Mountains of Arizona
Cloudy 62 Degrees
12:54 p.m.
Long ago, when yours truly was experimenting with the underbelly of enterprise, traipsing back and forth on a car lot 12 hours a day, six days a week, I chanced upon an older gentleman coming in to buy a Corvette.
This was my kind of buyer. He knew what he wanted. He knew when he wanted it. He knew from where he wanted it.
And so when my “manager” finished the final negotiations with this guy, he walked off the car with a new car.
I felt really good about the whole thing until the manager came over to me and explained the snow job he had done on the guy to confuse him with the numbers of the purchase until he said yes.
The manager was excited about his conquest. Clearly he wore these acts as badges of honor. Back then, my religious indoctrination was still going strong and so I just thought I was going to go to hell for sure now.
A few weeks went by until, one afternoon, that buyer came back. He didn’t really “walk” in, he stormed in. He explained to me that his lawyer had reviewed the deal and pointed out that the buyer had been, in technical terms, “screwed.”
He was not happy. And for the next 40 minutes, he spoke to the manager and got his feelings out in the open.
How did the manager resolve the issue? Did he just tell him the truth?
Of course not. The truth doesn’t take 40 minutes. Only a lie bigger than the first takes 40 minutes.
The buyer walked out knowing he had been screwed but wasn’t able to completely prove it.
Despite what most people on the car lot thought, this is not selling. This is just evil on two legs.
If you’re playing business thinking there is a winner and a loser, you are play at an amateur level.
That’s certainly the level of the car lot.
“I will be successful if I screw the people who are responsible for providing the funds that feed my family.”
That’s how they thought. That’s the reality in which they lived.
The magic happens when you figure out how to structure your business so that when your clients win, you win too.