By Marlys Fox48 years is one heck of a long time to be anywhere! But our own COO, Steve Schwanz, is celebrating that anniversary as a ‘Fox’ this week!
Steve has spent his entire professional career here—he’s worked nowhere else!
Actually, he also spent the summer before working as an intern between his junior and senior years in college. And then he just wanted to come back, and stay, like, forever. Steve came on board at just the right time for us, for sure. And likely for him as well. We were a 10-year-old company at the time—in 1978. We had great assignments and a solid future, but our ‘average age’ was climbing up there a bit. And I was the ONLY woman involved in the selling process. Simply put, we needed to reimagine our employee-hiring method to assure that we were ready for future growth and the emerging business needs.
Steve was young. Handsome (and yes, that matters a bit). He had a father with an entrepreneurial spirit, as I came to realize after I met him. And he had a wonderful mother as well. Solid people from Wisconsin. Steve wasn’t exactly a city boy, but he sure knew his way around the USA!
Marlys Fox.
And perhaps most important of all, Steve exemplified everything that we thought was ‘foxy’ for Fox Associates. He wanted to learn. He wanted to win. He wanted adventure. He wanted experience. And he wanted to climb that company ladder, even while having to kind of start at the bottom at 21 years old. Steve was smart as hell, and that helped him put his feet on all the right rungs of the ladder.
Some of our other outspoken (smartass, male) Fox salespeople asked me if I looked upon my hire as a sort of mother-son relationship. I answered at the time: “No, I don’t think of him as my son. More like my bratty little brother, who I just love to death, but who I’d occasionally like to smack upside the head, because of his provocative stance on being the new brightest of the lights in the old Fox den!
As it turns out, Steve was indeed a bright light with a strong will to succeed and a willingness to learn from us, but with the guts to go out and experiment with his own ideas! Guess what? Most of them worked!
So he did climb the ladder, alright, and he’s right up there now hovering just under the tip of the triangle! He’s COO. He’s well-positioned to take over when, as I say, “the Great Media Director in the Sky,” calls me, the CEO, to Heaven for a face-to-face meeting, which I will have to accept.
And with that, Steve will personally inherit the entire stock and ownership in Fox Associates, Inc. That seems to be a pretty nice reward for 48 years of hard work!
I hope Heaven will let me peek down even with no visible means of communication, (so much for my computer, to say nothing of any AI possibility. But my hope is that Steve will remain for another 48 years and offer to others the thrill of working in an entrepreneurial environment with opportunity “to be all you can be,” and he can be the very proof of what all is possible!