Working past midnight

I have power and don't really need the candle to write by, but that's not really the point of candles, is it?

It’s late and I get that you may be sleeping… or it’s early and you may just be waking up, not yet had your morning coffee or tea. But I promised you a story to my LinkedIn post and I’m a man of my word.

Here’s the refresher post in case your life does not orbit mine and you have long since forgotten. I get that; it’s ok. It’s the one about scheduling phone calls at off-minutes, like 12:37am. It’s all coming back to you now, isn’t it?

Exact change

Way back, I used to work for this biomedical company owned by a good ol’ boy from Mississippi (really, that’s how he billed himself … also, ironically, his name was Bill.) He would have this habit of gathering us all in the conference room when he got on a call with a potential client he was pitching or one he was renegotiating a contract with.

When I say “us all,” I mean the CFO and me, the whip-smart sales guy who could sell exercise bikes to paralyzed people.

He was a pacing man, a man who paced. He also didn’t like to over-prepare for things, which means he would say things off-the-cuff at these meetings that would eventually end up in binding contracts. Our job was to keep him from saying things he didn’t later want to live with. Our other job was to keep track of the pennies.

Whenever he would get around to talking about prices for the various medical widgets he made that you never want to have a need for, he would throw out a number, like “that particular bone screw cost $432.18.” Not $430.00 or around $435.00, but EXACTLY $432.18.

In reality, that screw probably should have only cost $17.00 in change, but this is the American medical system so things were not ever going to be cheap. He could have maybe sold these things for $250.00 a piece all day long but he hated being dickered down on price. He also loved a healthy margin.

Nobody negotiates $432.18, but they will negotiate $430.00 endlessly until one party relents, usually the person selling the widget. The buying party assumes with a price that specific, he had run all the costing numbers up and down and there really wasn’t gonna be any room to negotiate. Terms, shipping rates, media buy shares, yes… but price? No.

In truth, he just pulled the number out of his butt and our job was to write it down so it wouldn’t get lost when the contracts were drawn up. Forgetting the specific price you told your customer during a pitch is one mistake you can’t make even once. It gives the game away.

That’s the story.