Memorable Clients

1963 - 2009

From my first job selling The Ladies Home Journal and Time Magazine door to door when I was seven through my executive coaching career I've had clients who looked to me for advice and service. Is that service as in servant. I don't know. Maybe. 

Here are four memorable vignettes. 

I was naive when I went to work for Follick Leader in 1962 at his souvenir store on the Venice Beach boardwalk. He taught me skills like helping customers, engraving medallions and taking care of cash.

For July 4th, a week into my tenure, Follick asked me to man his small souvenir booth inside a nearby amusement park, Pacific Ocean Park. 

Around 5 o'clock I heard something that could have been "say whaddya get fo these shayes?" 

A young black man was asking. I didn't quite understand. The word 'shayes' was foreign to me as was his accent. Follick had told me the park would be crowded with kids from the ghetto that day. Not the usual clientele. I was momentarily a stranger in a strange land. Strange to me, that is. 

As I worked through the sale, including some unexpected, uncomfortable bargaining, I grew up a little bit. Maturity that prepared me to deal outside another ghetto. The ghetto I had grown up in. 

Fifteen years later I was an Account Supervisor at the Ogilvy & Mather ad agency office in Toronto. We had just won the NCR account and I got assigned to manage the client relationship. 

We had won the beauty contest because of our strategy recommendations. Client liked another agency's creative idea but gave us the business while telling us to use the loser's ad concept. Oy vey. Ominous. 

My direct client was Les Friedman. A bit of a tyrant. I soon learned that was inevitable since his boss, Paul Lappetito, was a lot of a tyrant, or shall we say a hard charger, who knew what he wanted, visibly impatient while people around him adopted his point of view. An  American assigned to Canada whose prime directive was "just tell them what to do". 

But I won. The product was NCR's entry in the new minicomputer segment. The ad idea we were directed to use didn't work and I had to stage manage the war between our brilliant creative team and our never wrong client. People used to joke about whether I carried a gun to meetings. Me against the tyrants.

One wonderful lesson I learned was when Lappetito told me that his computers were not invented to save people money. Their purpose was to help make people more money. Wisdom that I still convey to clients.

Around the same time American Express was also a client. I managed their direct mail credit card acquisition program. I pulled the strings to research, design, print, computer customize and mail about 3,000,000 invitations to get the American Express Card each year. 

My client was the director of marketing, Bob McConachie, who also ran their large TV advertising budget. I learned something special from Bob. The American Express Card was expensive compared to its competitor Visa. Not good for business. One day Bob led an incredible discussion during which every product disadvantage the Amex Card suffered was reframed as an advantage. A building block for strategy development I still use. 

My direct mail venture ran well. And I was constantly selling Bob on new programs which led to extra spending and more profit for the agency. Bonus time eh!

One cold Saturday in February 1979 I was awakened dark and early and summoned to an extraordinary meeting in Mike Sugarman's office. He was the president of American Express Canada. Hmmm

When I arrived the president of my agency, Graham Phillips, was there. Bob McConachie was not . Hmmm

Mike explained to us that McConachie had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars without authorization. All our invoices would be paid. McConachie had been let go.

As Graham and I walked out to the parking lot he turned to me and said "I'll not be surprised to see you drive off in a Ferrari." I think he was joking.

Sobeys became a big client of my current company, The Coaching Clinic, in 1996. Our work for them has included soft skill workshops, elearning and executive coaching.

One particularly interesting coaching assignment was to sort out a disturbing conflict between two senior managers.

During my initial meetings with each man it was obvious they were battling in part because of the differences in their ages. One was a traditionalist, the generation before baby boomers, and the other generation x. It was a testosterone battle. I had to gently convince each man that they were just fine but they had to recognize the other was different and could be brought around with more respect for their age and ideas. That simple idea worked. 

Soon after the meetings I received a handwritten note from the HR manager who had hired me. His short handwritten note read

'Jerome, you gently laid hands on their shoulders and each thought the other had been healed.' 

December 2019