Boss Life (17 page)

I think about this for a second. It's true that I make quick decisions and that I'm used to having my own way. And that I can debate with the best of them. All my employees know this and never argue with me about anything. If I feel like it, I explain my decisions. If I don't, I don't. I'm not used to any push-back. Sometimes I wish I did get a fight from my workers. I know that they are smart people. They must have some good ideas. I must be wrong fairly often, or my business would make more money. But they don't challenge me. Am I that intimidating? Possibly. I think that this is why I was interested in joining Vistage—to get someone to criticize me when I needed it. And this is why I called Bob. I want someone to take a hard look at how we sell.

At the same time, I'm not so sure that Bob Waks is the right guy. He is the classic salesman—tall, groomed, confident, articulate, and he gives off a sales-y vibe. Ice to Eskimos. Anything goes to close a deal. There's nothing to dislike about him—he seems like a very friendly, smart guy—but he's 100 percent sales. And this rubs me the wrong way a little bit. I'm used to selling a thing, and I close the deal by making the thing so good that it speaks for itself. No fancy double-talk required. We are craftsmen, and we fade into the background as soon as the job is completed.

I have to put my prejudice aside. I have Sam Saxton's testimony that Bob is effective, and his numbers back that up. I want my sales problem fixed. I don't know whether Bob is the solution, but I have to try something. So I reply, “It's true that I make quick decisions. It's true that I push back when I'm challenged. So what? That's who I am. I'm also good at change. And so are my people. We don't get hung up on yesterday, because yesterday usually sucked. I'm willing to take criticism. And I believe Sam when he says that you are good. So let's presume that I'll be good to work with and that you will help. What's the next step? What do you actually do? When can we start? And how much will it cost?”

Bob tells me that he's going to need a couple of days to put together a recommendation and a contract, but he'd like to set up the meeting to review them now. Am I available next week? I'm going to be in the Middle East the following week, but we set a date for Thursday, the thirty-first. I think I've been maneuvered into doing something, and I don't like that. On the other hand, I'm heading in the direction that I wanted to go. I have nothing to complain about, other than a vague sense that I haven't been in control.

On Monday, after another dismal set of numbers, I tell the crew that I'm doing everything that I can think of to turn things around. I tell them about increasing the AdWords budget and the consultant. After the meeting, I ask Dan and Nick whether any of their clients are likely to place orders this week. They don't know, but promise to reach out to the most likely prospects. They are busy with outbound e-mails all morning.

Discouraging replies start arriving after lunch. The worst is from Cali Heavy Industries. Dan thought that it was a lock. Now Dan's contact writes, “We have chosen another vendor to move forward with this project. Thanks for your hard work and good luck in the future.” I call Jim, the dealer. He's “in a meeting.” Send him an e-mail. No response. That's a thirty-five-thousand-dollar job, gone. Add that to the forty thousand in Air Force work, and we could have been in much better shape for May.

Thursday is the last day of May. First thing in the morning, I go over to Bob Waks's office. His coy protest that he might not be able to help has been replaced with a multi-level plan of attack. First, evaluations. The fact that I have been making sales for twenty-six years notwithstanding, I will need to take a series of tests to see whether I am psychologically suited for the job. Dan and Nick will take the same one. It's called DiSC Profile and is commonly used in business. I've never heard of it. I will also take another set of tests to evaluate our company sales practices and culture and my own performance as sales manager. Sales manager? Is that what I do? I never thought of my job that way. Bob will also come out to our office to observe us at work, so that he can better understand how we approach our job.

After the evaluations, training. Dan, Nick, and I will take a ten-week course on the basics of the Sandler method of selling. I haven't heard of this either. I didn't realize that selling comes in different systems, but it makes perfect sense. Every company makes sales and wants to make more. And some people are bound to develop a theory of how it should be done.

During the training, and continuing on for the next twelve months, we will also receive two monthly counseling sessions with Bob himself. These sessions will allow us to discuss the ongoing development of our skills and to get help with challenges that come up.

It takes about an hour for Bob to go through this. In the end, I have one more question: how much? For the whole package, $37,000. Holy smokes. On the other hand, I could continue doing what I'm doing, even though it isn't working well. Sam saw his sales rise by 40 percent in the first year after the training, and he attributed all that to Bob's work. If my sales rise 40 percent, I will have an additional $800,000 coming in the door. Spending $37,000 for that result is a bargain. I have to pay Bob $8,000 right away and the rest in monthly payments of $2,416.

The eight grand is 8 percent of my working capital. The payments don't seem that bad. I ask Bob if I can put it on a credit card, and he says yes. That will help—I can give him the deposit, wait thirty days before I have to pony up cash, and retain the option of rolling the card balance if I'm still short on funds. I can't do that for very long, but it will give me some time to see whether the program is working.

