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Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive
Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition
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eBook - ePub
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive
Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition
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About This Book
This straight-from-the-hip handbook by bestselling author and self-made millionaire Harvey Mackay spells out the path to success for readers everywhere. They will learn how to:
- Outsell by getting appointments with people who absolutely, positively do not want to see you, and then making them glad they said "yes!"
- Outmanage by arming yourself with information on prospects, customers, and competitors that the CIA would envy - using a system called the "Mackay 66."
- Outmotivate by using his insights to help yourself or your kids join the ranks of Amercia's one million millionaires.
- Outnegotiate by knowing when to "smile and say no" and when to "send in the clones."
This one-of-a-kind book by a businessman who's seen it all and done it all has sold almost 2 million copies, and is the essential roadmap for everyone on the path to success.
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Personal SuccessCHAPTER ONE
âIâd like 15,000 Tickets for Tonightâs Game, Pleaseâ
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The fifteen minutes of fame that the late Andy Warhol promised each of us came to me in the spring of 1984. I was the point man in a nationally publicized effort to outflank Calvin Griffith, the owner of the Minnesota Twins baseball team. Griffith wanted to sell his ball club to a group of Florida businesspeople who would have moved the Twins to Tampa. Another group, consisting of Twin Cities people, with which I was involved, wanted to keep the club there, under local ownershipâand see to it that we didnât get caught up in a very expensive bidding war.
Unlike Calvin, we had a secret weapon: Bill Veeck.
In case you donât know who Bill Veeck is, he was the man who, in 1951, as owner of the hapless St. Louis Browns, staged an innocent-appearing promotion that so upset the baseball establishmentâand so endeared him to baseball fansâthat for as long as the game is played, he will be remembered as the man who âsent a midget to bat.â
At three feet, seven inches and sixty-five pounds, Eddie Gaedel, ordinarily a vaudeville performer, gave the Browns one of their rare distinctions. He was the first and only certifiable midget to appear in a Major League Baseball game. For the record, he walked on four straight pitches and upon reaching first base was replaced immediately by a pinch runner. True to form, the runner was stranded on third and the Browns lost the game. But from the uproar Veeck had created you would have thought heâd called Babe Ruth a transvestite.
Veeck also operated five baseball clubs, three in the majors and two in the minors, won pennants, set major-league attendance records, was the promotional genius who helped innovate bat night, glove night, fan appreciation night, playersâ names on uniforms, exploding scoreboards, the ivy-covered walls of the Wrigley Field bleachers, the expansion of the major leagues, the unrestricted draft, and such yet-to-be-adopted proposals as interleague play.
In a word, he was a visionary. In another word, he was a maverick. My first contact with Veeck was simple enough. I picked up the phone and called him. Veeck prided himself on being totally accessible to anyone. Unlike most club owners, Veeck roamed the stands, schmoozing with his customers, instead of hiding out in a private box, Ă la Steinbrenner. Veeck had opinions on just about everything, and he loved to lay them on anyone who would listen.
As the situation in the Twin Cities began to unfold, I found myself calling Veeck almost daily. Hereâs what we were up against: Griffith had an escape clause in his stadium lease that permitted him to cancel if the Twinsâ attendance did not reach 4.2 million fans over a three-year period. Thanks to an inferior product, attendance over the previous two years had been so bad that by the end of the 1984 season the Twins would have had to draw 2.4 million to reach the 4.2 million total. However, if the total was reached, Griffith would be bound to his lease, and to Minnesota, for three more years.
Though heâd be free once again to leave after each three-year stint, he knew and we knew that once he had announced his desire to leave, the already disgruntled fans would turn on his shoddy product with a vengeance, and he would be forced to endure another three years of horrendous attendance and red ink.
So, unwilling to spend the money necessary to improve the team, he was determined to sell. Just as we were determined to see that the Twins hit 2.4 million in attendance in 1984. And he had only one group to sell to: us.
Our problem was that 2.4 million was an almost impossible goal. Veeck had set a major-league record that stood for fifteen years when he drew 2.8 million with a pennant-winning club in Cleveland. Less than a month into the 1984 season, it was clear the Minnesota Twins were going nowhere.
Confident that there was nothing anyone in Minneapolis or St. Paul could do to bind Griffith to his lease, in late April the Florida group endeared themselves to Griffith. They accomplished this by ridding him of a longtime antagonist, Gabe Murphy, when they bought Murphyâs 43 percent minority interest in the club for $11 million.
