EPISODE 19

There was a pause now as Keith contemplated what he’d just heard.  Bosco knew this was the time to be quiet and he put his finger to his lips and looked at me carefully.  I nodded and waited for Keith to speak. 

“Now you think this is ‘sick’, right Michael?”

“Well, yeah.  Someone’s going to sue our guy and then where are we?”

“Why’s he going to sue?”  Keith was probing now and he was making sure that my objection was real.

“Well, you shaved his friggin’ head, didn’t you?”

“So what?” asked Bosco.  “Nobody forced him.  Hell, we even ask his permission, you okay with that?”

“Do we need to have him sign a release form?” Keith asked.

“Better than that.  We show him the service contract before we even start shaving.  We let him know everything about it.  We answer all his questions, heading off any other objections at the same time.  By the time he agrees to have the hair put on his head, he’s ready to sign the contract anyway.”

“But what do we have to protect our guy if the prospect gets pissed?” I persisted.

“You don’t need anything,” Bosco answered quickly.  “What’s he going to do, say that we drugged him and slapped a unit on his head while he was sleeping it off?”

“We’re not doing anything like that,” Keith responded quickly. 

“No we’re not,” I agreed.  “My point is that we need to protect ourselves in case we piss off the wrong prospect.”

“We’ll let the lawyers figure that one out,” Bosco said with a little smile.

“Fine, fine” said Keith.  He was gearing himself up for a final flurry of questions and this time his attention was entirely on Bosco.  He spoke slowly this time, like he was working on a difficult puzzle that he was close to finishing. 

“Bosco, how does all of this help us sell more units?  Now, before you answer that, I want you to consider that you’ve just made the goddamn things completely worthless by giving them all away.”

“Exactly!”  Bosco replied.  “We’ve shifted all of the value in the sales process to the service.  This makes the studio more valuable to the guy wearing our hair than ever before.  If the studio makes more on service and gets his clients into the habit of coming in every six weeks to make everything look good...”

“And this service plan is all pre-paid, right?” Keith interrupted.

“Right!  So there’s no excuse financially for the client not to come in.  Hell, he can come in every four weeks for all we care.  The more units the studio gives away as part of the prepaid service program, the more units we sell to the studio!”

You could almost hear Keith’s mind work on the other end of the line.  He was looking at Bosco’s proposal from every possible angle, looking for the flaw that would kill it.  I was doing the same thing, but I had to admit that I thought it was very clever.  None of us spoke as I watched Bosco lean forward to the speakerphone.  This was a tense moment and I had to marvel at how Bosco could keep himself in check.  A less disciplined man would have asked Keith a question, looking to surface any objection he might have, but Bosco knew that at this time, it was best to wait. 

A long minute passed before we heard anything out of the speakerphone.  Keith exhaled into his phone and then he heard him laugh.  Bosco sat upright and turned to me with a big smile on his face.  Keith began to laugh harder and then Bosco joined in.

“Brilliant, Bosco!” Keith exclaimed.  “No, no that’s really brilliant!  It’s so simple and so pure!”

“Thank you.”

“I swear to god, Michael, your old boss is the slickest operator in the world.  You’re a lucky guy to have spent so much time working with him.  There are people in our business who would pay…hell, who have paid a fortune to have him come in and work with them for just a few days.  And you’ve been with him for years.  Dammit!  You’re a goddamn genius, Bosco!”

Bosco was really animated now.  He was standing up and walking around the room, speaking loudly so that he could be heard on the speakerphone.

“The tough part is going to be training all of the studios how to get over their own belief that the hair is actually worth anything.  We’re going to have to work hard to beat this.  These guys spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on our hair and we have to get them used to spending even more.”

“You think we should send the salesmen out to their clients?” Keith asked.

“God, no!  Keith, you do that and this will all fail.  No, we have to offer them real education by qualified instructors.  PhDs.  I mean it.”

“Where the hell you gonna find a professor of sales?”

“You’re talking to him.”

“Oh Christ.”

“Come on, Keith.  Who the hell else knows this as well as I do?  No one!  We’ll run a three-day class somewhere, Vegas maybe.  We’ll invite them to come out and learn the greatest, most fantastic way to grow their businesses, charge ‘em a few bucks and they’ll climb over each other to get there.  Because nothing’s working, Keith.  They know it as well as we do.  The infomercials are failing.  The leads we’re getting from newspapers and TV suck.  Men are shaving their heads.  If we don’t do something to change the way hair is sold, a lot of these guys are going to go out of business and I know how much you don’t want that to happen.”

No, Keith didn’t want that.  I looked over at Bosco, who was looking intently at his telephone, waiting for the response.  It felt like a full minute passed before we heard anything.

“No, Bosco” Keith said softly.  “I sure as hell don’t.”

“So, we’re good?” Bosco asked.

“Hold on!” Keith said sharply.  “Let’s open this up and see what some other people think.  Michael?  I want you, Allen, Les and Bosco ready to talk about this in an hour.  I’m going to get something to eat here and I’ll call in then.”

That would mean that Keith would be sated with a nice meal, some nice wine and perhaps he’d even be a bit groggy at a little after 9PM Manila time while we’d all be growling for coffee in New York.  These were the prescribed ingredients for any successful meeting at Slip-Not when Keith was out of town.  But we were in no position to argue the point.

The next installment will be posted on January 13.

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