By Joseph Zeleny                                       

When one of my assistants approached me about an upcoming appointment she had a look of worry on her face.

I often hire interns for marketing because I am always hopeful that they will avoid some of the perils of a marketing career.  Many marketers come in learning about common practices in marketing and take them to heart.  It’s not until I remind them that it was once common practice to burn people at the stake that I usually am able to shake the cobwebs out of their eyes.

My intern had been with me for a few months and her term was just about expired.  I often have them look at information on people I am going to give a marketing session to.  This helps me see what they have learned and allows me to get some outside insight on an account.  Often it’s their wrongs that help me figure out the rights.

She sat in the chair and told me that she thought that Curtis and Darlene were doomed.  I looked over the folder while she told me about their company and why she had drawn that conclusion.

Ok, I have said before that I believe most companies just need to change a degree or two in order to succeed.  But this was a couple riddled with more bad decisions than the Donner party.  They were opening a high end water company.  Not a bad decision in today’s market where the fear of all the contaminants runs wild.  However that is where the good ideas end.  The couple decided to open shop on a street that was known for nothing more than a bunch of crappy used cars.  They were in between a used car dealer and a burger shack.  The idea was that people would come to them and pay upwards of $9.00 a gallon for their water.  The customers would have to buy one of their water jugs at $11.00 which they could sterilize between fills for $6.00 each time or six times for $30.00.  They decided that advertising in the (Nickle Minus Four Cents) saver was the best bet because that’s what the “marketer” from the publication recommended.  They were referred to me by a leasing agent who tried desperately to get them to pay a little more for a better space.

I looked back at my intern waiting for her to laugh and tell me it was a joke.  However, it was no joke.  She was absolutely dumbfounded and had no idea how to compose a rebuttal without completely trashing what their present plan was.  We spent the next three hours rewriting their business plan.  I know I have a good plan whenever I think about doing the business myself afterwards.

That night I actually dreamt of how awesome we had made their business.  Of course I would give my intern a majority of the credit when the couple thanked us for saving their business.  I like to end an interns stay with the first company that they can proudly ad to their portfolio.  I thought of how well their name would be known and how we had literally saved their business from dying.  By our original estimation the couple would have been out of business well before their lease was up if the (#^%$) Saver didn’t kill them first.

The next day Curtis and Darlene came into my office with two of their three kids and all of our introductions were very pleasant.  The couple told me how they had scrimped and saved to get enough money together to run their business while they were waiting for it to take off.  Usually I am a bit more tactful in telling people what I said to them.  However Curtis explained that he was the type of guy who didn’t like to beat around the bush.  I waited while he gloated his business idea and everything he had done and how the only reason they were there was because his wife felt that they needed a second opinion. 

“Your business will be dead inside of six months.”

Again, I am not usually this blunt, but sometimes people need a solid dose of reality in their veins.  I gained weight and got up to 254lbs convincing myself that I was ok at five foot nine.  It wasn’t until one of my little cousins said that I was her “Fat Uncle Joey” that I took the shot in the tail.  As of this writing I am now under 210lbs and will keep losing weight and eating sensible until I am at my target goal of 189lbs. 

I could tell my intern wanted to leave so bad as we watched Curtis’ face turn from pink, to red, to a near purple color before storming out of my office.  I turned to his wife and asked her if she wanted to know why.  She retorted about how it was a bad idea to be where they were and the advertising they were going to take but that he wouldn’t listen.

It’s amazing how much the people next to you can see.  But you have to remember that they don’t have the blinders on that you do.  Even to date there have been many business ideas that I have had that never made it out of the conceptual phase because someone had enough guts and caring for my future to say it was a bad idea.  Often when I listened to why it helped me change, or drop the idea altogether.

I told Darlene exactly why it was a bad idea before I said anything else.  I explained first off to her that selling a high end product in a low end area where the surrounding housing market was the lowest in the city was a bad start.  I went on to tell her that the Lenny Saver catered to people who were looking for a ten dollar lawn mower and not someone looking to spend $15 for a gallon of water.  I was about to tell her how making people come to them was a bad idea when Curtis walked back in.

He had calmed down and listened as I repeated everything I had said to his wife.  I made a hard correction to tell them that the Saver didn’t have a marketing meet with them.  It was a Salesperson who only wanted to use the word marketing to ease them while he slid his hand in their back pocket.  I explained that as a true marketer I was not wained by whatever decisions they made and I didn’t see a penny more than my salary regardless of what they spent with my company. 

Curtis calmed down enough to ask me if I had an option or if they had just paid for me to dump on them.

I first told them they needed to move and get out of their lease.  The area they were in was hard to get into and finding someone else should be easy.  I had a list of property managers for them who would be more than happy to help them get into a new space.  I told them they needed to find a space near a popular gym or at least near a home community with greater than twenty thousand dollars a year in expendable income.  I also told them they needed to work on some single bottle and delivery service so they could sell not only to the end consumer, but to gyms and retailers as well.  In both cases I gave them supporting documentation along with spaces that were available, and home communities that matched their target demographic.  I showed them what honest number projections would be and suggested they take the credit hit from the Saver and not pay them one red cent as they would need all the money they had to operate while gaining enough business to sustain.

I made many more suggestions before Curtis started changing colors again and insisted he knew what he was doing.  He had worked for another water company for a long time and was confident his idea would work.

This is a common problem when people want to start their own business.  They believe that because they have been in the industry, they know more than someone else who isn’t.  Just because you know how to drive a car, doesn’t mean that you can do a better job repairing it than a mechanic.  That is what a true marketer is.  If I don’t know your business industry when you call, you can bet I will by the time you sit down with me.  The same should be true for any marketer you talk to.  A wise man once said “A fool believes he knows everything, where a wise man only knows how little he knows.”  I know my body better than anyone else, but I will never take a scalpel to it.  Just because you know something, you will succeed better if you realize you don’t know everything.

Curtis got up and grabbed his kids and wife.  He told me that he was going to trust his gut and the people who were telling him he had a great idea rather than me.  Before he could ask for his money back, I made him a deal.  I told him that if he didn’t implement anything I suggested and was still in business after a year, I would give him double his money back.

He never collected.

I think it was about a year and a half later when I saw the two of them at Trader Joe’s.  I barely recognized them however I knew exactly who it was when Curtis made eye contact with me and left the store.  Darlene came to up to me and apologized.  She said that within just a few months they weren’t able to pay their lease on their equipment and the parent company took it back.  They closed the doors and had to sell their home to pay their debtors.  The “marketer” they had trusted stopped returning their phone calls when they started asking real business questions that didn’t have to do with the saver.  Darlene said her husband blamed himself but was too proud to ever pick up the phone and ask for my help.

When asked how it felt to fail so many times at inventing the light bulb, Edison stated that he hadn’t failed; he just found 2,000 ways not to do it.  So I don’t look at Curtis as a failure, I just believe he found 1 way not to run a business.  I just hope it doesn’t take him 1,999 more tries to get it right.