The Hooker Book

1992 - 2005

 

The last day I had a job was June 1, 1992. Since then I've been scratching out a life as a consultant and a coach.

There was some low hanging fruit at first; people I knew who were ready to do a marketing strategy project and others who could use my advertising agency management experience.  

Via my buddy Michael Daren I became a student of Dan Sullivan, The Strategic Coach. He taught entrepreneurs and consultants a very smart time management system. It gave me an idea about how I could be a specialized coach.

In November at a networking event I met a lawyer named Steve who asked me what I did. I said “marketing coach” for the first time. He said “I need one of those” and hired me. I wasn't exactly sure what to do but I dived in.

With Steve I developed my own technique to coach and a marketing paradigm for people who sell personal services.

The hurdle for people who are the product they sell is that their ego gets in the way. The ego has a protective function. It guards us from making mistakes, being silly or setting ourselves up for rejection. You probably know that when you're in sales, rejection goes with the territory. And rejection is doubly painful if what you're selling is you.

The main thrust of my marketing coach work is to get my clients to go out to lunch more. The purpose of these lunches is to cultivate better relationships with people who can become clients or more importantly referral sources. I think lunch is best for cultivation but other meals or coffee work, but not as well.  Creating a great list of potential lunch partners is very coachable as is being persistent in inviting the best prospects. Of course it takes overcoming fear of rejection to send a steady stream of invitations.  A big part of my work is to get clients to overcome ego invented excuses why they can't go out to lunch more.

My elevator speech became “I help lawyers make more money” which many find funny.  But never  divorced people.

Over the years I've coached many professionals aside from lawyers including therapists of all sorts, doctors, dentists, consultants, accountants, golf teachers, a handyman and even people searching for a spouse.

Around 1995 I was having coffee with Mike a friend who was also a coach and consultant. Mike is The Meeting Doctor. Organizations hire him to help them learn how to run better meetings. At the time his business was still embryonic so he had his fingers in other things.

Mike told me how he was colluding with his brother in Denmark to import specialty soap into Canada. It didn't sound like a good idea to me. It was a diversion from his meeting doctor business. I thought his ego was protecting him from risking the rejection of marketing his meeting doctor self. Rejection wouldn't be as painful if it was the soap being rejected.

I asked Mike how much money he thought he would make in the soap business. After some analysis we decided it would be about $100 per hour if things went well. That's good but meaningless unless compared to how much he could make as The Meeting Doctor. Well, after some discussion, Mike admitted on a good day he was earning $300 per hour doctoring meetings.

Then a random thought wormed its way out of my hypothalamus. I looked Mike straight in the eye and blurted out “would a $300 an hour Hooker turn hundred dollar tricks”.

And that is how The Hooker Book was born.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. The dogma underlying my marketing Coach work certainly applied to the world's oldest profession and I had a wealth of ideas that would expand nicely into a self help book.

A little research showed that while there were several books on the market written by successful madams and many on self-marketing nothing like my idea had been done.

An early task was to find a publisher. I had recently met an executive from Harper Collins at a networking event. I called him. Without ever having a meeting or getting anything in writing he told me he liked the idea and that I should write the book and he'd publish it. Easy peasy.

Over the next few months the idea crystallized to the extent that I outlined 24 chapters with 24 paragraphs that got my wealth of ideas down on paper.

Then it became obvious I didn't have the discipline to write the book myself. I had a lot of other things going on in my life which in retrospect I could use as an excuse but the truth is I just don't have the attention span to tackle anything more than a short story. Yes I know a 24 chapter book is very similar to 24 short stories and should be easy to write in 24 days. Not by me, though.

One of my key marketing strategies is expressed in the popular aphorism ‘do what you do best and delegate the rest’. The ability to delegate is a key attribute of good marketers. So I decided to delegate the writing of the book by hiring a ghostwriter.  I had recently won some money in the stock market so I could afford it.

More easy peasy. An ad in the Globe.  A meeting with the first responder, a female lawyer who didn't like practicing law and was working as a freelance writer.  A deal to pay her $250 per chapter was struck. We had six or seven meetings to turn over the outline, explain what everything meant and decide on a creative idea to carry the original idea.  3 months later I had my book.

The book was pretty good. The title was Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From High Priced Call Girls. I had dreams of seeing it in its own garish display at the front of every Cole’s store in Canada.

The book was written from the perspective of four working girls and nicely presented my ideas. I had a few friends and clients read the book. They liked it well enough to give me very positive reviews I could use for promotion.

Unfortunately when I called my publisher at Harper Collins he was gone and the person who replaced him said my book didn't fit their current plan.

Oh. Oh.

I made a pretty good effort to find a publisher.  I even hired one of my daughter’s friends to research and send letters to almost one hundred publishers.

The only offer I got was from a tiny internet publisher.  The kind who didn't print books until there was an order. All promotion was thru his website which marketed dozens of business books none of which would sell more than a few hundred copies. It wasn't perfect but if that's what it was that's what I settled for.

Altogether six copies were sold.

Sometimes I wish I'd never followed this itch. In retrospect there were a number of reasons not to. But what's life if you don't follow your dreams.