Boss Life (23 page)

In the mail I find two checks totaling $5,094, and in the afternoon, a client makes a final payment of $2,519. My cash on hand has risen to $94,722.

The next day I sell a table to a boss, who called in the morning, got my proposal after lunch, and gave me a credit card number at the end of the day for the $4,475 deposit. This is not a huge job, $8,950, but it's the first boss call I've had for a while. This sale brings our monthly total up to exactly $62,000. Four more days left, to sell either $138,000 to make our monthly target, or $334,785 to get back on track for the year.

We work on autopilot for the rest of the week. There isn't that much to do. The phone rings a few times, but the calls aren't promising. We get a few e-mails, ditto. And all that happened at the beginning of the week. Wednesday, just one e-mail. Thursday, silence. It's the same pattern I saw in AdWords last week, a decent number of inquiries on Monday and Tuesday, and then a sharp decline. I keep walking out of my office to study the two printouts, but the pattern of calls doesn't seem to correspond to anything there.

—

WE
'
RE ALL LOOKING FORWARD
to Friday. Bob Waks is scheduled to spend a morning observing Dan and Nick perform their duties as salesmen. I've taken pains to emphasize the importance of the training. “It worked for Sam Saxton” has become my mantra. To prepare for Bob, Dan has some proposals set aside to send on Friday, and Nick has a conference call with a client that he's been working with since January. He just sent his third proposal to her last week. She has questions about the design and wants to include one of her colleagues in the discussion of the options.

Late Thursday night, I get a text from Nick: his two boys were wrestling after dinner, and one broke the other one's arm. Badly. He's at the emergency room. Nick wants to know whether he can skip work tomorrow. Absolutely not, is my first thought. On the other hand: what would I do if it were me? I wouldn't hesitate to skip work to deal with a family emergency, and Nick isn't the kind of guy to give me stories just to avoid work. It's going to be a long night in the hospital for him. I e-mail Bob, asking whether we can reschedule. It's almost eleven. I send a text to Nick, telling him to do what he has to do.

I'm up at six-thirty and immediately check my in-box. Nothing from Bob, nothing from Nick. I take Henry for a quick walk and get to work at eight-thirty. As I explain to Dan that we might be rescheduling, Nick walks in. He looks like hell—red-eyed, still wearing yesterday's clothes. “I'm here. Surgery went OK, he's excited about his cast. He's already using it to threaten his brother.” Dan and I smile. We both have boys, we know the score.

Bob Waks shows up at 8:57. In his crisp business garb, he's a sharp contrast to our shorts and T-shirts. He starts with a little speech. “Here's what I'm thinking is going to happen today. I just want to sit quietly in the background and watch you guys do what you do. I'm not going to make recommendations, I'm just here to observe. Now, Nick has this call at ten-thirty. I'm very interested in hearing that, but I don't want you to do anything different than you would normally do. Just be yourselves.” He turns to me. “Is that what you expected, Paul? Did you have anything else you wanted to happen this morning?” I tell him that if that's what he wants, that's what we'll do.