I asked Bob whether he would be willing to include Emma for the same price. She's smart, and I want her to keep our clients' point of view in mind. Nick, Dan, and I have a lot to win or lose, and that might cloud our perception of what we are being taught. Also, if the rest of us go through the program, she would be the only person in the sales office who hasn't learned the new methods and the new lingo. I don't want to have to explain it all to her while we are learning it ourselves.

Bob agrees and I sign the contract. I decide that I'm going to approach it with an open mind and do my best to learn something. After lunch, I give Dan and Nick an overview of the training and the cost. They look very worried. “This worked great for Sam Saxton,” I say, “and I'm sure it's going to work for us. Look, I just bet thirty-seven thousand dollars that we can be better at selling than we are now. Sam's sales jumped forty percent. If we sell forty percent more than last year . . .” I take them through the calculations I've performed to convince myself that this is a good idea. I need them to buy into the program or it will be an expensive waste of everybody's time.

At the end of the day I take stock of the month. As usual, there's no clear message to be assembled from the jumble of data and events. Things that seemed important at the beginning of May have faded in my rearview mirror and been replaced by fresh concerns.

The numbers for the month are mostly bad. Total sales: $114,042. We shipped the Company S job back to them on the first, and they paid me what they owed in the middle of the month. Inquiries for the past four weeks have been consistently terrible: eleven per week. Increasing my AdWords budget has bought us more clicks, but so far they haven't translated into more calls. It's also been another month of low build totals: $137,086 moved from the shop floor into the finishing room. If that's all we have to ship next month, we're in trouble. Surprisingly, our cash position did not deteriorate. I started the month with $105,203 on hand, took in $182,594, and spent $175,113. That means an increase of $7,481. Stopping my own pay made a difference. I will end the month with $112,684 on hand. At our current rate of spending, that's enough to operate the shop for fifteen working days.

An increase in cash is better than the alternative, but it doesn't mean that all is well. I'm still down $24,470 from the beginning of the year. And I need to figure out why cash held steady and whether it can be sustained. Four factors are working in my favor. First, we shipped a lot of the jobs that we sold in January and February, with a total value of $198,496. That effort yielded $91,035 in preship and final payments. Some of these jobs had been sitting for a month or more, waiting for the client to get the site ready. And a few have been ready to go since last year. The shipment total, being higher than the amount we spent, results in a theoretical profit for the month of $23,383. Not all of that magically appears in my bank account, but it's better than a loss.

Second, we booked the deposits for the last sales of April in May because I deposited $27,418 on the afternoon of Monday, April 30. Third, one client surprised me by paying for an entire job up-front. That table cost $24,111. We had been expecting a check for $12,506.50, and instead we got one for $25,557.66—the table plus 6 percent sales tax. I won't need to pay the sales tax until the middle of the month after we deliver, so we got a nice thirteen-thousand-dollar loan from a customer without even asking.

The last factor is easy to overlook. May 2012 had twenty-two working days. The extra days can make a difference when there's a thin line between good numbers and bad. We shipped two jobs worth $15,833 on the last day of the month, which helped to boost the month's numbers at the expense of June's totals. Overall, my month has been puzzling. I'm doing everything I can to fix things, but I don't know if I am doing the right things or if any of them will work.

D
ATE
: F
RIDAY
, J
UNE 1
,
2012

B
ANK BALANCE
:
$107
,
096
.
18

C
ASH RELATIVE TO START OF YEAR
(“N
ET
C
ASH”
): -
$30,058.14

N
EW
-
CONTRACT
VALUE
,
YEAR
-
TO
-
DATE
:
$803
,
722

I come in early on Friday. There's an e-mail from Bob Waks with a link to the personality test and sales self-assessment. He says these will provide an objective measure of how I am performing. He ends with a warning: answer the questions honestly, or you are wasting your time and money. OK, I think, an unbiased evaluation would be useful. My visits with Sam Saxton and my strolls through the Eurofurn factory have been eye-openers. I'd like to know how my sales efforts measure up. I've never taken a personality test before. The questions don't quite make sense. I come to the conclusion that there are no right or wrong answers, just choices. It's liberating. I rip through the questions and press Send. Now for the sales self-assessment.

There are two sections: one about selling, and another about being a sales manager. The first questions aren't hard:

Do you know how to generate leads?

Yeah. Pay and pray. I give Google a ton of cash for the top AdWords spots and hope they show my organic results in a good position as well. And it's been working great, at least until recently.

Do you know how many potential jobs are in the pipeline?

I'm keeping a tally of the leads that come in, and about half of them get proposals.

After a few more process-oriented questions, they take a different tack:

Do you want to succeed?

Of course. I'm sick of failure. Who doesn't want to succeed?

Have you written down a list of your goals?

