“You mean, the Mustang Ranch?”
“Whatever,” he said. “The hookers—let’s go!”
“Sorry, Liam, that’s not something I can do,” I said. His firm was already a major customer, and I was just entertaining a client. I wonder what I might have said if I was actually trying to close a $100 million account.
---
Ed’s judgment in hiring me had turned out to be okay. In my first year at Scientific Atlanta, I sold $77 million of settop boxes to Rogers Cable and got a Salesperson of the Year award from my division of the company. The year after that, I sold $110 million and broke into two major accounts that we’d never been able to penetrate in Canada. Ed Scott gave me a chance to prove I could do something completely different from all my previous professional experiences, and it got me out of my depression, out of bankruptcy, and on a path to a great future. I was making over $250,000 a year—far more than I’d ever made in a regular job. The road ahead for me was going to be as a professional, hopefully making CEO at a Fortune 500 company some day.
One of the most demanding aspects of my job was keeping the expectations of customers in check when it came to product deliveries. We were perpetually behind on delivery of nearly every component, and as the customer champion, it felt like 90 percent of my job was apologizing on behalf of the company. During one six-month period in early 2000, we were actually more than thirty days late on fifteen consecutive shipments. Everything came to a head at a sales conference in Atlanta during a speech by Charles*, the Scientific Atlanta COO.
Charles was on the stage in front of two hundred salespeople, talking about how successful the year had been, and how we were going to be moving from selling mostly boxes to selling services as well. He encouraged us all to start pitching training and maintenance services to increase our contract volume with our clients. I almost choked. My major customers were already near lynching me for late deliveries; they would laugh if I suggested we’d be a good service provider.
As Charles was wrapping up his speech, I turned to Ed sitting beside me and said, “Ed, I’m going to ask him a question.”
“I think that’s a bad idea,” Ed said. I stood up anyway, while Ed tugged on my sleeve and whispered, “Sit down. Don’t ask him anything.”
Righteous with indignation on behalf of my customers, I shrugged off Ed’s hand and asked, “Charles, how are we supposed to sell services when our service now is so bad? We’ve missed at least 50 percent of the delivery dates to my customers in the past six months.”
Charles’s face grew livid. I smiled, realizing that he wasn’t aware of how poorly my Canadian customers were being treated and happy that I’d asked the question. I started to sit down, but then, trembling with anger, he pointed a finger at me and said, “Stand back up, what’s your name?”
“It’s Sanjay Singhal, I’m the sales manager for—”
He cut me off, speaking in a louder voice to the larger group. “See? See, this is what’s wrong with our organization today! It’s salespeople making up statistics to make up for their own failures managing clients. It’s people like that man,” he poked his finger at me, “whose exaggerations make it difficult for the rest of you to do your jobs!”
I looked down at Ed, both of us knowing the actual statistic was 100 percent, not the 50 percent I’d stated out loud. He shrugged and motioned again for me to sit down. I sat down as Charles stared at me, assuring me with a grim nod that the situation wasn’t going to get better for my customers anytime soon. Four weeks later, our quarterly commission checks were issued, and I decided to leave the company.
---
To be fair, it wasn’t just Charles’s assault that propelled me out of the organization. After two great years, my quota was being raised at the same time that sales were falling, making the financial rewards of the job less attractive than before. Still great, just not as great. Over the past year I’d gotten joyous calls from former colleagues at both Clearnet and Qualcomm, which had been bought by Telus and Ericsson, respectively. In each company, I had once held stock options that would have been worth $2 million. I felt like I was missing out on all the real money, and on top of that, I had to fake liking my customers and continue to pretend our service was going to get better. I held stock options at Scientific Atlanta as well, but nobody was going to go near this company.
