77 Phones in One Day

Seventy-seven phones in one day. The company record, across a sales force of more than 10,000 people. Nobody had done it before and I had not been on the floor long enough for anybody to expect it from me.

The part that made it possible was not speed. It was the six hours in the middle of it. A family came in who owned a Korean newspaper, and they had questions, and I answered all of them. Plans. Coverage. What every line would actually cost. Which phone in the store made sense for a grandmother and which one made sense for a son in college. Six hours in a retail store is an eternity and every other person on that floor thought I was throwing the day away.

I was not selling them. I was teaching them, which by then was the only way I knew how to do it. They left with what they needed instead of what the board wanted them to buy. Then they went home and wrote about me in their newspaper, and for months afterward people walked into that store and asked for me by name. Hundreds of them. I never spent a dollar to make that happen.

The record has my name on it and the record is not the point. Seventy-seven is what the day looked like on a spreadsheet. What actually happened is that I gave six hours to one family who never asked me for a discount, and the six hours paid me back for the rest of the year. Every business I have run since has some version of that math in it. The slow thing that looks like a waste of an afternoon is usually the thing that compounds.