At 10:20, Nick asks whether I will sit in on the call with him. I'm happy to do this. I've noticed that Nick has a hard time getting a conversation going in an organized fashion. He's an excellent listener and good with give-and-take discussions, but he doesn't launch a presentation very well. Hems and haws, doesn't get to the point. So we agree that I will open the call and then hand it over to Nick. Bob asks, “Who are you talking to?” Nick tells him the name of his primary contact. Then he checks the e-mails from her and comes up with a name for the other person on the call. Bob isn't satisfied with that. “Do you know who these people are? Where they fit in the organization?” We don't. The client is the Chamber of Commerce of a mid-size Texas city. Nick's contact is Mary, who called us, but we don't know anything about her. Nick and I pull our chairs up to his phone with the proposal open in front of us: ten pages of images of the proposed table, floor layouts, and photos of wood options. When Mary answers, she says she needs to get her colleague, Kate. We wait. And wait. Those are long minutes. Nick and I sit crouched over the phone, Bob hovering in the background, Dan in the other corner of the room, trying to type quietly. Finally Kate introduces herself. I start our pitch: “Mary, Kate, I'd like to thank you for getting us involved with this project. Nick has sent you his proposal—do you have it with you?” Silence. Then a muffled yes. I keep going. “OK, then Nick would like to review it with you. Here he is.” Nick quickly reviews the floor plan, showing how the table will fit in their room, and talks about the folding mechanism he is recommending. Then he goes over the wood samples. During these five minutes, we can hear rustling noises. Nick looks at me, eyebrows raised. I chime in. “Mary, Kate, do you have any questions? What do you think of this design?” More rustling noises, then a loud
bonk
, then an indistinct voice: “How much does this cost?” Nick and I look at each other. The price of the table is in large red numbers at the top corner of each image. “It's on the top of pages two, three, four, five, and seven, and there's a summary of every charge on the last page.” More rustling and then murmurs. Then we hear a deeper voice. Is there somebody else in the room? Mary speaks, “OK, I see it now.” Long pause. More murmurs. Finally, she says, “I'm going to have to take this to the board. They need to make this decision. We'll get back to you. Nicholas, you've been so helpful with these proposals. Could you just do one more? Can you include the table you showed in the first proposal with these here and maybe some lower cost options?” Nick agrees to do the revisions by Tuesday, thanks them for their time, and hangs up. We look at each other, then at Bob. His face is impassive, but his demeanor suggests he's struggling to find the right words to convey what he's thinking. After a pause, he says, “Well, that was something!” I ask him for a little more feedback, and he says, “I don't want to get into specifics right now, but I'm
sure
I can help all of you. There's a lot of room for improvement here.” Bob says he's seen enough; there's not much more he can do with Nick and Dan today.

We retreat to my private office. I ask him, “What did you really think?” His reply is brutal. “You guys are pretty bad. You made just about every mistake in the book. I don't want to waste time today going over that in detail, because we have a lot of other stuff to go over and I have to be back at the office by one-fifteen. The training sessions will cover everything you need to know. So let's talk about the assessments. Did you read the reports?” I tell him that I read every word, and we proceed to have a long discussion about the findings. I haven't seen Dan's and Nick's DiSC profiles, just the assessments of their potential as salesmen, so Bob shows me how they scored. High Conscientiousness scores are the one thing all three of us have in common. Nick has a low Dominance score, a very high Influence score, a below-average Steadiness rank, and a high Conscientiousness score. That makes perfect sense. Like me, his low S score reflects an impatience with routine. He doesn't keep good records and his desk is disorganized (just like mine). But he's an excellent craftsman, hence his elevated C score.

Dan has no Dominance, below-average Influence, above-average Steadiness, and high Conscientiousness. And that matches my experience with him. He never tries to push his opinions and he doesn't try to ingratiate himself with me or with customers. He has a hard time with the quick give-and-take of phone conversation. He deploys his strengths, his organization, and his mastery of his job to come up with very good solutions to clients' problems. But if some further persuasion is required to close the deal, he struggles.

I beg Bob for anything that we can use right now. “Just one tip. There must be something we can do right away. My sales are terrible and we may not survive long enough to put the training to use.”

Bob sighs, then says, “Here's one. Never end an interaction with a client without a commitment to meet again. You have their attention; use it to pin down an actual day and time for the follow-up. Don't let them put you off. Put it on your calendar, and then follow up with an e-mail confirming it. It's a way to keep moving on a job. Try that and see what happens.”

After Bob leaves, I return to the sales office. I don't want to discuss the assessments with Dan and Nick. Is it my place to criticize the way a person is wired? So I tell them about Bob's tip. We all marvel at the simplicity, the beauty of the concept. Why hadn't we ever thought of that? We let clients get back to us whenever they feel like it. We don't even try to control the pace of the deal. Bob's strategy means that we have an excuse to call our clients back, to make sure that they are moving toward a definite yes or no.

Emma, Dan, and Nick roll out at four-thirty, leaving me alone in the office. It's Friday afternoon, leading up to a holiday week. I don't expect any more calls today and we don't get any. I check with Nancy—Henry is doing OK. So I sit and think. Henry. Money. Sales. AdWords. Dan. Nick. Steve Maturin. My problems are all fighting in my head to see which can bother me the most. A wave of despair washes over me. It's a physical sensation, one that I've felt at intervals over the years. I feel it most when I'm tired, and it's quiet, and I'm low on cash. I know it will go away because by nature I'm an optimistic person. But while I'm caught in it, I feel very, very bad.

