The one with a title

And that title: General Manager!

I’m employed!

All I can say is…life is strange.

Most of you know the story of my last job: I knew nothing about marketing, but when I met an executive recruiter at a job fair he took one look at my resume and said “I know a marketing research company that needs you, even though they don’t know it.” He’d just placed the general manager of the company and knew it well, and knew they’d be more effective if they had an analyst with my skills. Four days later I was hired, and I moved to Minneapolis and spent almost twelve years tracking the coupon industry.

This might be even more random! My friend Timmy writes me and says “You know you are in Montana when you can walk by a bulletin board and see: Wanted 1 or 2 male goats... Well, it turns out he knows the guy who put up that billboard.

Tim er, Doctor Murray finished his degree a couple of years ago, and he and his family moved to the Bitterroot mountains, in southwestern Montana, where [Major Drug Company] has a research division. And one of his co-workers has a ranch on the side, and they have a goat trading business.
Yes, that’s what I said.

Somehow, they were seeking someone with exactly my skill-set to oversee various properties. Which include the GoatFinder.com, the "Internet's #1 Source For Finding Goats Online", and its partner site, GoatWanted.com, which provides a simple interface to find goats that are currently available for sale. I'll be working mostly by phone and email, so I can work almost entirely from home.

My primary responsibilities will include:

• Develop and improve the database software that lies behind the site(s), storing information about the vendors, ranchers and breeders and their respective inventories
• Implement a probabilistic matching algorithm to pair offered and requested Goats along 29 dimensions of compatibility (they currently use just one dimension!)
• Organize a Scientific Board of Advisors, maintaining relationships with external hircine researchers from institutions worldwide working in areas related to Goat breeding and cloning
• Manage the external team of programmers who work on the front-end design and third-tier architectures that hold everything together and make it work (unfortunately, I probably won’t get to go to Bucharest or Mumbai to meet them, at least in year one)
• Evaluate new business opportunities (the idea I offered in my phone interview, to which they were immediately receptive and which will likely be my first major project, is to match ranchers with active herds to institutions needing innovative solutions in the areas of brush and scrub control)
• Additional responsibilities as required.
  

I start next Monday, and I’m super excited about this opportunity!

Coupons, goats, all I can say is life is weird, but wonderful,
sg