Virginia McCurdy prepares to retire

WASHINGTON — Virginia McCurdy has always gone about things on her own terms.

Once a high school English teacher, she left the public sector to make money for her growing family after a seven years. She then spent 18 years selling ads for the Journal before parting ways after a disagreement with management. That led her to her a 32-year career selling custom promotional material as an independent contractor, a career choice that proved lucrative off the bat.

“That first January to August, I made $13,000 in salary. From September to the end of the sales year, at that time, I made $9,000” she said. “It occurred to me that I had made a good decision … I bought myself a ring, which I’d never had the money to do.”

McCurdy said her decision to keep working in sales was natural.

“I like people, I like getting around, I like traveling,” she said. “It offered me the opportunity to continue doing what I like with a base that already knew me, which contributed to my success that fall.”

At the end of this, her 32nd year selling custom promotional products, McCurdy plans to retire, once again on her own terms, rather than waiting for the health complications of age to push her out.

“It’s been an accumulation of stresses in the course of this year,” she said. “I’m at a point where it’s going to be easier to live life without orders.”

It wasn’t an easy decision to make. McCurdy contracts for HALO Branded Solutions, where she said the company’s growth was outpacing her own.

“There’s much about it that I’ve always liked, but it’s getting to the point where it’s so big, and I’m not one of the big producers anymore,” she said. “You know when you’re falling off because your treatment radically drops.”

Technology represents another of McCurdy’s reasons to call it a career. Having learned everything she knows about computers “from the seat of (her) pants,” in her words, it’s hard to keep up as the business world relies on them more and more.

“I have thought, since my days at the Journal, that the best place for a computer is under the wheels of a semi,” she said. “But that isn’t how the world is working … it’s everything now.”

A lot has changed since her start in sales. Even as she started selling custom promotion content in the ‘90s, McCurdy faced the assumption that sales work was men’s work.

“It dawned on … folks that I could sell, what a novel concept!” she said. “The atmosphere since 1990 has changed radically. Probably, I’m guessing, between half and two thirds of the sales force for HALO Branded Solutions … is women.”

As she prepares to exit the workforce, McCurdy said she would miss one thing in particular: the customers.

"You develop a friendship with each of them in a different way,“ she said. ”It gives you an insight into people that you don’t necessarily get on the computer … we all have a basic circle we gravitate to for friends. But the Journal took me out of my comfort zone in terms of circles, and it gives you a better picture of the entire community.“

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com