EPISODE 48

The truth was, the Web site was damn near genius.  Bosco had divided the country up by state and then broke each state down by its various Designated Market Areas (DMA).  A DMA is a unique media territory that each major market holds.  For example, White River Junction and Lebanon were considered one DMA, while Boston alone had 8 DMAs.  It all depended on the ability of the various TV, radio and newspaper outlets to service all of the subscribers in a given area.  New York and LA could host lots of DMAs and this was what Bosco had been counting on.  His plan was to have the studios in the many DMAs to buy the exclusive rights in their territory (which he alone would define) to all of the leads in their area that the site would pull in.  They would pay a monthly fee to secure that right and then they would also be charged a fee for every lead that was generated on their behalf.  Bosco took out advertising in a number of publications, including Men’s Health, which proved to be the most strikingly bold and brilliant part of his plan.  The Men’s Health ad was so simple it was almost criminal.  There was no graphic, just a half-page black panel with white print that read:

“Losing your hair?  You don’t have to put up with it:

theresnohaironmyhead.com.”

The response was extraordinary.  Within 2 days of the ad hitting, we received over 300 leads.  After that, it really got heavy.  We were averaging over 500 leads a day for a while before we saw the tide begin to recede. 

“You gonna run the ad again?” I asked Bosco a couple of weeks later.

“Nope.  You have to go sell the leads we’ve got first.  Bring me some cash and we’ll talk.”

Pierre helped out by cataloguing the leads according to the DMAs they came from and I started making phone calls. I’d call up a studio owner and tell him or her that I’d gotten a lead in his market.

“If you like, I’d be happy to send it to you.”

“Yeah?” they almost always asked.  “You want my address?”

“Yup.  Just give me your email address and you can have it in five minutes.”

Well of course, very few of these studios had Internet service then, let alone had an email account, so they usually asked me to fax the lead to them, which of course produced some very nasty unintended consequences, once they signed up for the service.  If a studio picked up 30 or more leads on a given day and we faxed the individual survey sheets we had received from the Web site to our client, the result was either a masse of paper strewn all over the studio floor (which pissed off the owner no end), or no leads received at all (should said owner’s fax machine be out of paper at the time that we sent the leads).  It was a remarkable example of a “lose/lose situation”.  Once the owner got the lead sheets off the floor, or managed to get them out of his fax machine, the circumstances often deteriorated further. 

You need to picture what life was like for the studio owner to understand why things like a flood of fresh leads would prove to be so problematic for him.  A well-run studio had an efficient and polite receptionist whose job was to channel all of the foot traffic, while simultaneously handling the incoming phone call requests for bookings.  The receptionist would handle the book, making sure that the workload was evenly divided between the technicians, whose job it was to deal with the care and maintenance of the hair replacement systems that the clients wore.  Flood a tech with too many clients in a day and nothing would get done properly, causing the overflow of work to fall on the owner’s back.  This was never a good thing. 

The receptionist was also the gatekeeper who prioritized the many calls from customers asking to speak directly to the owner.  A successful owner was able to establish a strong following by virtue of the personal relationships that he or she was able to develop with the client base.  If the owner had properly cultivated a close bond with the clients, it meant that the studio could enjoy the loyalty of its client base for many years, allowing the business to flourish.  The downside was that a really popular owner could find himself flooded with personal requests from his clients.

“C’mon, just let me talk to Angela for a minute.  Please!”

“Mick and I go way back.  He’ll take my call.  Just tell him I’m waiting for him to pick up.”

“Rudi swore he could take me on Tuesday!  This thing is falling off my head!  I look like someone scalped me!”

Meanwhile, the owner would be running around, putting out an endless number of fires.  The 1 o’clock slot is triple booked and none of the three clients wants to reschedule. The dye job on one unit is no good and the tech asks if it’s okay to grab a new one, or should he/she try to re-dye the one that got screwed up?  The client who came in to have his hair system cleaned up hasn’t been in for 6 months, the unit is toast, but he doesn’t want a new one (“Just fix this one now, so I can get outa here – but make it look good!”).  The stockroom is a mess and no one can find anything in it.  The stockroom is empty and there’s nothing to find!  In short, our happy studio owner didn’t have time to deal with an ever-growing mountain of aging leads.  Thusly, our office received a series of angry calls from studio owners shortly after the Web site began to crank out leads to our new clients.  As luck would have it, those calls came to me.  They were all quite similar.  The irate owner would complain that the leads were useless.  My job was to isolate the reason why said owner held our leads in such low esteem.  More often that not, the reason was that the lead had not included the prospect’s phone numbers.  They gladly offered up their email addresses though and as such, they expected to be contacted that way.  This was a new kind of prospect, an Internet prospect and as we were learning, they had to be handled differently than the late night, TV watching moles we were all used to dealing with. 

