Photo: James Tressler.

It’s never a good time really to be out of work, and looking for a job. You feel the pinch keenest around December. Maybe it has something to do with it being the end of the year, a time of summing up your efforts, your life, reaping what you sow, and all that stuff they feed the troops.

Guvenç was not what you’d call a melancholy person. He wasn’t given to deep introspection, but at age 38, and with a newborn son, he was beginning to develop the habit. Fortunately, his wife had a good job at an General Electric. Her salary, plus their savings, would tide them over for a while, and their flat on the city’s Asian side was paid off.

With winter rapidly approaching, they weren’t destitute.

Still, there is something about being fired that does something to you, cuts the ground out from under your feet, makes you suddenly doubt yourself. Especially when it happens in the way it happened to Guvenç.

Let’s go back and have a look. Guvenç’s line of work was sales, ever since he’d come out of university and landed a job at a leading retail firm in Levent. After three years there, he moved on to the Turkish distributor for Suzuki. At age 26, he started as a sales manager, moved up to the regional level.

His proudest achievement, during this period, was doubling Suzuki’s share of the Turkish market in a period of ten months, a success he credited to his makeover of the bonus system, which motivated the sales team.

By his mid-thirties, Guvenç had been promoted to national sales director, reporting directly to the company’s general manager. He was on top of the world.

Then came the S-Cross.

If you could give a name to his failure, it would have to be that. S-Cross:a name that, at least for Guvenç, would forever live in infamy.

“It’s my nightmare,” he says.

###

A couple of years ago, Guvenç and his general manager had bet a great deal on the success of introducing this small SUV to the Turkish market. The owner of company gave his consent, and 32 million euros – enough to purchase 1,300 units.

Initially, things were OK. But then they ran into an insurmountable problem. The majority of the vehicles were manual, with diesel engines. But in Istanbul, especially, automatic transmissions are becoming more and more popular.

So Guvenç and his general manager were stuck at the end of the year with 300 unsold vehicles. They couldn’t get rid of them. Desperately, Guvenç tapped into his network of dealers. He even made inquiries with contacts in neighboring Iraq and Syria. No luck.

Then, one day, his phone rang. It was an old contact, who’d heard on the grapevine that Guvenç was in a jam. By chance, this contact knew of a distributor in Azerbaijan, a neighboring country northeast of Turkey near the Caspian Sea.

Emails were exchanged, and within a matter of days an offer was on the table. The good news: the Azerbaijan guy was willing and ready to take the S-Crosses off Guvenç’s hands – all 300 of them! The bad news: At a 10-percent discount. Ten percent! After a weeklong series of emails and phone calls, proposals and counterproposals, Guvenç managed to get him down to 7 percent.

With time running out, Guvenç made the deal. The S-Crosses (by now, you could almost call them “Albatrosses”) were finally shipped to the shores of the Caspian and out of his life forever.

###

But at the end of the day, when you added the numbers up, the failure was embarrassing, to say the least. Not only had the owner of the company failed to get a profit on his initial investment. He’d actually lost money – to the sad tune of about $75,000 U.S.

Guvenç and his general manager were both summoned to the big boss’s office. After a spectacularly vicious dressing down (the old man, though a billionaire and in his early eighties, clearly still had a lot of fight in him, especially when it came to losing money), they were informed that the entire Turkish Suzuki operation was to be sold, effective immediately. The old man was washing his hands of it.

Within a month, the new ownership came in, and both Guvenç and his general manager found themselves out on the street.

###

Damn you, S-Cross!

Where, and how, had he failed?

Guvenç had a lot of time to think about it, as the weeks passed.

During the day, he helped look after the baby (his wife was home on maternity leave), and browsed LinkedIn, Kariyer.net, and other websites for job openings. The problem was, vacancies for such high-level positions as national sales manager don’t come along every day. His whole career had been spent in the automotive sector. He felt he was too old now to switch sectors – they would be looking for fresh, young talent rather than reshaping a wounded veteran – and he wasn’t willing to accept a lower position. That would, in his mind, clearly be a step back.

He decided to set his sights on the international companies. Volkswagon, Ford, GM, Renault, Toyota, Hyundai – you name it – all of the big car companies have a presence here. Especially in Istanbul, where you have some 14 million souls in need of efficient transport. There’s enough of the pie to go around.

To that end, Guvenç enrolled in English classes. If he hoped to land one of these jobs – if and when a suitable position ever came around – he would definitely need to brush up on his English, the lingua franca of our times. Even the German, French and Japanese companies communicated with their Turkish staff with English.

###

That’s where I came in.

