cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Remarkable Power of an Excellent Memo I've had an interesting experience in business that I just have to write about here. Last Friday I got one of those calls that you just don't want to get. I won't bore everyone with the specifics, but a client was in danger of getting cut off by a company and his agent was furious. I explained to the agent that the situation was entirely the client's fault for having completely ignored company requirements and having effectively given them the finger when they'd asked him to do a few things. In fact, the agent forwarded me an email from the client in which he was expressing his unbridled fury at everyone in sight and was announcing his intention to move his business elsewhere. It got worse. 20 minutes later, my father (principal stockholder and President of our business) got a phone call from the owner of that agency. He was furious and making threats. He said that if the client wasn't given exactly what he wanted immediately, he was going to move all of the agency's business elsewhere. That would have represented about a hundred thousand dollars. All around, a very bad scene. I called an underwriter at the company and she didn't really give a shit. I got her to give on a very minor side issue. Aside from that, they weren't budging. I was in real trouble. On top of everything else, everyone in my office was following the situation. So I typed out an email. I put a lot of thought into it. Since I was explaining some rather complex things, I assumed that the agent would end up forwarding it to the client rather than trying to paraphrase. So I wrote with that in mind. I wrote a wonderfully informative, friendly and insightful email that (without having to lie or exaggerate at all) made it look as if I'd gotten him some major concessions from the company. The tone was almost conspiratorial, as though I was letting the agent (and by extension the client) in on some secret plan to get the client everything he could possibly want. Then nothing. I called the agent and left messages. I called the agency owner and left messages. Nothing. I had to assume that things were so bad that they were no longer returning my calls and that we were going to lose all of that business. Finally, this afternoon I got a phone call from the agency owner. He sounded happy. In fact, he sounded thrilled. What had happened? Indeed, the agent had forwarded my email to the client. The client went out on his yacht that weekend (all of this concerns insuring an extremely expensive yacht) and on returning, sent out a mass email to a wide circle of his friends about the weekend on the water. That circle of friends included the agency owner. In this mass email from the client, he raved on and on for several paragraphs about how he was insured with the greatest company in the world, that there was no better person on the planet for protecting a million dollar yacht than I am, and that everyone with a yacht had damn well better get it covered just the way that he had. Wow. From the jaws of defeat, a major victory. The power of a very well-written memo is incredible. I can state truthfully that I write very, very good memos. Some of them I would like to frame. Anything longer than a page risks getting dull, so in those cases I also manage to make them extremely amusing. My memos get passed around offices and tacked up in break rooms for hundreds of miles around. It is probably the thing that I am best at. Other people know more about this industry than I do. Other people get more work done every day and make fewer mistakes. Other people have smaller heaps of unfinished work and unanswered email. All of this is true. But I write wonderful, wonderful memos that explain very complex things in clear, useful terms. Sometimes this doesn't really mean shit. But every now and then it becomes a 00,000 difference. This was one of those times. 17:28 - 2008-04-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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