This was only appropriate, given that our Web prospects had requested information from a Web site.  While the form that each prospect was asked to fill out did request a telephone number, we had decided not make this a requirement.  Lots of sites did and the failure to fill out a required field meant that the site would refuse to process the form, reminding the prospect to supply the information requested.  We figured that people who wanted phone calls would give us their numbers and that this would also identify them as higher quality leads.  Unfortunately, much of these subtleties were lost on the studio owners.  They wanted leads that they could close with as little effort as possible.  When they didn’t get what they expected, they literally exploded.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on August 2nd.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 47

“So what the hell do we do with him?” I asked.

Bosco and I were driving back from lunch in his car.  We had purposely avoided talking about Pierre throughout the meal.  I know I didn’t have much to add on the subject and Bosco rebuffed the only attempt I made at bringing it up.  But now he seemed ready to engage and I was fascinated by his response.

“It’s obvious, Michael.”

“It is?”

“Sure.  The answer was right in front of us all through that little meeting we just had with him.”

“Kindly educate me.”

“Well, do you notice how Pierre always shows up at a meeting with a notepad?”

I’m a fairly observant fellow and so that small detail had not escaped me.  I nodded and Bosco continued.

“He takes his job very seriously.  In fact, I bet he puts what he believes is a lot more effort in every day than either you or I do.  He doesn’t respond to the extra money I offer him because that doesn’t motivate him.  He also doesn’t seem to really care if you and I shit all over him.  He just shuts down and looks at how unfair everything is.  He feels like a cog.  His problem is that he doesn’t get the one thing he craves the most.  He wants to be in on the decision making process.”

“He’s not qualified.”

“That’s true, but that’s not the point.  Pierre needs to feel that he matters.  I think that if we let him in on our planning sessions, we might be able to get him to do what we want.  If he becomes part of the process that establishes goals and strategies, he’ll feel like he’s part of the inner group.  That sense of belonging is very important to Pierre.  Even if he needs to start at the bottom, he doesn’t want to feel as though that’s what he’s doing.”

“I have a friend who married his girlfriend right out of college,” I said while staring out the window at a very attractive woman seated on a motorcycle.  We were on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, so she was riding without a helmet.  Her long blonde hair was braided tightly and I tried to imagine what she might look like with it hanging loose about her shoulders.  As I did this, she turned to me and smiled.  I was a bit embarrassed, but I managed to wave to her just before she gunned her bike and sped off ahead of us. 

“And?” Bosco asked, bringing me back to our conversation.

“Well, she got a degree in English, or History, or something like that.”

“Liberal Arts!” Bosco chuckled.  “Yeah, not a lot of jobs out there for folks with that particular piece of paper.  At least not right off.”

“Absolutely.  She was really bummed out too.  She went out and applied for every day job she saw in the paper.  You couldn’t say she didn’t have that part of the game down.”

“But,” Bosco interrupted, “She didn’t have game though, did she?”

“Am I telling you this story or are you gonna?”

“Play on!”

“Thank you.  Anyway, she didn’t get any offers and she was depressed as hell about it.  I went over to their place for a couple beers after work a few weeks back and she was there, all upset.  Her husband was trying to cheer her up, but all she did was cry, ‘Four years of college and this is what it gets me’.”

“Think Pierre feels that way?”

“I sure as hell do, Bosco.  So, I’m going to have to agree with you for once.  If we’re going to ever get Pierre to perform, we’re going to have to bring him in.  This might not be too bad a thing anyway.”

“Why’s that?”

“Maybe he can tell me why kids his age want to buy hair.”

“You don’t know?”

“Shit, Bosco!  I don’t understand why anyone buys hair!”

“No you don’t, do you?”

“Nope.”

“It’s my humble suggestion that you keep that one great truth to yourself, Michael.  I get what you’re saying.  But the studio owners who pay us for advice wouldn’t be all that understanding.”

“I’m not stupid, Bosco.”

