Bosco was clearly in a very agitated mood. I had just walked into my office and found
that I already had two voice messages from him, plus an email requesting that I
check my voice mail. I did and listened
as Bosco urged me to call him as soon as I got in…twice. One thing Bosco was and that was
insistent. I remember him once calling
my home five times during the space of an hour to see how I was getting along
on a small copywriting project I’d taken to work on overnight.
“Bosco!” I had almost shouted into the phone, “If you don’t
leave me the fuck alone, I’m never going to finish this.”
“Just tell me when you think you can show me something,” he’d
replied nervously. “We need to put this
to bed before tomorrow morning.”
It didn’t make any difference to Bosco that we weren’t even
going to present the copy to anyone until after lunch the next day. In his mind, this needed to be ready NOW and
emailed to him even sooner. That would
give him all night and much of the next morning to fret about it and to make
countless changes to the final product.
What I loved was that more often than not, he would hand the whole thing
back to me an hour or so before deadline to be reworked again. I guess part of the reason why I never minded
this all that much was that it was sort of flattering that he trusted me to
work some kind of perceived magic at the very last minute. Bosco had confidence in me and I always
appreciated that.
I dialed Bosco’s extension and he picked up on the first
ring.
“Where’ve you been?” he demanded.
“Fishing” I replied.
“Don’t be so damned smart,” he snapped back. “Just get up here right now. We’ve got a conference call with Keith.”
Keith was Keith Baade, the owner of SlipNot and when he
summoned, you really had to hustle.
Keith was so damned bright that at times I thought it had driven him
partially insane. This was a widely held
opinion, but even though he was prone to strange ramblings when he ran a
meeting, he actually listened to whatever anyone had to say, considered what
had been said, questioned the logic of each new idea, and then sometimes held
an often baffling debate with himself as he turned the concept around and
around. The result is that you never
knew what he was going to say about anything you presented him with, but you
could be sure that once he’d made up his mind, Keith would demand immediate
action and complete allegiance to this newest plan.
This was all fine, except that Keith was quite apt to change
his mind on the wisdom of his own strategy within a couple months, if not
sooner. This made things very exciting
in the Marketing and Sales departments.
The other oddity about Keith was that he almost never was in
the office. He spent weeks, sometimes
months at a time traveling through China, India, and the Philippines looking
for new sources of hair to ship to his constantly expanding manufacturing
enterprise. SlipNot owned almost 50% of
the US market and his goal was to come as close to establishing a monopoly as
the law would allow. Keith would be
speaking to us by telephone from Manila on that morning. The phone bill was always enormous, so Bosco
wanted to get in a few minutes prepping for Keith’s call.
When I got to Bosco’s office, I found he was already on the
phone with Keith. As I came in, he
motioned for me to sit down and he put Keith’s voice on the speaker.
“Keith,” he said quickly, “Michael’s here.”
“Good, good!” Keith laughed.
I loved this about him. Keith was
always in a good mood at the beginning of almost any meeting. I think he really liked all the people who
worked for him and he seemed to enjoy the intellectual exercise of pitting
ideas (and people) against each other.
It was a sort of absurdist dialectic the way he’d coax an idea out of
one person and then elicit from someone else in the room an objection to the
proposal. He’d let the two sides duke it
out for a while, sometimes tossing in a question or demanding an explanation of
a point raised, but always keeping his own opinions hidden. He knew it was a taxing process on the
sometimes-fragile egos around the office, so he liked to begin every meeting
warmly, just like this one. This was how
I knew that the shit was apt to fly.
“So, Michael” Keith began.
“Bosco has a very interesting idea I’d like to have us talk about
today. Has he told you anything about?”
Nope. Of course he
hadn’t. This was going to be the
dynamic, Bosco was going to throw his plan out and Keith was going have me try
to poke holes in it.
“Not yet” I replied and I looked over at Bosco. He smiled and pointed to the screen on his
laptop. There was a Word document that
outlined some kind of marketing plan, written in that bizarre language that
only Bosco could decipher. For all his
verbal skills, Bosco had trouble writing.
His spelling was atrocious and he really never quite got the hang of
just what a spell checker was for. I
couldn’t figure out what Bosco was showing me anyway and I shrugged my
shoulders to indicate this.
“Okay, Keith?
Michael? Let’s start with the
biggest problem we have right now in the business. Our male client base is shrinking and that’s
because there’s really only a very small market to begin with. In reality, less than 2% of the adult male
population that is experiencing hair loss actually wants to do anything about
it. There are millions of other men who
lose their hair but they really aren’t any good to us. They either comb what hair they have over the
bald spot, shave their heads, or like Michael, they just don’t care.
“The 2% who might, just might want to buy from our clients
are reluctant to do so, even though we know that they’re dying for some way to
stop their hair loss and to grow their hair back.
“They don’t want surgery.
They’re either afraid of the procedure or they can’t stand how expensive
it is. Think about it. You pay between $2000-$3000 for a procedure
that gives you maybe 900 follicles and then you have the rare privilege of
coming back at least two, if not three more times so that you can actually
build a new hairline. And of course
those follicles eventually die and the whole process begins again.
The next installment will be posted on December 30.
If you'd like to read the entire book today, GO
HERE.
No comments:
Post a Comment