"Missed Oportunity"
There was a key account executive that we hired when I took over as the sales manager. The original sales staff had burnt out on the owner’s whims and low pay. I had to fight to get this account executive hired as all of the other leadership team members were against the hire. The owner finally relented stating his all too frequent phrase, “I’ll do this, just to prove you wrong.”
Needless to say, the owner was totally wrong about the account executive as he became the number one producer, bringing in more sales than the others combined. But more than that, the account executive brought us what could have been the most profitable deal we could have ever made.
The account executive came to me telling me about a guy he had on the line asking for us to build him a website similar to ours. He had seen the company’s cyber store which had been implemented with some of the features I had come up with for ShareValue. He was asking us to build him the same site with a few minor modifications, while promising not to compete against us selling computer products.
The owner finally agreed to speck the deal, and he bid the build-out at $250,000. We got a call back a couple or so weeks later with an offer. The man had a bid for $125,000 cash and $125,000 stock and wanted to give us the first opportunity if we would match that offer.
The owner was so ticked off over the fact that the guy had the gull to shop his specks and try to negotiate the price, he flat refused.
Everything in me said we needed to do this deal. I pleaded with the owner to just bite the bullet and do the deal, arguing that we already had the site built and the cost of modification would take less than $25,000 in programing, most of which the owner could do himself. This would give us $100,000 in cash flow to focus on our sales growth. But he wouldn’t budge.
On my last call with this man, I explained the situation and how the owner felt, trying to figure out some way to patch the deal up, but to no avail. Before he hung up, I asked him if he had registered his company yet and could he tell me its name so I could track it in the future. Very enthusiastically he stated, “amazon.com!” I thought about it for a few seconds but could not come up with a correlation between the name and selling books.
So, I asked him, “I may be missing something, but what does the amazon name have to do with selling books?” Jeff responded saying, “It’s a great name. We are all going to get rich!”
I walked out of the meeting with the owner mocking my desire to do this deal. He asked me if I had asked God about it. I informed him that I hadn’t. He demanded that I do it right now as he was really put out with my reluctance to let the deal go.
So, I asked the Lord, “What about this deal”. Instantly he responded saying, “You would do well to drop everything you’re doing and go work for this man.”