“No, you’re not.  But you can sometimes be too blunt and that makes it seem like you’re arrogant.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Okay!” Bosco said, ready to change the subject.  “So when we get back to the office, I want to look at our new site with you.  The beta is live now and we can go over how this thing is going to work.”

“We bringing Pierre in on this?”

“Might as well.  I built it for him and all of his Gen-X friends!”

A half hour later, Pierre, Bosco and I crowded around the screen in Bosco’s office.  To an outsider, it might have resembled a trio of cold, hungry cavemen at the primeval moment of the discovery of fire, with the exception that the youngest of those cavemen was taking copious notes of everything that he saw or heard.  Bosco clicked from page to page on the new site, which had the unfortunate URL: “theresnohaironmyhead.com”.

“You really like that?” I had asked Bosco of the site’s address.

“Actually, Michael – I’d rather hear what Pierre thinks about it.”

Pierre stopped scribbling in his notebook and took a long look at the site page on the display.  He flipped back a couple of pages in his notebook, looked at the words there and then with a serious expression, he gave us his verdict.

“It’s perfect.”

“Why?” I asked.

Pierre looked down at his notebook again, but didn’t appear to be reading from it.  Instead, he spoke slowly and clearly, apparently trying to explain to me a concept that he found so simple that I must have appeared to have been brain damaged to him.

“Because it’s the first thing that will go through a guy’s head when he suddenly realizes that he’s going bald.”

When I went home that afternoon, I reflected on what Pierre had said.  This hadn’t been what had popped into my tiny little mind when I first realized that I was losing my hair.  It had been one morning shortly after my 31st birthday.  I’d wandered into the bathroom to take a leak and brush my teeth.  Afterwards, I looked into the mirror to take stock of the damage I’d inflicted on myself during the previous evening out.  The tell tale signs of a fair amount of alcohol and marijuana abuse presented themselves as I looked at my bloodshot eyes and the black marks underneath them.  Screw it, I thought.  I can work this off with a couple cups of fresh ground coffee and a brisk walk outside.  I was almost ready to turn away and leave the bathroom when I glanced at the mess of hair on the top of my head. 

When I was a boy, my mother taught me how to part my hair and comb it.  In spite of the fact that my hair always seemed to stick out from the back, sheer will power and repeated brushing “trained” it to bend to my will.  I was able to rake my fingers through my hair and have it settle out the way my mother liked it by the time I was maybe 9 years old and from that day, I swore I’d find a way to destroy the one image of myself that she had coerced me into creating.  When I was 16, I grew out my hair shoulder length and parted it right down the middle.  To my delight, this had the effect of infuriating both of my parents.  Nothing more rewarding than getting a little two-for-one action!  But as I looked into the mirror 15 years later, I saw that the fine part that I had nurtured with such malice aforethought had seemingly…widened!  In fact, it looked less like a neat line that separated the right and left poles of my head as it did the runway of a major metropolitan airport.

As my right forefinger traced the path of this augmentation, I began to wonder how long it had been going on.  Things like the loss of what appear to be perhaps a quarter of the hair on one’s head don’t normally happen overnight.  Obviously, this had been developing for quite some time, but I’d either been too oblivious to notice, or perhaps I had seen it and subconsciously chosen to ignore the whole thing. 

I hadn’t given it another thought since.

Deep down, I guess that I really didn’t get the hair replacement business.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on July 29th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 46

Now Pierre was really befuddled.  He looked at his notebook briefly and then stared at Bosco.

“I don’t think this is fair,” he said quietly.

“Why not?”

“Well, you’re treating me like shit.”

“Not really, Pierre.  I’m just trying to figure out what will get you to do what I need you to do.  I mean, working with Michael is pretty easy, in spite of the fact that he’s an arrogant prick.  I know exactly what motivates him: money.  All I have to do is to give him new ways to earn more of it and he meets any goal I set for him.  It’s that simple. I haven’t got any idea of what makes you come in the door every day.  I’ve offered you more money if you kick your production up, but that didn’t work.  I gave you more training.  Same thing.  I haven’t got a clue what to do with you.”

Bosco stood up and began to walk around his office in an aimless pattern.  He was really upset now.  He was giving serious consideration to letting Pierre go.  I snuck a quick glance at Pierre and his confused expression confirmed that he truly had no idea how deep in this he was. 