Five-thirty rolls around. Nobody has called. None of my problems have been solved. But I start to feel better. We're not out of work, yet. Henry will go back to school in a week. And that was a hell of a good tip that Bob gave us.

D
ATE
: S
UNDAY
, J
ULY 1
,
2012

B
ANK BALANCE
:
$91
,
271

C
ASH RELATIVE TO START OF YEAR
(“N
ET
C
ASH
”): -
$45
,
883

N
EW
-
CONTRACT VALUE
,
YEAR
-
TO
-
DATE
:
$865
,
722

Sunday morning. I return from a jog to find Nancy sitting in the kitchen. And no music from Henry's room, which is unusual. She looks upset. “Are you OK? I thought you went shopping?” She starts to say something, then collapses in tears. “I took him to Trader Joe's. You know, he's always been good there? So we were doing OK until we got in line.” She collects herself, then tells me what happened. It starts with a small annoyance: the jerk in the checkout line.

The store is crowded and the lines are long. Nancy has a cart full of groceries. Henry is by her side. The woman ahead of her, when she arrives at the cashier, parks her cart, and then does—nothing. Most people will start unloading, to speed up the process, and maybe to be helpful. Not this woman. She gives the cashier a tight smile, and then stands back.
Serve me, now
. The cashier starts unloading the cart for her.

Meanwhile, Nancy is hearing some rumblings from Henry. First, he places her hand on the handle of the cart. He's saying: Mom, push this thing out of here, I want to go. She tells him to be patient. Then he suddenly jumps and gives a short, loud shout when he lands. He's 6-foot-4 now, and weighs 215 pounds. Every person in the store stares, and then quickly turns away. People are very polite about Henry's strange behaviors. They can't help looking. But if we act as if nothing unusual is happening, or announce that this child has special needs, they stop. Oh, one of
those
kids. We know better than to judge, so we'll just ignore whatever is happening.

The woman is still watching as the cashier bags her groceries. Suddenly, she points at the item in his hand. “I don't want that tea.” The cashier sets it aside. “I want a different one. Wait for me.” She leaves the line and heads up the aisles to find a better box of tea. While she's gone, the cashier does nothing. Nancy holds Henry's hand, speaking to him quietly, telling him he has to be patient for a minute, then they will be able to go for a car ride and have a treat.

The woman returns with her tea. Checkout resumes, again without any help from her. Then she does it again. “I forgot to get eggs. It will just take a second.” She gives a fake smile to Nancy as she heads back to the dairy section. The cashier pauses again. She comes back with eggs. Checkout continues. Finally, the last item is bagged. Now she digs through her purse, then pulls out a check book.

Henry jumps and shouts again, this time a wail of despair that lasts a couple of seconds. Again, every eye in the store turns toward him and Nancy, who is still holding his hand. She puts her brave face on—a weak smile, a quick shrug, intended to convey her apology to the public, sorry about the fuss. She turns to him again. “Shhhh, honey, just another minute, then we'll be done, be patient, be a good boy.”

The woman asks the cashier for a pen. A sigh of despair passes through the whole line—Nancy has four or five people behind her at this point. He has to look for a few seconds, but finds one in the back of his drawer. She slowly writes the check. Signs it. Fills out the register. Then hands the check to the cashier, who gives her the receipt. She looks at it closely. Then she proffers it to the cashier and points to one of the numbers. “This was supposed to be on sale. I want my discount.”

Henry is finished waiting. With a full-throated roar, he attacks. He wraps an arm around Nancy's neck and pulls her backward off her feet. She lands on her side, sprawled on the floor. Then Henry bursts into tears and starts repeatedly slapping his own head with both hands, hard, while he jumps up and down.