(Note: Two years later, Scientific Atlanta was accquired by Cisco)
My former colleague from Nortel and Clearnet, Mac, had started a company, Signal*, parlaying his contract with me at Clearnet into a contract to build them a voicemail system. In August of 2000, I was on the phone with him and mentioned, “Mac, they’re paying commissions in a few weeks, and I’m not really happy here. I wonder if I should stick around?”
“Hap,” he said, “I don’t know if you’d be able to take a cut in salary, but we really need someone to run Sales and Marketing for Signal. I think you’d be great at it. Interested?” I told him I needed to think about it.
The next day, I called my father, dreading the conversation. I started with, “Dad, I hate my job. I think I want to quit and go work at a startup. I’ll take a base pay cut from $120,000 to $60,000 a year, but the commissions are going to be even better.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Dad?”
Nothing.
“Dad?”
Finally he replied. “I know you wouldn’t be calling me if you hadn’t already made up your mind, so I know you’re going to do it no matter what I say. But you’re making a huge mistake. You have a great job at a great company. Just put your head down, get along with people, and do your job.”
“Dad, I’m just not cut out for corporate life,” I explained. I told him the story about being told to sit down and shut up at the Scientific Atlanta sales conference.
“So your company doesn’t want to do what you tell them. When are you going to learn to get along with people?”
“Dad, you never got along with any of your bosses, and that’s why you became an entrepreneur, isn’t it?”
Dad couldn’t argue the point and admitted it, saying, “I don’t want you to be like me. I want you to have a secure job and not have to struggle like I did.”
“Let me just see how this works out,” I said. “I can always get a high-paying job, but I like Mac, he’s got a great product, and I think I’ll have fun. Don’t worry, I’m not in charge. I know that I don’t know how to run a company myself.”
By the end of the conversation, my father was supportive. Not enthusiastic, but not despondent either. “Okay, go ahead,” he told me. “I hope it works out for you. Just don’t tell your mother what your new salary is.”
PAPER IS EXPENSIVE
Signal made voicemail software, mostly for cellular companies, many of which were expanding their networks and purchasing new system infrastructure. The company already had one major contract, and I was the sixth employee, running sales and marketing.
It was a departure from previous jobs for me for several reasons. It was the first time I was going to work for a non-brand-name company. It was the first time I was going to work for a friend and someone I knew well, and it was the first time I was going to be senior enough to participate in decision-making, able to avoid the sort of boneheaded corporate mistakes and mistreatment of employees that my previous employers perpetrated.
With just one major customer and only a few million in sales, it was a huge step down in status from Scientific Atlanta, but it offered an opportunity to get a small stake in the fledgling company, and if I was any good, I’d be able to make almost as much as I had previously. My new boss, Mac, didn’t want to put the equity in writing, because he didn’t have a formal shareholders agreement, but he shook my hand and said, “Hap, you know me. Trust me.” Over the years, Mac had taken to calling me by my childhood nickname, “Hap,” and it always made me feel a bit closer to him, so I decided to trust him.
After my previous disasters trying to run things myse
lf, I needed a strong guiding influence, and Mac was the right person at the right time. I vowed that this time I wasn’t going to flame out in less than two years like with every other job I’d ever had.
---
Mac and I had our first run-in literally over the office printer. “Hap, what is this?” he said, looking at the contract I was printing out for review. I wasn’t sure what he meant; he’d already seen the contract and shouldn’t have been surprised by it. He clarified. “You’re wasting paper. If nobody else is going to read this, you’re wasting half the paper you’re using.”
I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, I think my boss here is just as crazy as all my other bosses. I wonder how long I’m going to last?” But all I said was, “Okay, I’ll use both sides.”
Printing on both sides of each sheet of paper was only the first of many conflicts Mac and I had that could be traced back to both my high-flying lifestyle at Scientific Atlanta and the spendthrift approach I had taken to running Nikean.
