Can you imagine the look on his face that Tuesday morning?!
He’d fired up the PC, booted up Outlook and begun shelling his emails; removing the meat from the husk; the substance from the unsubstantial, unwanted and unneeded.
Presumably his PA knocked on the door?
Maybe she had it propped against the wall in her office or leaning against the desk?
Perhaps she figured it was more efficient for her boss to come and walk over to it than to dial up facilities management in the basement and get one of the keen, young interns to help her drag or carry it in to his office?
Surfboards are big things: The sort of thing that requires an excess baggage charge on the plastic and a trip to a lonely corner of an airport to drop it off. They’re like dolphins; highly efficient in the water but a whole lot of manhandling on land.
Either way, that’s’ what he saw once he’d removed the brown paper in which it’d been carefully cocooned prior to the UPS guy picking it up from that office on Bishopsgate.
It’s not often one gets a surf board delivered to your place of work, and especially if your role is that of General Counsel of an international clothing manufacturer but that’s what it was: A good old fashioned, beautifully sculptured lump of polyurethane, fiberglass and resin.
But that wasn’t the biggest shock. No, the real shocker was the fact that the sender had written her phone number on it in huge black numbers, along with her name.
She’d desperately wanted to get a meeting with him but all her efforts and that of her BD team had produced a big fat ‘squat-all’. Invites to seminars, market updates, breakfast briefings and sporting events had been shunned. Brochures dumped, emails ignored and junked, phone calls and voicemails denied.
The surfboard was the last ditch, ‘what-have-we-got-to-lose’ attempt.
It worked: Of course.
He picked up his phone and called her immediately.
Well you would wouldn’t you, if the partner of a law firm and head of intellectual property had written her name in huge black letters on a surfboard and you were Legal General Counsel of a global clothing manufacturer focused on the surf, beach-dude market?
I don’t claim to know the secret to business success but one thing I know for sure – You’ll fail if you do what your competitors are doing.
Send more surfboards.
Nick Davies' Blog 