Madness and Irishmen - Part 1

The company that I chose to join when Bell wouldn’t let me be a manager, was an Irish Screening Plant company out of Northern Ireland. The President of the company had been wooing me and my wife for about six months…I knew a great deal about their company from working with them as a Phone Power consultant. I liked all the people and the amount of fun they were able to have at work. Now you need to understand that I didn’t know the first thing about the product they were selling…which happened to be a very inexpensive portable screening plant for use in quarries or on highway jobs, or any of a number of other applications.

The first thing I realized was that they didn’t have a technical manual for the screening plant, and this was significant because most of the executives making the buying decisions had engineering backgrounds and wouldn’t even look at anything without looking at a tech manual first. I mentioned this to John (the President) and his response was… “Well, write one me lad.” I told him that I need to be able to do some immediate road trips to identify the first target customers and his response “Ye have all those beautiful evenings with nothing to do me wee lad, carry home an Old Bushmill and it will fortify you while write.” Well in those days I was so “full of my self”…that I agreed, and told him I would have it completed in six weeks…John said “Won’t do, laddie…we will need it in four, pretty bound copies and all.” Now this was the man who didn’t even realize that he needed it before I brought it to his attention, and now it had to be in the customer’s hands in four weeks.

I had already determined that Texas was the place to start because they had the most applications for the product, and the biggest highway budget in the country. So I stopped off at three competitors and picked up their manuals under the guise of being a new quarry owner in the area, and jumped on a plane for Dallas.

Now you have to understand that I lived most of my life following the advice of the Great Philosopher Brett Maverick, “Faint heart never filled a flush.” I attempted to make appointments with the biggest potential customers based in Dallas…the key was not to call on the phone and be written off as just another Damn Yankee. I went to the offices in person with a bouquet of flowers for my target’s secretary, and my appointment book just filled itself like magic.

By reading and re-reading my competitor’s technical manuals…I discovered what the consensus was concerning what potential customers should know…but they were as dry as a Quaker sermon. I decided that ours would be different it would be a tech manual with a noticeable marketing twist. I "gotter done", and John loved it…this was good because I told him I needed to be Vice President of the Southwest Region (with a pay cut and a percentage of the business that I personally generated) and I need business cards with that title before I returned to Dallas. I don’t know how he did it but there were two boxes of extremely professional business cards (complete with my new title) on my desk two days later along with my plane tickets to Dallas.

I think I need to continue this in the next post..