Chapter 9

I was up and ready early, ate breakfast at the local IHOP, and was at the factory's offices at 8:45. I guess I was a little early, since Mary had not arrived as yet. I waited in her outer office and had a cup of coffee. At five to nine, a very well dressed forty-something woman walked in and waved me into her office.

"You must be Bob Rothman, I'm Mary Herman, I'm the CEO around here and we will be meeting in about a half hour to discuss your designs for our website. I am truly sorry for my COO's outburst the other week. He is not in the habit of getting 'no' as an answer. It turns out you gave him his first. I like that you just ended the call and said you wouldn't do the job if that was the schedule. I took the time to do some checking up on you. You were a one man operation and you also do some of the best work in the business. I also got wind of some of what happened out in California last week. I hear that they were up and running in just a day and a half. That is very impressive for one man to do, especially since from what I hear, it was a disaster. May I ask how you did it?"

"Mary, I just did my job, my client had some trouble, I caught the first flight I could, and went right to work when I arrived. It is really that simple. I take it that since we are still talking, that you have been given a good report on my work and my work ethic. Now I have a presentation that is not mine in its entirety. I now have two new employees and one of them took your requisites and designed a website from that information. You talked to the designer, Nicole Kidd. You may have also talked to my office manager Tammy Fields. We are now a three person shop, and we are very good at what we do. Shall we go to the presentation and see if we have your business or not."

"Boy, you don't beat around the bush, do you? By all means, let's see what you have for us."

We left her office by a side door, directly into a meeting room that could seat maybe thirty people. It was full of people, so I set up my laptop and plugged into their projector. Mary introduced me and I went over the parameters we were given for the project. I then went step by step through what a customer would see on their website. I answered questions as we went along, so the meeting lasted until noon.

They were impressed, and in some cases blown away, by what we could offer them. I said was going to leave Mary a copy of the software that drove the site and told her that it was a time sensitive disk. The software would self destruct after three days, meaning that the password would no longer be valid, and any tampering with, or any attempt at copying the disk, would result in immediate deletion of the data. They could run the system however many times they wanted in the seventy-two hours it was available, then they could just shred the disk as it would be useless. I said I would be available in the office for the rest of the day and the next, but I had to leave Tuesday evening to drive to Cleveland for another client. We walked back into Mary's office.

My little speech blew Mary away, "Mr. Rothman, do I take it from your abrupt manner that you do not want to do business with us?"

"Ms. Herman, I normally do not do business with people who treat me wrongly. We had a meeting at 9:00 AM this morning, you arrived five minutes before then, and then proceeded to explain how you had checked up on me, and to further insult me, you asked how I did my job, wanting, I thought, a complete description of how I helped another client. Then during the presentation, I was questioned on every part of the presentation, asked why I did this and that, and if that was normal for other clients. I do not do a normal client presentation, I tailor each presentation to the client I am working for at the time. Every client has similar requirements, but then too, every client is different. That is what makes every website special and unique to that client. I will not stand for being dissected and second guessed in doing my job. If your people are so talented, then they can design your website. Now, do I have your attention?"

"Yes, you do, I did notice several of the questions, but I didn't think anything about it. As for me coming in at 8:55, I ran into some heavy traffic this morning, why was that significant, Mr. Rothman?"

"OK, first, I have a habit that was ingrained into me in the military, you are never late for a meeting, you are always at least fifteen minutes early, because you never know what will cause a delay. Secondly, you did not offer me any refreshment, and you automatically assumed who I was. However, I had not spoken to introduce myself, and neither had your secretary. How would you have felt if I said I was not Mr. Rothman? Thirdly, I do not like it when people tell me that they have checked up on me. I assume a client does that as a part of the process to find a good designer. But you brought it up as though it just happened since you talked to my people on Thursday. I also do not talk about my services to other clients. That is strictly between me and them. I'll be willing to bet that you did not get that information from either the CEO or their IT department manager. I know both of them personally, and they would never betray that confidence. I will be informing them that some of the information was released to you. Now if you would like for me to design your website, then I need to be treated a whole lot differently than I have so far. I was treated better by the guard who escorted me to your outer office and by your secretary, than I have by any of your other employees. Now, Ms. Herman, do you still want me to design your site or do I just drive on to Cleveland and get a head start on my next project?"

I still had the disk in my hand, and Mary sat down, in her chair, hard. After the presentation, we had come back to her office, she was behind her desk, and I was seated in a chair in front of her that she had asked me to sit in. She stood the whole time we spoke, making me feel inferior with her superior position and stance. I think I had finally broken through to her business and common senses. I could almost hear the wheels churning, going over everything that I had said, and what she remembered from the meeting. She finally broke her silence, "Mr. Rothman, I can see now that I owe you a very sincere apology, from me personally, and from the company as a whole. I had not seen that what we did was belittle and pick at you. You came all the way up here, at your expense, hoping that the presentation was what we wanted. If not, and we went another direction, then you were out the design work, the time, and the money to fly up here."