, Klaus Jensen and a partner purchased Gracia.
The company was not in good financial shape, and I had to trim some personnel.
And Justin, by then, had shown me enough that I kind of took the chance and said, okay, let's try to do it with Justin on his own.
Two years after he started working at Gracia, Misimore was head of the company's accounting unit.
They basically told me that they wanted me to be in charge of the company's finances on a much larger scale.
I was like, okay, that's great.
But they told me something that started concerning me, that they knew a guy that they wanted to bring in on more of a consulting basis.
And so, I mean, at that first point, I thought I was being promoted all the way to the top, but I thought I was still being kept underneath somebody.
The consultant came in two to three days a week, then just every few weeks.
And after a few months, the consultant told manager Jensen the company didn't really need his services at all.
Misimore could do the job on his own.
With the consultant no longer looking over his shoulder, Justin decided that working for Grasha would be his career.
He started working even harder.
11-hour days, six-day work weeks, and no vacations.
I was the first person here, last person to leave.
When it snowed, when nobody else was in the office, I was answering the phone.
I mean, I would work, do my accounting stuff in the front office.
I would take orders.
I messed up a lot of orders because I didn't know how to take orders at the time.
I'm not a sales guy, but somebody needed to be here to take the orders.
He'd show management that he really cared.
He set his sights to be the company's next CFO, chief financial officer.
He was 25 years old.
Going that extra mile, doing whatever it takes, long hours, hard work.
You know, it's a balance of hard work and intelligence, but I think that if you have to weigh the two, hard work's going to outweigh intelligence every time.
As Justin was gunning for the CFO job, Groscha's owner, Klaus Jensen, had plans of his own.
He wanted to retire and he wanted to leave the company in good hands.
He set up an exit plan.
First, he hired a former colleague, Richard Comer, to be Grosch's sales manager.
Comer would handle the company's external operations while Misimore would manage finances.
The two got along great.
They were yin and yang.
Comer was the idea man, and Justin was the numbers guy.
To Jensen, they looked like perfect candidates to take over the company.
Jensen began easing himself out of day-to-day management, leaving Misimore and Comer in charge.
In three years, they were ready to buy the company, but they didn't have any money.
I had student debt.
I just bought a house, so I was, you know, I was in debt.
I mean, I had a good income, but being that young, I really hadn't had much time to save.
A bank saw the company as an attractive investment and offered financing to the two to allow them to buy Grasha.
Misimore was 28, Comer was 40.
In 2016, Misimore and Comer purchased Grasha.
They were 50-50 partners.
Eight years after he started as a temporary employee, Justin Misimore was now the chief executive officer and co-owner of Grasha USA.
When you visit Grasha's factory, the first thing that catches your eye is a huge banner that says, everything is important.
There's no detail too small.
And it's that attention to detail, mixed with intelligence, ambition, and lots of hard work that got Misimore to the top.
They saw this young hotshot accountant who'd been working with the company, was doing a great job managing the company's finances, was doing things above and beyond what a typical accountant should be doing.
Klaus Jensen says Justin deserved the top job.
There's always a little bit of luck involved for all of us where we end up.
Obviously, he was lucky that I called Express and needed an accountant and he got the job.
But from then on, he can take credit for maximizing the situation and showing that he was ready and having the ambition and the gut to go for it.
At the end of the day, you have to earn it and he has earned it.
Justin Misimore has been CEO for two years.
He's ditched his plans to become a lawyer.
Still, when he's watching a good lawyer movie, he has daydreams of what it might have been.
I feel like I just sit there and I'm like, I'd have been great at that.
I do feel great.
I feel like I've been great at that.
And that's the extent of my regret.
But sitting where I am now, owning my own company, a living, breathing organism, the freedom that comes along with that, I couldn't be happier.
That was independent producer Philip Greitzer with the story of Justin Misimore's rise from temporary worker to CEO.
And that's all for this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals.
Find out more at expressprose.com, and you can listen to every podcast this season on expressprose.com/slash podcast.
This podcast is produced by your host Steve Mencher for Mensch Media, iHeartRadio, and Red Seat Ventures.
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See you next time on the job.
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