September 11th is the 254th day of the year (255th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, and, of course, it is also the infamous day in 2001 when a series of coordinated terrorist attacks were launched by the Islamic terrorist group, al-Qaeda, upon the United States in New York City and in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. September 11th also happens to be the date when I started my employment at Seed Hawk Inc in 2006, ensuring that I would not be able to forget either anniversary.
Depending on who you ask, I think I was employee number 38, 39 or 40 because there were a few of us that started around the same time that year. Today, seven very fast years later, there are around 250 employees, give or take a few, and according to the company’s stats, “Seed Hawk’s sales have grown by 700 per cent” since then. Coincidence you ask? I think not...Just kidding.
My employment started just weeks after Seed Hawk Inc had sold a minority share of its business to Väderstad-Verken AB of Sweden, a leading European agricultural equipment manufacturer, and the partnership only enhanced and accelerated the rapid growth that had already begun at Seed Hawk and I am fortunate enough to have come along for the ride.
My employment at Seed Hawk has also paralleled in timeline my guest editorials in this very paper. In another bit of coincidence the Owner/Editor of The Citizen at that time, Mike Kearns, was the person who offered me the opportunity to express my views in a weekly editorial in his paper and now he’s a colleague of mine and a fellow full-time Seed Hawker.
I have always felt conflicted about writing about my full-time employer in these editorials as it may have made me look like a bit of a suck-up, or brownnoser, if you will, and I prefer to do that in person…ha-ha…just kidding again...kind of.
At the same time, though, I have always felt proud about my association with Seed Hawk and I think I may have joined the team a few years too late, but we cannot re-write history can we?
Mike and I are good examples of Seed Hawk’s willingness to set aside any pre-judgments of potential employees at the company, (he and I being of the somewhat-advanced-but-still-lower-middle-aged demographic), regardless of gender, race, religion, colour, disability, sexual orientation, national origin or as mentioned earlier…age, the largest concern is that the potential employee bring a strong work ethic to the work-site. Many, many companies advertise their anti-discrimination rhetoric but Seed Hawk lives it.
So, maybe you are wondering why I chose to write about my full-time employer at this particular time? Well, if you hadn’t heard, Väderstad has recently acquired 100 per cent of Seed Hawk and I felt that it was a good time to acknowledge and thank the original ownership for their dedication to farming science, manufacturing and especially their employees. Thanks Pat and Brian.
As this is not a journalistic news story you will have to obtain details of the deal from other sources but suffice to say it will remain business as usual at Seed Hawk with the same leadership team and, as always, it’s onward and upward and I will be along for the ride until my usefulness to the cause has been exhausted and retirement is imminent. With any luck that will be at the same time.
“A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.”-Colin Powell (1937-).
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