We began the English lessons with our mutually agreed goal being job interviews. After an initial assessment, I found Guvenç to have a fairly strong level. His comprehension was good, and he proved capable of conversing, with the expected grammatical errors and occasional lexical gaps. We worked on those things, to a degree. The main focus was to identify common interview questions, especially those related to management , and to role play those questions. The aim here was to build his confidence, and allow him to brainstorm, within the lesson, for appropriate responses.

One day Guvenç arrived with some good news. He’d had an interview at a French-owned car rental company, one of the market leaders in Turkey. The company’s bread and butter is leasing cars to the big companies. At the end of their contracts, these big companies usually trade in the cars for new ones.

Guvenç was applying for the manager of the second-hand department. The goal of that position was to boost sales of the French company’s second-hand cars to the local dealerships. A Turk was ideal for the position, since local knowledge not only of Turkish, but also the dealerships, were essential.

The initial interview was with a Turkish manager, and according to Guvenç, the interview went well. The final interview would be with a Frenchman, who was the regional manager for not only Turkey but Bulgaria, Romania and other neighboring countries as well.

We practiced this interview, with me playing the role of the Regional Manager. Typically, we went over questions dealing with his track record at Suzuki, his management style, strengths and weaknesses, the usual lot.

Finally (still role-playing the French regional manager), I asked Guvenç to describe his biggest success and failure as a manager. When coming to the latter, we went over the sad story of the S-Cross once again. Good God! Together, we’d probably exhumed the corpse of that devil a dozen times, to the point where I almost felt as though I had made the unfortunate bet myself, and had been kicked to the curb right along with Guvenç. I found myself running for cover whenever the cursed name was spoken above a whisper.

“What did you learn from that experience?” I asked.

Guvenç chewed his lip, sighed wearily. It was clear that he’d gone over the details in his sleep at times.

“If I could do it all again,” he said, “Clearly, I would not have ordered the manual transmissions with diesel engines. That was a big mistake. We underestimated how popular the automatics were becoming, especially in the Istanbul market. Also, we didn’t realize how powerful some of our competitors are – especially Nissan – in the customers’ eyes. Globally, Suzuki may be a strong brand. But here in Turkey – not so much.”

I asked if he thought there had been a lack of proper market research beforehand, to which Guvenç nodded grudgingly.

“So –“ I said, still as the French regional manager, “Knowing that you have showed such errors of judgment, why should I offer you this position? Especially when your background is not in the second-hand market?”

“Good question,” Guvenç said. He laughed. “I guess if you knew these things, you would not hire me.” He broke character. “Seriously, though, I hope it doesn’t come up in the interview.”

###

A week or two passed, and the time came for me to leave on a much-needed holiday. I was going to America with my wife for a few days in New York and to spend Christmas with family in Pittsburgh.

Guvenç and I had our last lesson. More than a ten days had passed since his interview, and he was still waiting for the phone to ring for the final interview with the general manager of the French company.

“Maybe they’re busy,” Guvenç speculated. “After all, it is December, and many companies are busy with end-of-year reports, deciding next years’ budgets, targets … Or maybe they already found someone else for the position.”

“Well, let’s hope they’re busy,” I said. “What else are you doing?”

“I’m looking on the Internet every day for a job,” he said. “And of course, playing with my son, and learning English.”

“I guess you’ve gone over the failure at Suzuki enough,” I said. “You’ve learned from it and now it’s time to just keep moving on, like you’re doing.”

The lesson ended, I walked Guvenç to the door, and I wished him luck.

“Let us know when you find something,” I said. “And Happy New Year!”

“Thank you,” Guvenç said, shaking hands. “You too. Have a good trip to America. Let’s hope the new year brings good things for both of us.”

“Absolutely.”

###

Again, I wish Guvenç luck. Certainly, I know something about what he’s going through. I’ve been fired from jobs before, and know how that can take something out of you. You feel like everyone is looking at you askance, with suspicion, as though you’d absconded with the church funds.

Also, it doesn’t help Guvenç’s cause that economic forecasters are predicting a downturn in the markets in the new year. It doesn’t help that you’ve got Russia throwing economic sanctions around at Turkey, and a civil war in Syria just south of the border, and a general air of uncertainty pervading the entire region.

But he knows all that.

Personally, having taught in global companies these past ten years, I don’t think Guvenç’s mistakes were that bad. It’s like a coach who drafts a Heisman Trophy winner, only to find that the player isn’t up to the pro game. Do you fire the coach for betting on the wrong horse? Depends on how many times he or she does it, right?

I say give the guy a break. After all, before the S-Cross knocked him sideways, he did manage to double his company’s market share — what was it? In ten months? Yeah, that’s right. In ten months, baby. So there’s that.

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher. He lives in Istanbul.