Griffith then announced that he was open to all offers for his majority interest as long as they were for at least $50 million, which is what the pennant-contending Detroit club had just sold for. Calvin then sat back waiting for the bidding war to unfold between Tampa and Minnesota for the remaining stock.
What he hadnât counted on was the tenacity of the Twin Cities community and the long memory of Bill Veeck. Twenty-five years earlier, Veeck, as the owner of the Chicago White Sox, had voted at an American League meeting in favor of Griffithâs move of the Washington Senators franchise to Minnesota. In exchange, Veeck felt he had an agreement from Griffith to support Veeckâs bid for an expansion franchise in newly vacated Washington. To Veeckâs mind, Griffith reneged on the deal when he voted for another group. It was an act Veeck would not forget. He devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck, to Griffithian duplicity, a topic that also included another ancient wound inflicted years earlier when Griffithâs uncle, Clark Griffith, supposedly reneged on a promise to let Veeck move the Brownsâ franchise to Baltimore.
What Veeck told me was that if we could mount a buyout of Twins tickets sufficient to boost 1984 attendance to 2.4 million, Griffith would cave in and sell to us at our price, knowing that if the club couldnât be packed off to Tampa, the fan resentment over his threatened move would be so great he couldnât afford to operate it any longer.
âCalvin canât take the pressure,â said Veeck. âHe couldnât take it when his family twisted his arm to vote the Washington franchise to their buddy, General Quesada, in 1961, and I am confident he wonât fight once he sees youâve got the financial muscle to back up a ticket buyout.â
Maybe. But it was a big gamble.
Griffith was getting cute and claiming that the 2.4 million had to be actual fans in attendance. Even giving away the tickets, we couldnât guarantee 2.4 million would actually pass through the turnstiles. Scarier still, the $6 million we raised from within the community wasnât necessarily enough money to guarantee 2.4 million attendance, live fans or not. Six million dollars would purchase only 1.4 million tickets. It might not be enough. We could never be sure how deep the well was, because unless another one million fans were willing to pay out of their own pocketsâfor tickets no better than the ones we were going to give away freeâweâd fall short of the 2.4 million.
But I believed Veeck, who had been dreaming about getting even with the Griffiths for a quarter of a century and probably knew his old adversary better than anyone else on earth.
So I helped put together a group of influential supporters, held press conferences all over the state, set up offices to buy and distribute the tickets, and one day in May walked up to the Twins ticket booth in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome with a cadre of reporters and announced to the young lady behind the counter, âIâd like fifteen thousand tickets for tonightâs game, please.â
From then on, it was easy sledding. I never really knew if I could have gone back to our supporters for more money if we needed it, but what we had was enough to convince Calvin that the race was on and heâd either have to sell to us or watch his single greatest asset wash away in a sea of red ink over the next three years.
He sold to Minneapolis banker Carl Pohlad for an amount considerably less than the $50 million the Detroit team brought, or the $32 million that the Cleveland club had sold for about a year later. (Of course, the average value of a Major League Baseball franchise has skyrocketed in recent years to more than $260 million, with the pin-striped Yankees worth several times more than that.)
After that, Pohlad easily arranged the purchase of the minority shares held by the Tampa group, and that was the end of the Griffith era.
Veeck? He didnât get a nickel out of it, nor ever once see his name in the paper in connection with the proceedings. The man whom other owners had derided for years as a publicity hound had no desire to take credit for a victory he had masterminded. He was content simply to bask in the knowledge that he had evened an old score.
Unbelievably, it took only three years to prove the wisdom of our actions and today, as I write this, a new era has blossomed.
Thanks to the aggressive management of the Pohlad organization, for the first time in the history of the franchise, attendance hit over two million as the Twins achieved what has been dubbed, âThe Impossible Dream.â Even now, as debates over a new stadium continue, attendance remains very close to that mark. With the turn of the millennium, the Twins captured a few divisional championships, and they are again in the American League playoffs in the fall of 2004.