“It’s not fair, man.”

“I know you feel that way, Pierre.  But that doesn’t change the fact that if you’re not making me any money, then there’s no real reason why I should give you any more to stay here.”

And there it was.  Bosco had come as close to actually telling someone to leave as he ever had in his life.  Still, he hadn’t told Pierre that he was fired. 

“It’s not fair.”

“Wait a sec,” I interrupted.  “I think Bosco may have it.  Bosco, you just said you hadn’t figured out what motivates Pierre.  So, Pierre, what is it you want?”

“What do you mean?” Pierre asked, looking even more puzzled, if that was even possible.

“What do you want?” I repeated.  “When you took this job, what were you hoping to get out of it?”

Bosco smiled.  I was using the script that Pierre had been using to qualify the leads he had been calling.  So, I was literally trying to qualify Pierre out of the box.  If he didn’t know why he was even coming to work, then there was no reason for him to even want to stick around.  But on the other side, if he could express what he hoped this crappy little job was going to do for him, maybe we could figure out how to give it to him.

“Well, I guess I just wanted to do what you guys do.  You know, make marketing plans for the clients.  Set ad budgets.  Do market research.  That’s the stuff I’m interested in.  Seriously, making these calls to get bald guys to come in and have their scalps evaluated isn’t what I went to school for.  I want to use the stuff I learned in my job.”

“So, you want Michael’s job?” Bosco asked.

“Yeah.  I could do it.”

“You think you could do what I do?” Bosco said with a smile.

“I think I could learn it.  Sure.  Why not?”

Bosco turned to me and asked, “Can Pierre have your job?”

“Absolutely,” I replied.  “Just as soon as I’m through with it.”

Bosco laughed out loud.  “Oh god, Michael!  You are a piece of work!  Sorry about that Pierre.  It looks like Michael’s not giving it up to you.  You’re going to have to keep making those calls for a while.”

Pierre looked really upset now and he repeated his oft-said refrain about the relative inequity of the situation.

“Of course it’s fair!” Bosco admonished him.  “You may know a lot, but you don’t have the skills yet.  If you stick around here though, you’ll get it.  Do you think Michael liked making those calls any more than you do?  Actually, I take that back.  Michael did like making the calls, once he figured out how to do it and it started to make him some money.  But you’re very strange to me.  The money doesn’t mean as much to you as it does to Michael.  So we’re right back where we started.  I still don’t know what motivates you.  All I know is that you don’t like what you’ve got.”

There was a silence after that.  It was clear that we were at an impasse and I really wondered what Bosco was going to do.  As usual, he did precisely the right thing.  If nothing else, he was a master at gauging when it was time to take a step back.  He stood up and motioned for me to do the same.

“Michael and I are going to lunch, Pierre.  Keep making your calls.  We’ll talk more about this later today.  I promise.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on July 21st.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 45

Bosco was thrilled with my report on Firefly.

"You're right, Michael.  Those guys are geniuses.  Our site will do a lot of the same things, by the way.  But I want you to think about how we're going to sell it because I'm putting you in charge of that, effective right now."

"Sure.  Care to give a clue as to just what in hell it is I'm supposed to be selling?"

"Leads."

"Leads?"

"Michael, we're building the largest lead generator on the Web.  It'll draw from all over the country...shit, from all over the world!  There are millions of people who want to do something about their hair that radio, TV and newspapers can't reach.  Those people don't read newspapers to begin with and they sure as hell don't listen to the radio.  They watch television, but they don't watch the commercials.  The remote has killed that.  But, do you know who they are?  They're a demographic group that's going to feed our industry for the next 10 years."

Bosco stopped for a second and looked carefully at me.

"You have no idea what the fuck I'm talking about, do you?" he chuckled.

"That obvious?"

"The blank stare was a giveaway.  Don't worry about it.  You're going to learn a lot about them, very soon."

"Who?"

"Generation X, of course!"

You have to remember, it was 1995.  Bill Clinton, the first baby boomer in history was the president of the United States.  There was every reason to assume that another "boomer" would follow him and like the WWII generation, we (being a boomer, I'm authorized to use the possessive plural here) were likely to run this damned country for a good long time to come.  After all, the World War II generation had delivered Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush.  How the hell were we supposed to know that the next, and likely the very last boomer elected was going to be George W. Bush and that he was going to drive the country's economy right into a shit pile?  Thus ended the Boomer Era.  Thanks, George.  But this was a while before all of that was going to happen.  In '95, most boomers had every expectation that, having driven the economy and just about everything else for the past 10 years or so, that we were apt to be doing so for a good long time to come.  But Bosco was a bit smarter than the rest of us, recognizing that the generation behind the boomers was actually more apt to fuel everything, as the general population aged.  He wanted to know how to sell them on the new hair of the 21^st century.

