If you follow this blog, you may remember a post where I documented conversation with Ronald from Birmingham. Ronald operates a shoeshine booth that he takes with him throughout the Southeast to provide services at events. Before my keynote speech for the PaymentsFirst Evolutions conference in Birmingham, I went to get an update (and a shine) from him and was greeted enthusiastically with a detailed recount of our previous meeting the year before.
When you can remember people and recount details, it is a powerful connection that makes the recipient feel important. I wish I had one tenth of the skill in that area that Rodney demonstrates.
This skill (and his shoe-shining abilities), however, was not enough to keep people coming to him. Revenue was light. Election year and its uncertainty had caused people to forgo all non-essential services. As a result, he couldn’t employ people even if he wanted to, not that anyone would be interested, Rodney explained. It was not lucrative enough. “I heard a guy one time say he put three kids through college just by shining shoes. I guarantee you he was doing something else on the side.” He held up the rag and shoe polish and said, “You cannot put one kid through college with this.”
The idea of providing the shoeshine service at corporate events happened when he was given an opportunity to do it and realised afterwards that the money he made from it was significantly more than what he normally made in a fixed location. This resulted in him changing his entire business to do exactly that, only to discover that most of the events following did not yield the same lucrative result as the initial event.
This reminded me of a similar experience in my life. Back in 2010, not long after I started my independent consulting and speaking business, I was given the opportunity to create a one-hour webinar session for a company that provided training to financial institutions. It was a hit. My share of the revenue for that webinar alone more than what I could ever have hoped to receive from an in-person keynote that I ended up shifting my focus from marketing to meeting planners to online webinars.
As it turned out, it was all a fluke, and I ended up making the mistake of making a strategic decision out that one event instead of observing whether its success could be duplicated. Be aware and cautious.
One instance of an event, after all, does not necessarily indicate a trend. I ended up starting again from scratch and was set back a year in terms of establishing myself as a resource and cementing relationships with both the meeting planners and association executives.
But that’s how it is. Business means hustling. It means making smart choices about expenses and nurturing relationships. It means doing the right thing and acting in a manner that makes you a business partner to be desired. Rodney gets it. Do you get it?
David is an international speaker, executive coach, serial entrepreneur, and shipwreck survivor. He is the bestselling author of Grounded (Little River, 2016) . If you’re interested in David’s expertise in the areas of leadership, finance, and public speaking, please get in touch here.