October 1987 will always be remembered as the month the Minnesota Twins astounded their loyal and long-suffering fans by winning the American League Pennant to make it to the World Seriesâand then stunned the nation by winning the series to become the world champions of baseball. At the beginning of the season, Las Vegas bookmakers set the odds against that happening at 150â1. The phenomenal ascent of the Twins from last place to world champions ignited an explosion of pride, unity, and goodwill that energized the entire upper Midwest and produced incalculable economic results.
Bill Veeck did more than acquaint me with the weird economics of Major League Baseball. He also taught me a lesson that applies in a wide range of business situations.
Most business problems can be solved if you can teach yourself to look beyond the dollar sign. Business revolves around human beings. Weâre not all in it for the buck. Fight trainer Gil Clancy expresses it, naturally, in sock-in-the-eye fashion. âThe reason I stay in this game after thirty years isnât to get rich. Itâs to get even.â
It takes all kinds, friends. Thatâs why no one has all the answers. What this book offers is not how and what to buy cheap and sell dear. Instead, Iâm going to try to help you make money by giving you a better understanding of people.
The first lesson I offer is one of the first I learned when I made my first business deal. I was eleven years old and Iâd won a prize for selling the most tickets to the St. Paul Saints opening baseball game. This entrepreneurial coup was scored by telling my friends that if they bought their tickets from me, I could get them into the locker room to meet the ball players. It should have been easy. After all, as the Associated Press correspondent in town, my father knew every ball player on the team.
Unfortunately, I hadnât bothered to ask him about it beforehand. The day of the game, he was covering a political rally in Minneapolis (in those days, reporters, like doctors, were generalists), and even doing my best âJack Mackayâs sonâ number, though I could see the whole team sitting there in their skivvies drinking beer, I couldnât bluff my way past the man at the clubhouse door.
I made it home in one piece, but my credibility with my friends was zero. To top it off, my big prize for selling the most tickets turned out not to be such a big prize after all. It was a seasonâs pass, just the kind of perk my father could have had for the asking.
That introduction to the world of marketing taught me a couple of lessons many adults learn at a much higher cost than I had to pay. Anyone can get the order if heâs willing to stretch the truth far enough. Whether you tell the truth or not, you donât come out a winner just by getting that first big order. The mark of a pro is getting the reorder. In the advertising business, they put it a little differently: âCreative wins âem; account service loses âem.â I learned something else that day: The clubhouse men of the world are just waiting for a chance to kick you in the ass. You may not be watching them, but theyâre watching you, and the more arrogant you are, whether youâre an eleven-year-old kid or some self-important business type, the better the odds theyâll find a way to get even.
Now youâre getting the picture.
What you are going to read about from now on in this book isnât a laundry list of killer closing lines and split-second witticisms that landed the big fish.
Itâs how the big fish got to be that way and how you can be one, too.
CHAPTER TWO
Harvey Mackayâs Short Course in Salesmanship
Lesson 1
Itâs Not How Much Itâs Worth, Itâs How Much People Think Itâs Worth
A speaker is introduced to a roomful of people who have never seen him or heard him before. He begins his presentation by reaching into his pocket, holds up a twenty-dollar bill, and says, âThis twenty is for sale for exactly one dollar. Who wants to buy it?â
Now, be honest. Would you leap to your feet clamoring to get his attention? Or would you wait a few seconds, see what everyone else does, and then after a hand or two goes up, timidly raise your own?
If youâre one of the hesitators, youâre normal. Weâve been taught all our lives that only suckers fall for deals like that. But once someone else is willing to take a chance, on no better information than ours, then our greedy little hands pop up, and we tend to go along. The faster othersâ hands are raised, the greater the demand, and the more likely we are to be part of it. Our sense of what something is worth derives not from the intrinsic value of the object itselfâwhether itâs twenties for a dollar or unusual tulip bulbs or a rare gemâbut from the demand that has been created for that object.
Okay, you say, thatâs Marketing 101. Everyone knows that, but what does it have to do with the real world?
A great deal, it turns out.
Iâd like to tell you a story about four of the richest men in North America who absolutely did not understand this very simple concept.
Maybe we can learn something from it.
The scene: the suburbs. The most valuable property in the state (and possibly in the country), fift...
Table of contents
- Dedication
- Contents
- Authorâs Note
- Foreword by Kenneth Blanchard
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four
- Chapter Five
- Chapter Six
- Chapter Seven
- Searchable Terms
- About the Author
- Praise
- Other Books by Harvey Mackay
- Copyright
- About the Publisher