Nancy tells me this story as tears stream down her face. “And the worst thing—I'm lying there on the ground while Henry is screaming—and nobody does anything. They just stand there. And that, that”—a lifelong feminist, she can barely bring herself to say it—“
bitch
just walks away, with her stupid groceries, and the checkout guy—nobody does anything at all to help me.” Gulp. I have some sympathy for the bystanders. I've been in her place, except for the being-knocked-to-the-floor part, and it all happens pretty fast, although it seems like every second is an eternity. Henry's worst behavior is so outlandish that people's brains can't process the situation—they literally freeze in their tracks while they try to figure out what is going on. And who's going to jump in and try to calm Henry down? He's big, and when he goes off, it's very scary.

“Are you hurt? So what did you do?”

“I left the groceries. I got him in the car, and he calmed down. When we got home he was smiling at me, but I was so”—long pause—“I was just so furious, I sent him up to his room.” I express sympathy, as there's nothing more to say. Nancy stops crying and sits with a very sad look on her face. “I can't take him anymore. I just can't take this. What are we going to do with this kid?” I don't know. In the short term, we have another week until he goes back to school. At the end of July, he'll be home again, for five weeks. Nancy continues, “I can't take him out by myself anymore. I just can't do it. I never know when he's going to attack me.”

There are four people that Henry pays attention to: Annie, the woman in charge of him at his school; Janice, his longtime babysitter; Nancy; and myself. Annie and Janice are in our lives because of government spending—they're both funded by our local school board, because of its legal obligation to provide local kids with a meaningful education. Even giant autistic kids. But this week, Annie is on her own break, and Janice is available only now and then. Nancy has decided, sensibly, that she can't go out in public with Henry anymore.

The rest of the day passes as usual: loud music, snacks, and car rides. But now every excursion is done by me. Nancy is afraid to be alone in a car with Henry, even if he's in the backseat.

I have a lot of responsibilities. I try to stay strong, but sometimes it feels as if a heavy weight is squashing me flat. The disappearing sales, the vanishing cash, the non-existent income, the non-performing employees, and now this. I'll keep trying to solve the problems I understand. And the others, like Henry? There's nothing to do but ride them out. They'll either get better or worse.

—

THE NEXT MORNING
, I take Henry with me to the Monday meeting. He is usually good for an hour, sitting in my office and listening to music. If I get distracted, he'll head to the refrigerator and start eating whichever lunch looks most delicious. Fortunately, we hold the meeting next to the fridge—I can talk to the crew and defend the lunches at the same time.

Finally, I have a snippet of good news. “We have more cash than we did last week.” I point to the number I've written on the board: $91,272. “We're still down relative to the year, but it's better than two weeks ago. Unfortunately, sales last month weren't so great.” I point to that number: $62,000. “I won't sugarcoat this. That's the lowest since July 2008. Our backlog is three and a half weeks. That's bad, too. But we're trying to fix sales. We just had our evaluation from our trainer. We got one good tip from him already, and we start the classes next week. I'm sure this is going to work. We just have to keep going. Something will happen.” They're all looking at me, as usual, with little emotion. “OK, that's the meeting.” They head to work. I'm pretty sure that some of them are looking for jobs, but nobody will tell me that unless they find one. Henry has been good, so I give him a donut and we leave. Four hours to kill; then Janice can take him until dinnertime. After she arrives, I head back to the shop.

Bookmark: AdWords. Log in. Stare at the screen. It's 94 degrees in my office. I'm keeping the air conditioning off to save money. We've had two inquiries this morning, then silence.

AdWords reports steady clicks for the past month, even as calls and sales are disappearing. Where did the boss callers go? What happened to them? Are they just not shopping anymore? On vacation? Worried about money? Do my headlines no longer appeal? Are the ads even running? What if Google is lying about showing my ads? Now, there's something I can check.

I start running searches to see whether my ads show up. I start with our highest traffic keywords: “Modular Tables.” Yup, there's the ad, but I don't see a free link to our site below it, just our competitors. Now the keyword that drives our best organic results: “Custom Conference Tables.” There's our ad, with free links right below it. Now “Boardroom Tables.” That's the string that generates the most e-mails, and I think it's the one that brings in the boss shoppers. Hmmm. No ad, and our link is in the third free position. No ad? I recheck in AdWords and see that, yes, I'm offering to pay $7.50 for a single click from that group. This is more per click than any of my other ads, by a long shot. So why aren't they showing it? Is it just a fluke? I know they show different results to different shoppers. Maybe Google knows that it's me doing this particular search, by checking my IP address. So I go out and search “Boardroom Tables” from my bookkeeper's computer. No ad, weak organic result. I recheck “Custom Conference Tables.” No ad. Then “Modular Tables.” Ad is there. Back at my computer, I use Google to find proxy sites. I can pretend to be searching from anywhere in the country. I spend the next forty-five minutes channeling searches through cities where we have done a lot of business: Houston, Pensacola, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago. Everywhere, it's the same pattern. The “Modular Table” ad is running, the “Boardroom Table” ad isn't.