With only eight people in the office, I wanted to hire a pretty receptionist instead of another field engineer. On a plane flying into a major customer presentation, I wanted to insert a video of a scene from the movie The Matrix into a PowerPoint deck we were going to give to a group of sixty-year-old men. When travelling, I usually paid the fuel surcharge when I returned rental cars. I was having to adjust to the more entrepreneurial, small-company nature of Signal. My spendthrift and glamor-loving attitudes from my previous startups were contrasted against the stark reality of cash management at a successful startup.
---
But it wasn’t just Mac’s proper cash management that was foreign to me. His entire way of doing business was different from what I’d been exposed to at Fortune 500 companies. One night I sent Mac an e-mail asking him to look at the pricing on an installation proposal. By afternoon the following day I hadn’t received a reply, and I poked my head into his office, “Hey, Mac, did you have a chance to look at that pricing e-mail I sent you?” His response was, “Could you send it to me again? My e-mail inbox was too full, so I deleted everything.” In shock, I didn’t say anything, but Mac, sensing my alarm, added, “Look, Hap, if it’s important, they’ll send it again.” Standing at his door, following up on my own e-mail, it was hard to argue the point.
Soon after, I proposed developing a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that we could send to prospective clients. Our technology was pretty impressive, and I thought a standard request for an NDA would give us credibility. Mac’s response was, “Hap, I don’t ask anybody to sign an NDA. If you don’t trust the person you’re dealing with, then don’t deal with them.”
When I got to Signal, there was no standard contract for new installations. As with the lack of paper backing up Mac’s promise of equity to me, trust seemed to play a large part in how business was conducted. I asked Mac why there were no contracts, even with our largest clients, and he responded, “Well, 95 percent of the time, when you get into a contract dispute, it’s because one of you doesn’t remember the agreement; when you’re negotiating, just send an e-mail with what you’ve agreed to. You don’t need all the signatures and bullshit legal language. Our customers are happy dealing with us through nothing but purchase orders.”
On a particularly difficult negotiation with a large customer, Mac and I had discussed the major deal points before a conference call. On the call, the client asked us to change what we considered a major term, and I began to answer, “I don’t think—” when Mac interrupted me and said, “Yeah, okay.” I looked at Mac, hit the mute button, and asked him, “I thought that one was a deal-breaker?”
Mac shook his head and responded, “Hap, he’s just being a dick and trying to show off with what he can ask for. He doesn’t really care. It’s easier to just say yes and then not follow up on it.” As with the e-mail-clearing technique, he added, “If he really thinks it’s important, he’ll follow up on it himself.”
During a group project in business school, an adversarial teammate once said to me, “If we agreed all the time, then neither one of us would be learning anything.” I was learning a ton at Signal.
---
By my third year at Signal, I was really having success with selling, but I hated the part of sales that was cold calling. I had hired a junior associate, Vincent*, to handle that part of the process. Vincent wasn’t technically astute, but he had an incredibly thick skin that allowed him to deal well with failure. I saw this often enough when we’d go out for lunch and he would regularly try to get the phone numbers of waitresses that served us. On one occasion, he tried to get the waitress to spend more time with us by asking for more and more pepper on his Caesar salad. As he began to sneeze, he said, “Wow, you’re really good at dispensing [sneeze] pepper. Can I [sneeze] have your phone [sneeze] number?” He must have been a great salesman, because she gave him her number.
Vincent was having trouble getting a call back from a new telecom company in the United States, and he came to me for help. I didn’t know the head of engineering, but I knew that my old friend from PRTM and Clearnet, Stephen Howe, would be able to introduce us. I sent Stephen an e-mail, and a couple of days later I hadn’t received a reply. I then left a voicemail and didn’t get an immediate response.
At lunch with Mac the next day, I complained bitterly about Stephen’s lack of responsiveness. By then, he was rising quickly in the ranks of one of Canada’s largest telcos, Telus, and I said to Mac, “Stephen doesn’t seem to recall that I’m the one who got him his high-flying job. He could at least return my damn phone calls.”
