The power of purpose

I love my boss. Otherwise my job would cease to be meaningful. He has a special place of business with some of the greatest people in the world as employees, friends, and clients. I work at a bicycle store. We service a great many cyclists in the New Orleans area. Stories abound of jobs where the pay is good but the toll on the soul leads to unhappiness. Not that I'm always happy, yet it is more often then not, our days are joyous and filled with humor.
I started working here about fifteen years ago. My employment history was mostly service oriented. I worked as a gardener, in a credit and catalog dept., as a busboy and bartender, and did some odd jobs for cash here and there. I am fiercely loyal and had been shopping at this store for 5 or 6 years before I approached them about work. The shop has had its struggles and schisms along the way and I think we've made it through the worst. Being nearly bankrupt in the mid 90's , we battled for over three years just to get back to even. Our best year ever was interrupted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and still we returned to banner sales.
The philosophy is simple: treat people with genuine interest and serve them as guests in your home. We've all been to a business where we were ignored, pestered, or treated like crap. We don't want that to be how we are viewed and quite the opposite, we want our clients to feel our honesty and devotion to our craft. We make some of the finest bicycles in the world and are willing to fix just about anything. I goes to say that some folks will try to take advantage of the easy-going nature of the shop and we'll put up with it for a while. I won't pretend I've never asked someone to leave, met young children at door to explain why they're unwelcome without their parents, or spraying Lysol® on extremely unhygienic bums and gutter punks. What I will say is we're quite tolerant of the wide range of beliefs and practices of our customers and consider everyone's individual preferences when they pay us a visit.