Say Cheese

A buddy of mine measures his success by the number of his employees who have become millionaires. Can you imagine?

He’s not bragging. He’s not taking credit. He’s just an accomplished businessman who gets joy knowing how many of his current or previous employees have a million dollars.

I don’t know much about business. Indeed, the sum total of my knowledge about start up companies can be written on the back of a postage stamp with a shaving brush. When I first heard that Steve was a “serial entrepreneur” I assumed that he had somehow made a bundle of money by having invented breakfast food. The reality is more straightforward. People who work for Steve work hard. He rewards their dedication by doing what he can to insure that they become millionaires.

His current count is 42.

Make no mistake. Steve doesn’t give anybody anything. Except possibilities. He develops relationships and makes them work. As best I understand the process, it is Steve’s responsibility to uncover opportunities. Then he and his team go in and everybody becomes wealthy. Or in Steve’s case, more wealthy.

Steve was explaining one such possibility to me recently. Like the dog in the brilliant Gary Larson cartoon, I wasn’t quite getting it. “Operational planning,” “product development,” and “return on investment” all passed unharmed over my head. But I did hear him say, “483 million dollars.” $483M was a number I understood.

“You were asking for these folks to invest $483 million with you?”

“Well, it was the third meeting and we’d done our homework,” Steve began. “We were confident that we had the CFO on board. I had six eloquent people on my team; the multimedia presentation was going well; of the ten decision makers on their side of the room, I felt confident about six of them.”

“So did you get the money to go ahead with your project?”

“We were just about to get them to sign when my wife called.”

“Your wife called and interrupted a $483 million dollar deal?”

“She was at the supermarket,” Steve went on. “She wanted to tell me that they had run out of the kind of cheese I like. She said that the manager had told her that the kind of cheese I like would be there, but then it turned out that it wasn’t. My wife wasn’t happy about having to make another trip. She told me about how she and the manager worked it out.”

“So you took the call? You talked to your wife? There is close to half a billion dollars on the table and you made 20 people wait while you talked to your wife about cheese?”

Steve looked at me gently. I could tell that he was a born leader about to impart a significant lesson. “I wasn’t talking to my wife about cheese,” he said. “I was communicating to my wife on the phone and to everyone else in the room that in my life my marriage comes first.”

Needless to say, Steve closed the deal. He has $483 million at work and the right kind of cheese at home. He also has one of the best relationships you can imagine with his wife of 40 years. She knows with every fiber of her being that her needs come first, that she and her husband are on the same team, that what is important to her is important to him.

Can your children say the same thing about their relationship with you? Do they know that when they need you that you are there for them?

I acknowledge that the analogy is unfair. Steve is in his 60s and can afford to miss a deal, even a big deal. He is so absurdly successful that everyone on the planet wants to do business with him. His kids are grown and gone with lives of their own. You, gentle reader, may very well be in a stage of life in which you have expenses, “debts no honest man can pay” as Springsteen put it. You may not have the luxury of blowing off your boss to go throw a ball with your daughter or take a call from your bride.

But when your daughter really and truly needs your time and attention are you there for her? Or are you ALWAYS on your computer? Are you EVER truly and completely out of the office? When was the last time you said to your kid, “What do YOU want to do today-anything you want, just you and me?”

Little ones like to make brownies with their parents. Cracking eggs, measuring oil, mixing the ingredients, licking the bowl are all guaranteed to make for a good time, a lasting memory, and a complete mess. Another way you could go about it is to WORK for the same two hours instead of baking with the kids and destroying the kitchen. You could certainly earn more than the $3.99 it costs to BUY a package of brownies.

But do you see how it’s not the same?

I spoke to a guy out west recently who has been driving over an hour each way to work. He said the money was good but that he didn’t see his kids much during the week. His five, seven, and nine-year-olds were in their pajamas and ready for bed by the time he got home and he was exhausted after the long drive. He gave notice, quit his job, and got a new gig closer to his house but with a 30% pay cut. I asked him how he was making ends meet. He said things were tight, but that he was home every day before dark and that he and his daughter has planted a vegetable garden and that they were spending half an hour watering and weeding every day. He said he wished he had quit his job with the brutal commute years earlier.

I hope you’ll agree that there’s a man who knows the value of a 483 million dollar piece of cheese.