Mac wasn’t sympathetic. “Hap, wasn’t he the one who got you the PRTM job that put you in a position to get him the Clearnet job?”
I took a swig of my beer and said, “Argh, you’re right. I’m the one being an ass.” And Stephen returned my call later that afternoon.
---
One day I got a call from Gary*, the head engineer at Century* Wireless. I had sold them a voicemail system a year earlier, and they were having problems with lost messages. “Sanjay, this problem is bad and getting worse. Our CEO is on the warpath. Can you send someone down here to fix it?”
The problem was that all of our field engineers were at a customer site, and it was our largest customer, Telus. When I asked Mac to peel off one of the engineers to send down to Century, he said, “Just tell them we’re working on it. Sending an engineer won’t do any good anyway, all of our troubleshooting can be done with remote diagnostics.” I relayed the message to Gary, who responded, “Okay, well just get it fixed.”
The next day I got another call, this time from the CEO himself. “You sold us this goddamn voicemail system and promised it would work! I’ve got a dozen calls from our best customers saying they’re losing their messages! Gary tells me you’re working on it remotely—bullshit! Get an engineer down here and fix it!”
I went back to Mac and pleaded to have an engineer sent down to Century in Ohio, but I was rebuffed again. “Hap, sending an engineer down there is a complete waste of time. He’s just going to sit in their central office watching lights blink. This install with Telus is critical for our future, and I don’t want to delay it.”
I had an idea. “Mac, I think all they want is to know we’re paying attention. If they’re just going to watch blinking lights, let’s send somebody down there who isn’t an engineer!” I suggested Vincent.
Mac’s reaction was instantaneous. “I said it was useless to send anybody down there. Vincent’s not an engineer, and they’re going to figure that out and think that’s even worse than nobody at all.” After a few attempts to change his mind, I went back to my office to sulk.
We fixed the problem two days later without sending anybody onsite, but it was too late. The CEO called Mac and me down to his headquarters to tell us personally that we’d lost their confidence and they were ripping out the system. It was the worst moment of my professional life as a salesman as we took a drubbing from him, knowing we had already lost the contract. At o
ne point, the CEO said, “We were losing customers, and it was your fault. The least you could have done was show us you gave a damn and sent someone down here.”
Mac looked at me before responding. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to hit me over the head with a two-by-four. We should have sent an engineer down.”
On the trip back to Toronto, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to say I told you so. “Mac, I don’t know if sending Vincent down here pretending to be an engineer would have saved this contract, but it couldn’t have been any worse than what just happened.”
Mac wearily responded, “Hap, we did the best we could. It was a no-win situation. And just because you and I disagreed doesn’t mean one of us was wrong.”
I was embarrassed by the dressing down and Mac’s refusal to take responsibility. That night returning to Toronto, I backed up my sales database to my own laptop and decided I was going to quit, taking my leads with me. I couldn’t decide whether that would be illegal or just unethical, and while contemplating the difference I fell asleep. The next morning I restored the database and went back to work.
I was having just as much conflict with Mac as I’d had with any previous company or boss—the only difference being that Mac had more patience. My mood swings were as bad as they’d ever been, and Mac was very understanding in granting me months off at a time as well as not reacting to several of my more flamboyant arguments. He was quite happy to let me have my tantrums as long as I delivered on the sales front, and I did deliver sales.
If I had just stuck to focusing on sales, we would have gotten along fine despite all our run-ins. Mac had no patience for people who strayed outside their roles. Once I overheard him telling a senior developer who suggested some ideas for our website, “If you want to do marketing, go get a damn MBA, and then come back here and apply for a marketing job.” So when I began pushing my challenges into the area of corporate strategy, a disagreement over our growth path became our biggest argument yet. Mac and I had a grand shouting match that everyone in the office could hear. Mac yelled as he hit the table with his fist. “You made your point; now I’m making the decision. This is my company, and I make that call!”
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