No, why would I? I just want to sell more; do I need other goals? I have a million e-mails to do every day; I don't have time to write anything down.

Do you control your own emotions and behavior?

Absolutely. At least in front of my employees. And my wife and kids. Keep it all inside, locked down tight. I have to be strong.

How do you make major purchases yourself?

I do some research, make my choice, and slap my money down on the counter. Is there a better way to shop?

What is your definition of “a lot” of money? A hundred? A thousand
?
More?

I'm spending eight grand every day, selling tables that can cost fifty thousand dollars. A hundred dollars is a rounding error. It's what the scrap in one trashcan costs me. A thousand dollars? Not much. A hundred thousand is a good pile of cheddar. A million dollars is a lot of money.

Do you have a system for selling?

Yup. Write a great proposal. Put a bunch of them out there, and some will come back.

Do you track your selling activity every day?

Nope. I'm sitting in a small office with Nick and Dan, so I know what's going on.

When do you send a proposal?

As soon as I can! I want to put my info into my client's hands before my competitors can even raise their pencils. The buyers always say how impressed they are by our speed. I'm sure we'll score highly on this question—we can hardly do any better.

Do you know whether the person you are dealing with is a decision maker?

Sometimes, when they tell me. And I can always tell when it's a boss on the other end of the line. But the others? We'll give anyone a proposal, so that they can pass it up their chain of command.

Are you sympathetic toward your clients?

Sure, they're nice people, mostly, and they want us to help them. Sometimes they get to be irritating—Eurofurn—but that's just the way it is.

Do you want your clients
'
approval?

Who doesn't? Having them disapprove is hardly the path to success.

Are you willing to accept their excuses for delaying a decision or ending the project?

Sure. What else can I do?

Do you try to get them to make a decision
?

Not really. Our proposals speak for themselves. If they appreciate good work, they'll realize that we're the guys to go with.

What do you tell yourself when a sale is lost? Do you blame external factors or accept responsibility?

Well, the economy has been pretty bad the past few years, and it looks like it might be getting worse again. And our product is good, our prices are fair. We're doing the best we can. We're not the cheapest guys around, and so we can't be a good fit for everyone. Sometimes it's just not meant to be. Everything I'm doing has worked for years; we're just going through a bad patch right now.

Do you hold regular sales meetings?

Like, sit-down-with-an-agenda-and-watch-the-boss-bloviate meetings? Why bother? We're all in the same room. It's like a continuous meeting already.

Do you provide coaching and feedback for your salespeople after every proposal?

I should definitely do that. I told the guys to cc me on every proposal they send, and they've been pretty good about it. I don't always have time to look through them, though.

Are you a good listener?

Of course I am. I have a unique ability: I can listen to a person talking to me and type an e-mail at the same time. It's the only way I can get work done when my workers keep interrupting me. And I'm considerate. If they start to tell me something, and I'm still thinking about something else, I'll very nicely ask them to start over.

Do you constantly look for new salespeople?

You mean someone who understands how to make our product, and knows our software, and can zip through a couple proposals a day? They aren't out there. It was enough trouble to get Nick and Dan up to speed. I don't have time to start that process over.

Do you use reasonable hiring criteria when choosing salespeople?

I think so. Nick was the only guy working for me who could talk on the phone, so he was the obvious choice. Dan had dealt with clients in his previous job, maybe not selling, but at least he had spoken to them. And he showed up at the right time.

Do you need approval from your salespeople?

Like letting them veto decisions I make about the company? Or are you asking whether I feel good when they respect me? I'm not sure what this means. But I don't think those guys see the big picture, and I don't have time to explain everything to them before I make my mind up. So no, I guess not.

Do you accept mediocrity from your salespeople?

Look, sales is chancy. Success and failure come in clumps. I don't know why those guys can't make a sale every day; it's probably the same reason I can't make a sale every day, not that I actually know why that is. I don't like picking up the slack when they don't sell, but that's what the boss has to do sometimes. And what am I going to do anyway, fire one of those guys?

Have you ever fired a salesperson for poor performance?

I've only had two salespeople. I'm not sure that Dan has what it takes, but firing him would be pretty harsh.

Why not?

This question isn't on the test, but the other questions lead me directly to it. Dan is lagging way behind Nick in sales. He hasn't even passed the two hundred thousand mark, and we're almost halfway through the year. I was hoping for at least eight hundred thousand from him by December, but it looks like I'm not going to get it.

I submit the results. Dan and Nick have just rolled in. I don't feel like discussing the test with them—the line of questioning has been disturbing, to say the least. I e-mail them the link to their own assessments, asking them to complete them as soon as possible. As for my own test, I wonder how I'll score. It's strange to answer a bunch of questions about how I do my job and whether I'm heading in the right direction. I'm not used to being challenged in this way.