Bosco had hired a guy named Pierre Tabacot to take over making the calls for his studios.  Pierre was, as everyone appeared to me, a very tall fellow with a thin face that featured a well-maintained goatee.  He wore glasses and always appeared to be squinting.  It turned out that this was due to the fact that he had no health insurance and his eyeglass prescription was quite out of date.  He was a freshly minted University of Vermont graduate with a liberal arts degree and little or no real experience.  His father was from Quebec and his mother hailed from Burlington.  Apparently, “Dad” had heavily influenced the naming of his favorite son.  Pierre was fairly self-conscious about his heritage, his age, his relative inexperience…in short, he was a bit of a wreck.   Still, he was very bright, eager, and possessed an earnestness that, had it not been so innocent, might have driven most people completely nuts.  He was ready to take on the world though and often made note of that fact.  Unfortunately, his domain was limited to the realm of balding men who watched infomercials on late-night television.  This wasn't exactly the career path he'd envisioned when he had declared himself a marketing major just two years prior.  He had dreamed of a career in a Boston or a New York advertising agency.  Instead, he had landed in Bosco's little four-room office in White River Junction.  Times being what they were though, he took the job and worked his ass off.

There is a major difference between working hard and working efficiently and Pierre didn't quite grasp it.  While he was often in the office up to an hour earlier than either Bosco or I, and he was usually still on the phone trying to book appointments as the two of us made our daily exit - Pierre floundered about, never reaching his monthly quota for the first six months he worked with us.  His frustration grew, as did Bosco's.

One afternoon, Bosco called Pierre and I into his office.  He asked me to close the door before I sat down.  Clearly "Daddy" was perturbed.  Pierre sat perched on the edge of his chair, his long legs tucked underneath while his long body leaned out toward Bosco's desk.  He held a little notebook in his hands and as was his habit, he readied himself to take precise notes of all that was said.  You had to admit that the guy took his job seriously.

“Pierre,” Bosco began.  “I think you know that all of us want you to succeed.  Michael will tell you that I’ll do anything to get you to where you need to be so that can happen.”

Bosco shifted in his chair.  He was uncomfortable with the situation.  Above all, Bosco Ignatz hated confrontation with the people he hired.  I knew this from my own dealings with him.  I had been then and continue to this day to be a complete pain in the ass.  My sales numbers have always saved me, although I have often deserved to be shown the door anyway (and in many cases, found myself sent packing, in spite of my ability to rack up higher sales numbers than most of my cohorts).  Pierre’s problem was that he really didn’t go for the close when he had a prospect that was ready to book.  He’d keep talking around the subject, trying to make sure that it was okay for him to ask for the order.  He was, simply put, afraid of being told, “no”.

Bosco was afraid too.  He might actually have to fire somebody and that was something he’d never done before.  Bosco coughed nervously and continued.

“The problem Pierre is that you’re just not booking enough appointments.  I’ve coached you, so has Michael.  But your numbers just aren’t there.”

Pierre looked confused.  “What do you mean?  I booked 5 people yesterday.”

“True,” Bosco replied.  “But it took you 7 hours.  I need you to book at least one an hour to make this work.”

“But I made a lot of calls.”

“Also true.  You’ve been very good at smiling and dialing.  But that’s not what I need.  I need appointments and you’re just not getting it done.  This isn’t an isolated thing either, Pierre.  You’ve never averaged one appointment an hour in all the time you’ve been here.  I don’t know any other way of putting it.”

“Okay.  I’ll come in a little earlier tomorrow and make more calls.”

“No, that’s not it.  Pierre, I pay you by the hour already, so supplying yourself with more billable hours doesn’t help me unless you start to book at the rate I need.”

“But I’m working as hard as I can, Bosco!”

“I get that.  The issue isn’t your effort.  It’s your output that’s got me worried.  You’re not keeping up with the goals we’ve set for you and I don’t know what to do to motivate you to change that.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on July 14th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.