The next morning I repeat my test. In every trial, both “Modular” and “Boardroom” ads are running. When I do proxy searches again in the middle of the afternoon, the “Boardroom Table” ad is gone. At the end of the afternoon, only the “Modular” ad is still showing.

Why does the “Boardroom” ad stop showing in the afternoon? Why is that ad so important? My old theory, back in April when inquiries started to drop, was that the economy was going down the toilet again. Then my Vistage group told me that they didn't see this, and that I had screwed up my marketing. I believed this for a while, but then decided we were experiencing a seasonal dip—more calls from schools, less from bosses, because of the end of the school year and the start of vacations. But what if the ad that bosses like best isn't even showing late in the day, when bosses shop for tables? I don't know for sure that the “Boardroom Table” ad is the one that brings the bosses to us, but it used to generate the most e-mails, and “Boardroom” conjures up an image of big, expensive tables used by powerful leaders. And what are we showing instead? “Modular Tables.” The inquiries for those tables usually come from institutions that need flexibility because they can't afford a dedicated boardroom. Cheapskates. These are not the shoppers we want.

So why does Google show the “Modular Table” ad instead of “Boardroom Table”? I think it's because of the huge search volume related to the “Modular” concept. The click-through rates are really low, but that ad generates more revenue for Google. As my money starts to run low, they turn off the other ads and keep the “Modular” ads going until I've used up my daily budget. By the end of the day, when the bosses have time to shop, the ad aimed at them has disappeared.

I don't know how long this has been going on, but the inquiries started to dry up in April, shortly after I introduced our new modular table ads. And increasing the spend didn't help, probably because the additional money was wasted showing the “Modular” ad to more people. Google's algorithm thinks that every click is a good click. It doesn't care whether it helps me or not.

It looks like the “Modular” ad is sucking the life out of the rest of the campaign. It's a theory. I can't prove it. I don't have enough information about which ad drives which kind of customer to call. So I could be wrong, but there's no doubt that the “Boardroom” ad is disappearing by mid-afternoon. Is there some way I can tell Google to put priority on the “Boardroom Table” ad? That's a great question, and I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out the answer, without success. Frustrated, I head home.

The next day is July fourth. In the morning, we take Henry to the local parade, which he enjoys. I persuade Nancy to watch him at home for a few hours, and I go in to work. I'm obsessed with finding a way to keep my “Boardroom” ad going without turning off the “Modular” ad. But I can't find an answer. It's incredibly frustrating. Google's help features are almost useless, and AdWords doesn't have a help desk. Like so many tasks I must do, there's no way to figure out the best approach. And I don't have the time or money to hire a consultant.

In the back of my mind, I've been wondering what happened to the BigOil project. I haven't heard anything since my e-mail on June 21. When we crossed into July, I abandoned hope. There's no way we could make a late August delivery. Imagine my surprise, on the fourth, to see an e-mail from Shiva. Her direction: use the drawings that we provided. Fantastic. Those are almost useless. Should I sink a day into designing something that I think will work? Instead, I reply, asking whether the drawings show the location of the boxes, or whether it is schematic, and they might be somewhere else in the room. Further surprise: Shiva's boss sends a drawing, shown to scale, with the boxes located. But it's a very odd design, clearly done by someone who knows nothing about building tables. The dimensions are non-standard, and it will be very difficult to assemble. On the other hand: forty thousand dollars. I reply that I will have a design ready to send tomorrow. The following morning I decide that crazy won't do. Four hours later, I send them a complete proposal, showing a practical design. Total cost: $47,884. At this point, I have little faith that I'm going to get this job. But I've done my best.