—

SATURDAY EVENING I FLY
to Dubai, which is the last thing I want to be doing, not least because the trip will cost more than four thousand dollars. I arrive on Sunday afternoon. I have three meetings on Monday in Dubai. In the evening, I fly to Kuwait City, where I have four meetings on Tuesday and one on Wednesday morning. After lunch, I'll fly back to Dubai to catch an early-evening flight home.

That's a lot of meetings, especially considering that I'm not sure whom I'll be meeting or whether the PowerPoint I have prepared will be impressive. I hope that my client list will be enough to show that we're legitimate.

I'm also painfully aware of my company's limitations. We're not large, we're not profitable, and the business seems to be collapsing. How can I be confident that I'll survive long enough for this effort to pay off? How do I walk up to strangers, shake hands, and make a convincing promise of a prosperous and profitable future? I have no choice. I'll put my problems at the back of my mind. I'll just do it.

The next morning, I meet Bahar O'Brien. She's my Commerce Department contact in Dubai and she'll be accompanying me all day. She's cordial but reserved. Just her tone of voice is enough to put me in my place: today's American businessman, come to Dubai in search of riches. And, she seems to imply, not a particularly impressive specimen. Now I'm wondering about my suit—a summer-weight wool affair, in an attractive sand color, perfect for the Middle East. Or so the salesman had assured me back in Philadelphia.

Our first meeting is at the Al Reyami Group, a local conglomerate that does a little bit of everything, including design and construction. When we arrive, our contact doesn't remember making the appointment, but he tells us he has twenty minutes. I pull out my laptop and start the show. The first slides show the table we made for the World Bank, an enormous oval forty feet long and twenty-four feet wide. One picture shows the finance ministers of the G20 countries sitting around it. Instant credibility. Our contact leans back in his chair with a smile. “I think we have something for you. I need to check with my boss. Give me a minute.” He's back in five and takes us to see the head of the design department. I run through the slides again, and he calls one of their project managers. Twenty minutes later, we meet him and two designers. He tells me that they are renovating the local office of a multi-national petroleum company that I'll call BigOil, and that the client wants a very large boardroom table. By chance, they are having a meeting to discuss this at two p.m. Can I attend? Absolutely. I never expected a shot at an actual project on this trip. Home run on the first pitch.

The second stop is an architectural firm. The receptionist takes us to their boardroom, which is dominated by a large walnut table. We could have made it. I'm on my knees examining its underside when my hosts walk in. I scramble to my feet and shake hands with the firm's owner and his general manager. After my slide show, they comment, “Very nice work. We could have kept you really busy ten years ago. Now there's not much going on. The recession is still bad. We're barely surviving ourselves.” Why did they take a meeting with me? Curiosity: they've designed a lot of boardrooms and wanted to see somebody else's approach. We chat, and I learn more about the local market. Nobody in the area specializes in boardroom tables. The local custom furniture market is dominated by much larger firms that offer a full range of products, from upholstered furniture to wall paneling. They promise to contact me if a job turns up, but I don't think I'll hear from them again.

Our last stop is half an hour away. During the drive, Bahar confirms that Dubai's boom has passed. We drive by stubs of roads that terminate in empty desert and the skeletons of partially completed structures covered in dust. Bahar's descriptions are a variation on a theme: “This was supposed to be a [luxury shopping mall, luxury hotel, luxury international business hub], but the owners went broke.” Even so, we pass small gangs of workers, their heads wrapped so that only their eyes are visible. The forecast today is for a high of 115 degrees. And it's not a dry heat. They wear pants and long-sleeve shirts, buttoned to the wrist. I wonder what brought them here. I've heard that local pay is, by my standards, abysmal. If working in a foreign country under a broiling sun for peanuts looks like a good idea, the other choices must be truly awful.

Our third meeting is in a strip mall. It's a store selling residential furniture, but there's no one visible inside. In a back office, we find a middle-age man leafing through a magazine. Bahar tells him that she's arranged to see Mr. Bubbedin. Unfortunately, Mr. Bubbedin has gone to Chicago. Would this gentleman like to see my presentation? He shrugs. I rip through the slides. He compliments me in a perfunctory way and tells me that I should have been here ten years ago. It was crazy back then, money flowing like water. I take his card, but there's nothing for me here.

We return to Al Reyami, and in their boardroom we meet representatives from BigOil, Al Reyami, an interior design firm, and the audiovisual equipment contractor. The project manager announces to everyone that they have found someone from America to build the table. I run through the PowerPoint and show them a nifty 3-D model of the World Bank table. Then we start discussing details. The schedule is a potential problem. They'd like delivery in late August but it is already the first week of June. (Shipping from America to Dubai takes about thirty days.) But nobody seems too worried about schedule, so we move to other technical issues. We close by agreeing that I will prepare a complete design after I get back home.