Last week, almost five years after retiring from the medical sales industry, I was asked to accompany former colleagues to one of their clients. We traveled for nearly two hours from Bacoor to—well—God knows where.
It gave me the chance to relive the experience of covering hospitals, something I hadn’t done since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. While there were offers during those years and even now, I prefer the consultancy setup—it doesn’t tie you down to the daily grind of office hours.
I don’t mind doing the work, but being glued to a desk for eight hours, plus another two to four hours of travel back and forth, drains so much energy just to accomplish what often amounts to one hour of actual work. My officemates used to joke that I was just loitering around the office all day. It’s true—but not because I didn’t work as hard as they did. I just worked smarter.
Office hours started at 8 a.m., but I usually arrived by 6:30 a.m., thanks to my wife, who’s a teacher and needed to be at school by that time. I secretly advanced our clocks at home by 30 minutes without her knowing. She was never late in her eight years of teaching, and I consistently arrived at the office before 7 a.m.
Coming in early didn’t mean resting—it gave me time to review documents like requests for quotations, contracts, and sales materials. As head of sales, I was constantly checking quotations, so I created a regular price list. If the offer matched the list, it didn’t need my approval. For discounts within a set percentage, I authorized reps to approve them on-site. As for the rest—especially those for NCR—I delegated them to our expat employee. He was technically under me but had direct access to our boss, a foreigner and his friend. Since he liked working outside the guidelines, I issued a memo assigning him half of my workload. That way, he no longer needed to bypass me. Now, he handles the bulk of the work while I sit with Mon, our head of collections, chatting about nonsense all day.
Egay had been asking me to join them for a while, but I showed him my packed schedule. We finally found August 26 open, so I met up with him and Ricky, our former service manager, and headed straight to their client. The two-hour trip was anything but dull—we spent it reminiscing about our hilarious moments working under one company.
I met their client and did my best to address their inquiries. Hopefully, after nearly an hour and a half of discussion, they were satisfied. We had a late lunch around 2:00 p.m., then traveled back to Evia, where I had left my car.
For me, helping a friend—especially someone who’s helped me many times before—is something I’ll always do without hesitation. ||
